A few months ago while attending the initial meeting for the proposed 4th of July celebrations at the Limerick Local Heroes hub, it was suggested that we do a Tweasure Hunt, following on the success of the first Tweasure Hunt back in April.
The 4th of July Tweasure Hunt event, which took place Sunday, 8 July 2012 from 11:00 – 13:30, was organised by a team of volunteers. Gabriela Avram, Tara Robinson and Sharon Slater were responsible for getting the ball rolling.
As research began for the American themed questions it was more difficult than first thought, but the team persevered and 10 questions were eventually produced. In addition to the questions that would send the would-be participants searching the city, photographs of interesting streetscapes within the mapped area were taken. The final portion of the hunt involved the ambassadors, which proved the most difficult as many Americans had themselves traveled back to the States for the 4th of July celebrations. This too was overcome with native New Yorker, Dominique Bouchard, from the hunt museum volunteering some of her time. This hunts participants also had the advantage of an online “helpline” that whey could tweet for clues @topgold.
This family-friendly event was a great opportunity to rediscover Limerick city while looking for names, places and stories that connect Limerick to the United States of America.
There were three teams:
- Mickey Mouse – One man and his daughter, and another lady.
- Washington – Three men.
- Liberty – a couple and each team had a smartphone and a Twitter account.
The participants were given a map and a set of tasks. They had 10 questions that needed to be solved, 6 photographs that needed to be reproduced, one “ambassador” to talk to, one plaque to create and one story to record.
The hash-tag #4thjulylimerick was used so that those who were not there but were interested in the 4th of July events could see the hunt in real time. During the hunt it was discovered that the hash-tag had begun to trend on twitter, which was primarily due to the fact that over 100 tweets were tweeted with the #4thjulylimerick hash-tag . This trending seemed to cause much confusion to others on Twitter as they tweeted such comments as “#4thjulylimerick is trending… you know it’s the 8th?”
After all was said and done, the Tweasure Hunt was a roaring success and all the hard work and research that was put into it on behalf of myself and the other volunteers was well worth the effort.