Category: Podcast

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 35): Bryan Roth, HQ’s coronavirus response

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00:13 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk, and I am one of the lackeys that works at HQ. Although, for this specific episode, we are outside of HQ, as it turns out, so we may have to temporarily change our name. And I have… I’ll just get right into it with our guest for today, and that is Bryan Roth, who is the president, one of the co-founders at HQ. And, as everybody will notice, Bryan, we are both outside of the office right now.

[chuckle]

00:51 Bryan Roth: That’s true, Chris. Well, it’s good to be a part of it. I’m glad we’re still able to make this happen, even though you’re talking from your house and I’m talking from the guest bedroom in our house. It’s certainly a little strange, but the normal course of events does not have to stop because we are somewhat quarantined, I guess.

01:12 CR: Right. Well, before we get into HQ stuff, how are things at the Roth household these days?

[chuckle]

01:19 BR: Things are okay. We’re getting to spend quite a bit of family time together. We still like each other, which is really encouraging. I mean, the truth is it’s kind of a break from the normal routine. It’s been so many years of going to HQ every single day or every single weekday and working and going home at the end of the day. And so it’s quite an adjustment, I think that Nicholas, who’s 14, has not been in school now for about four weeks, and he’s got… We don’t even know how much longer it’s going to be. I think the dog is the happiest of all, Allie, our Portuguese Water Dog. I think it’s a little strange, because, in the morning, she looks at me like, “Alright, when are you walking out the door and giving me my treat?” And it’s like, “Well, I’m just coming up to the bedroom.” And she’ll come in, kind of sit on the bed next to me, from time to time, and it’s pretty casual.

02:18 BR: It’s strange, because we’re supposed to stick around. We’re not supposed to go out except for essential things. And we can walk the dog, and get some exercise, and things like that, but the social distancing is, of course, really important. Like everybody else, we’re trying to do what we can to keep our community, friends, and family safe. And hopefully, everybody out there in geocaching land, all over the world, is doing the same thing. It’s important that, as a global community, whether within geocaching or external to geocaching, we all kind of come together as a community, support our neighbors, do what we can to get through this. And at some point, we can look back and look forward to getting out and meeting our friends and fellow geocachers back out on the trail.

03:04 CR: Yeah. And one of the big changes for the geocaching community, of course, has been events and Mega-events, for instance. I guess before we get into some of that unfortunate stuff about things being canceled and postponed, you actually did get to go to a Mega before all of this really hit. Maybe talk about that a little bit. It sounds like that that was a really great experience.

03:29 BR: It was a fantastic experience, it really was. I was at the Beethoven Mega in Bonn, and I think there were about 4,000 people. And it was around the time where reports were coming out of Italy, that things were getting concerning. And the event was really fun. It was a lot of geocachers coming together. The organizers did a wonderful job. The whole theme was Beethoven-based, because Bonn is where Beethoven is from, and this year is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. And so the whole city is doing all these wonderful things around Beethoven. And the organizers from Bonn took it upon themselves to create just a fabulous event. So there was a variety of musical performances throughout. So, you’d be standing in this big lobby, I guess it was, with hundreds of geocachers, and all of a sudden, students were coming through with their trumpets and trombones and kind of marching through, playing music, and…

04:34 CR: Wow.

04:35 BR: Friday night, there was a drumming performance, and on Saturday night, there was another drumming performance, and there was… There was just so much cool music. But then the Adventure Labs, they had a series that were on-site at the event. And there was another series that was in, essentially, downtown Bonn, and it took you to all the cool places. You got to go to Beethoven’s house and the place where Beethoven was baptized, and one of the churches where he used to play. And it was just a really fun, educational use of the Adventure Lab platform, which we really enjoyed. But all in all, the… As always, the food and the drinks, the beer in Germany were fantastic. And the geocachers were kind and welcoming, and it was just such a fun time to get to talk to everybody. And I can’t wait for this to all be over so we can go back and do a whole lot more of it.

05:31 CR: Yeah, that… [chuckle] As you were describing that event, it just sounds amazing, and I’m extremely jealous now. So…

[laughter]

05:39 BR: But you’ve had the pleasure of going to some really good Megas as well. And any time you’re around that size of a group of geocachers, celebrating the game and playing with one another, it’s always gonna be incredible. This one, in particular, with the incorporation of music, and I didn’t even mention the logbook was a grand piano.

06:00 CR: Oh, I saw a picture of that. Yeah.

06:02 BR: It was extraordinary. It really was. And they gave out paint markers and they had thousands of people sign this thing, and now it’s a work of art. It was really impressive. Super, super-fun event.

06:13 CR: Yeah, that’s amazing. And especially when there’s a theme like that, like you were saying with Beethoven, and getting to learn all of those different things, it’s another amazing example. And we see so many of them, of how the geocaching community, the creativity that they have, and to make connections like that, and to come up with themes like that. And, [chuckle] like you said, a grand piano, that’s just amazing.

06:38 BR: It was amazing. On so many levels, it was amazing.

06:42 CR: So, you get back from that, and it wasn’t really long after that, unfortunately, that things with the coronavirus, COVID-19 became much more predominant. Certainly, here in Washington state, where Geocaching HQ is located, and I believe it was March 5th, if I’m remembering right, that was the first day that the lackeys from HQ were strongly encouraged to work from home. And I wonder if you could just talk through what the company’s response has been, just in how we do our jobs and what the decision-making was like, and the process for you and the rest of the senior management team in making the decisions that you’ve made for the company.

07:28 BR: Sure. Well, I guess I would start by saying that the safety of the lackeys and the safety of the community members is the most important thing, and having just come back from Europe and being a group of people that kind of pay attention to the news, and we’re embedded in this global community, so we hear what’s going on, we started to hear more and more about the reports coming out of Washington, so, in the early days, and that’s the state of Washington, not DC, we heard about the nursing home over in Kirkland, where a number of people were infected, and there were people that were dying. And we said, “Okay, this is not too far from headquarters. More and more news was coming out. And the morning of the 4th, we got word that both Microsoft and, I believe, Amazon were going to be requiring their non-essential workers to work remotely. And maybe non-essential is not the right word to describe it, but requiring some subset of their workforce to work remotely. And we said, “Okay, we know that this is serious. What should we be doing?” And we met as a team, it was on a Wednesday, we have our senior leadership team tactical meeting every Wednesday afternoon, and one of the primary topics was, okay, what can we do to protect ourselves and our community?

08:54 BR: We have geocaching visitors coming from all over the world and they come to our visitor center to find the HQ cache, and come learn more about geocaching and meet with us, and things like that. We also have lackeys who travel. We had scheduled Mega-event travel, and we had scheduled continuing education seminars and business travel schedule. We said, “Okay, at this point in time, if we’re going to do the right thing, then the right thing is for us to have everybody work remotely.” And, for what it’s worth, we’ve been doing this for over 19 years. If you had asked me years ago will there come a time where Geocaching HQ shifts to a remote workforce for an extended period of time overnight, I would have said, “No way, I can’t imagine doing that.” It’d be interesting, as an experiment, to find out, well, how effective can we be as a company with a distributed workforce, but that is a… It’s a dangerous test to do because if it doesn’t work out, who are we letting down? Are we not delivering on the promises that we make to the community? But here was a case where we’re essentially forced to test that theory. And on that Wednesday, we basically said, “Okay, we have to make this decision. Let’s make it effective tomorrow morning.”

10:21 BR: So everybody at HQ, we sent out an announcement over our Slack channel. We said, “Starting tomorrow, you are strongly encouraged to work from home.” And since that time, we’ve had different policies, where we’ve allowed people to take their computer monitors or some technology, try and set up a good remote work location for everybody. And there are… One of the policies, for example, is we have a lot of… We have a lot of lackeys who have children, who are school-aged children, and the schools are now closed, potentially through… Certainly the end of this semester, I think, feels likely. And so we have to make a choice to… What can we expect from lackeys who have to balance childcare? So one of the policies that we put out was, hey, the expectation is that you do your best, find a comfortable balance. We don’t expect you to put your children aside and not pay attention to them while you work. We just expect you to do your best. And as a company, let’s try and get through this as well as we possibly can. Model our values of passion, authenticity, and effectiveness. But we have to be a good company, we have to be a model, and we want all of the lackeys to feel like, as with everything, that they’re being well taken care of, that this company does care about them.

11:44 BR: It’s the same thing for the community. While it’s painful to close the visitor center, we know that’s in the best interest of everybody. So we closed the visitor center. All the lackeys were effectively sent home, and what we did up until… I think it’s still there today, but if you can get into the building, the building is technically still open today. That may change at the end of the day, given the new guidance from Washington state… Today.

12:10 CR: I think it actually did change, Bryan. I think today was maybe the first day that the building is closed to anyone who doesn’t have a badge. And so, therefore, the HQ logbook, which was outside the visitor center, up until now, unfortunately, will not be accessible to people. But as you said, this is changing all the time. And I think that today was the first day for that.

12:35 BR: Yeah. And in the grand scheme of things, when you think about all of the effects that this pandemic is having on people all over the world, moving the logbook inside and making it unaccessible for some period of time is kind of the least of our worries. There are people out there that are suffering, there are jobs affected, there are so many industries that are affected, and I think, from all lackeys, our heart goes out to all of those people. And one thing that we’re all looking forward to is getting back to some semblance of normal, but between now and then, we have to, both for ourselves and for everybody else out there, just encourage everybody to follow the guidelines from your local health authorities, and stay inside, stay home, stay safe. If it means that you can’t go out geocaching, that has to be the case, because everybody’s health is more important. So, for now, that is the case. This will not last forever. We will be back, and we’ll be able to see everybody on the trails, and there will be Mega-events again. Ideally, it’s over in time for our August 2020 celebration. We can talk about that for a brief moment, but, as of now, that is still months away.

13:51 BR: We’re optimistic, but we’re also realistic. At some point, if this continues at the current pace, and things are on lockdown, and we cannot host an event in Seattle, well, we’ll be considering other options and we will certainly over communicate to the community, as it gets closer. At the moment, thankfully, we have some time. Hopefully, things improve. Hopefully, all of this social distancing will help, and getting more testing out there. And ideally, we can ramp up production of the medical hardware that’s needed to take care of people. Between now and a few months from now, we’re all gonna witness what happens next.

14:38 CR: Well, you talked about this being almost a forced experiment for HQ, as something that you maybe couldn’t have foreseen, this notion of everyone working remotely, but I’m just curious what your take has been after three weeks now. My personal sense has been that the people are adapting very well, and I’m very encouraged by all of the interactions that I’m seeing, and the projects that continue to go forward. It’s not as though we’re standing in place. There’s lackeys that are continuing to work on tools for the community that will hopefully be of great use once this whole thing passes.

15:20 BR: Absolutely. It’s interesting, thinking about it as an experiment, if we had been planning to do the experiment, we would have said, “Okay, on such and such a day, we’re gonna start this, and here’s how we get ourselves best set up to handle it.” Well, in this case, we really didn’t have a lot of notice. For the lackeys, we really had about less than 24 hours of notice. And what I can say is I am beyond delighted with what I have seen, in terms of the performance from the team, the efforts being made to not skip a beat. The truth is I would expect nothing less from the team that we have, because this is really a great bunch of people. And I know that so much of it is driven by just caring about what we do, caring about the community that we serve. We know that this is important especially now and especially for those people who can still go outside and who can still sort of recreate. There are a lot of people that are signing up for geocaching right now because they’ve heard, “Wow, this is something I can do with my family while we are… While I’m not able to work or while the kids aren’t in school.”

16:39 BR: Now, that obviously transitions when people are required to stay home, but it doesn’t make anything different for us. We have to keep working. Having the luxury of being able to work remotely is something that not everybody, not every company gets, and we don’t take it for granted. And I think that’s really been demonstrated through the efforts of the lackeys and kind of hitting the ground running, so to speak. It was… Wednesday, we were all in the office. Thursday, we’re all figuring out how to effectively do video conferencing, and just learning the dynamics of, essentially, a new paradigm in operation for companies. So, if this is a forced experiment, I would say that the results are really positive so far. Hopefully, we can keep it going, and I know that, as a company, and as individuals, we’re determined to do well during this time. We don’t wanna falter. We wanna keep doing our very best to serve the community. And I think this is a good example. The Inside HQ podcast is not exactly inside HQ [laughter], but we’re not stopping. And so I think that it’s another example of how, even though there’s a lot of companies out there that can’t effectively do what they do, we’re not exactly one of them.

18:00 BR: And again, we’re not gonna take it for granted. We’re gonna keep pushing forward and we’re gonna do everything we can to make sure that this experiment… That the results of this experiment are positive, both for the game, the company, and the community.

18:14 CR: I think something that’s also been very encouraging to me, personally, has been watching the community’s response to all of this. And not surprising to me at all because of how great the community is, but just seeing how people have been patient and have kind of been trying to go with the flow as best they can. And then just seeing examples of… We shared it in a blog post recently. You probably saw the video from Italy, that would be… Italian geocachers.

18:39 BR: It was

18:42 CR: What a wonderful video, and just seeing examples like that of how the community is rising to the occasion in their own ways as well.

18:52 BR: Yes, absolutely. The video out of Italy was really inspiring, and I started watching another one that somebody shared this morning, coming from New Zealand. And then just watching the community on social media have the… Continue the dialogue, continue speaking about geocaching, and how we are adapting as a community. You’re seeing things on Facebook, of course, the Instagram, you’re seeing it on… TikTok has a really interesting geocaching presence, and there’s a lot of engagement taking place there. It’s exciting to see that while… I guess that, in a way, it is not required for us to be on the trail, physically geocaching, in order for us to be a geocaching community. And that’s inspiring. It truly is inspiring.

19:47 CR: Yeah, and as part of that blog post recently, we did list several different ways that you can try to still stay engaged with the game, and that is, again, one of the great things about our game, is that, “Okay, if I can’t leave the house, maybe I can work on these puzzles that have been driving me crazy for a long time, or maybe I can plan out a maintenance run for the future, when I am able to get back outside.” There’s a lot of different ways that you can still stay engaged with the game and then look forward to being able to do more once you’re able to have full movement again.

20:22 BR: Absolutely, and another thing I would suggest is while some people don’t have a very hard time adjusting to this new normal, there are others who are struggling with it. We know, whether it’s friends, family, community members, and so, as individuals, we can reach out to those people, whether it’s on social media or through message center, or something, and just check on, “Hey, how are you doing? Do you need anything? Do you wanna talk?” Here’s a song that I like, that makes me feel better. Here’s a piece of art. Or you see some of the folks doing, together at home, concerts on Instagram. I know Chris Martin from Coldplay did one, and John Legend did one. And there’s really a lot of avenues for maintaining a sense of joy. And so, if you know somebody out there in the geocaching community who might not be doing so well, think about some of the things that are working for you and maybe try and find a way to share them and try and find a way to pick each other up.

21:26 BR: That’s one of the foundational elements of community. It’s like mutual support, mutual encouragement. And so it doesn’t just have to take place on the trail, there’s plenty of ways that every one of us can help, so maybe that’s another way that people can think about it.

21:44 CR: Well, I think we covered a lot today, and hopefully, this… Again, I’m recording this right now. I hope it’s working [laughter]

21:52 BR: I hope so too.

21:53 CR: I’ve had my fingers crossed the whole time. This is our first time using this particular way of doing our podcast. We usually have the pleasure of being able to be right next to each other, and do it right there at the office. And hopefully, this will work out. And if it does, then I will have many other lackeys that are gonna get a… Not a knock on their door, but a virtual knock on their door.

[laughter]

22:17 BR: Well, hopefully, it doesn’t last too long, but if it does, everybody stay safe. Do what you can, wash your hands, practice social distancing, pay attention to the health guidelines, and together, as a community, we will get through this, I have no doubt.

22:35 CR: Okay. Well, thank you, Bryan. And if you’re listening to our podcast, and you… Well, and you are, if you heard me say that, that was a stupid thing to say [laughter] If there is something that you would like to hear us talk about on the podcast, you can drop us an email to podcast@geocaching.com, that is podcast@geocaching.com. And I will see who else I can rope into one of these conversations. And until next time, from myself and from Bryan, and from all of the other lackeys at HQ, happy caching.

23:10 BR: Happy caching, everybody.

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 34): Tom Phillips, VP of Marketing

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00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello there! Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast from HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. Thank you for tuning into our podcast. Today, we will hear from Tom Phillips, the Vice President for merchandising and marketing at HQ and one of the nicest human beings you could ever hope to meet. Hopefully you will enjoy this conversation that we have. This is our first episode of 2020 and we’ve had some people at times ask me what our schedule is for these podcasts. And the truth is, we don’t have a schedule. We, I don’t know, just kind of try to put something out there when there is either a project that we think will be interesting to know a lot more about or if there’s just a time to talk to a lackey that you might be interested in hearing from.

01:14 CR: So, early this year, at least for the first couple of months around the company, people have been heads down working on stuff, and there have been some things that have come out. For instance, the public profile when you look at it on the website, it now displays total favorite points that you have received as a cash owner, which is a neat thing. And then also on the website, the “date placed” filter is now on the search page. So if you are for instance trying to search for a certain cache that will help you qualify for a Jasmer challenge or something like that, you can use that new “date placed” filter. So a couple of neat new features that have come out, but not necessarily something that fills up an entire podcast episode. So that’s why it’s been a little bit since we have had a podcast here from HQ.

02:07 CR: However, there are a number of other Geocaching podcasts that have had lackey appearances in recent weeks, in particular Bryan Roth, one of the co-founders here at HQ and the company president. He has been on PodCacher. They had a big anniversary episode recently, he was on there. He was also on GeoGearheads and he was on Geocache Talk. So, some opportunities to hear from Brian if you haven’t checked out those podcasts, I encourage you to do so. But back to our show, Tom Phillips, again, is today’s guest. We actually recorded this conversation twice. The first time we’ve ever done that, but Tom is such a nice guy that I didn’t mind so much. He just kind of felt like the first time we talked that he could have had more information to share, and so he wanted to do it again.

03:00 CR: Originally I had said, “Let me just try to see how the first one went,” but then I thought, “You know, I like talking to Tom let’s do it again.” So here we go, me and Tom Phillips.

[music]

03:16 CR: Okay, are we ready?

03:17 Tom Phillips: I think we’re ready this time.

03:18 CR: We’re ready this time.

03:19 TP: I’m doing my best. Take two.

03:21 CR: Once again, you’re unique. You’re the first that we’ve done this twice with. And I’m just being honest with people, I’m putting it out there. I’m not gonna try to hide that this is our second conversation. I’m not gonna try to pretend.

03:32 TP: Hey, authenticity is a value of this organization.

03:36 CR: It is a value.

03:37 TP: And transparency, absolutely right. And the first take, the failed take of this endeavor, had nothing to do with your skills as an interviewer.

03:47 CR: Well…

03:47 TP: It had everything to do with, just the mood you were in that day, I think. [laughter]

03:51 CR: That’s exactly…

03:51 TP: ‘Cause I’m sure it had nothing to do with me.

03:55 CR: Of course not. No.

03:55 TP: No, no, no.

03:56 CR: Apparently you didn’t like the line of questioning. You felt like I was…

04:01 TP: It felt personal. It felt aggressive. [laughter] Which is often the way we interact, so I think that’s fair.

04:06 CR: And you felt like I was gonna take it easier on you this time, but I assure you…

04:12 TP: It’s not out of your system?

04:14 CR: I assure you, I am even more aggressive-feeling now than I was the first time around. [chuckle] I don’t know what you expected, but here we go.

04:24 TP: I wanted this. I wanted the real you. I wanted to release the real you.

04:24 CR: Okay.

04:28 TP: Released.

04:30 CR: So what do you do here, exactly?

[chuckle]

04:33 TP: And why do I show up everyday.

04:36 CR: Why are you here? Why are you here everyday?

04:36 TP: And just walk around and why do I whistle in the hallways?

04:36 CR: Every day are you here. Why are you so nice to people and why are you here? Those are the two main questions, then we can get out of here.

[laughter]

04:45 CR: What is your title and what does is mean? Let’s start with the basics.

04:47 TP: Excellent. So I actually have been here for 11 years and I am currently the Vice President of Marketing here at Geocaching HQ. So I get the opportunity to work with the merchandising teams, to work with our marketing and communications teams here at Geocaching HQ, the Creative Studio which is all the visual language we use and put together and then also our API partnerships to make sure that we are all working effectively together to support the community around the world.

05:17 CR: So it’s a pretty wide range of stuff. And you said 11 years you’ve been here, what originally brought you to HQ?

05:23 TP: I began my career down in Portland, Oregan. And I was born and raised in the North West. Ended up having a 20-year-life cycle with Nike down in Portland.

05:35 CR: Small shoe company of… And they sell other stuff.

05:35 TP: Have you heard of them?

05:37 CR: Shoes and some other stuff.

05:39 TP: Cute little group. So after our kids were born we decided to move up to Seattle and my wife’s family is from up here. And so that put me into the world of new and interesting groups that were working on new ideas up here in Seattle. One of those groups happen to be the three founders at Geocaching HQ. So I got introduced to them back in 2004, was fascinated with what this community was doing around the world, how it was working together, the creativity involved, the collaboration and really trying to do something that hadn’t been done before. So for me, there wasn’t a role at the time, but I just became a huge fan of what collectively this group was doing and said if there’s ever a reason that I could get involved and bring some of my experience to bear, I wanted to make sure I was staying close and just seeing what was going on.

06:31 TP: So in 2009 Bryan Roth picked up the phone, gave me a call and said, “Hey, we’re really interested in trying to figure out how we can support the community around the world with physical products that support the game. That made a lot of sense with… That’s in essence what I had been doing with Nike, creating products for athletes. This was the goal, to make sure that geocachers anywhere in the world had the physical products they needed to create and share and play this game.

07:00 CR: And so people now are familiar, if they go to Shop Geocaching there’s this wide range of different stuff you can buy. What was it like 11 years ago and what has happened over the years?

07:10 TP: I think one of the key things for me, and again, this was one of the things that just really got me hooked on how this community was different than so many other things that were going on in the world and that are going on in the world. This is a group of individuals all around the world that have come together as this community and work together to try to solve problems with each other and creatively think about the possibilities for this game. So even in the world of merchandising it was not a question of can Geocaching HQ come in and open a store that can sell products to geocachers all around the world, it was, how can we look at what’s going on in the world? There were segments of the community and individuals in Europe, in Germany, in the US, in Canada, they had all created these shops that were creating, finding, sharing products that the geocaching community needed, were inspirational to people and really excited to see if they could find that in their market as well. So for us, it was an opportunity to come in, collaborate with that community of retailers to say “What can we do, what are the things that we can provide that help support your business? And also sort of hook us together as a network that can really support geocachers in a more effective way.

08:36 TP: A lot of those really simple examples where things like if we took the amount of inventory we were gonna buy on an item, we could a lot of times, drive the price of something down and then be able to extend that pricing to retail partners around the world so it would be less expensive for them to try and create the same product themselves but just with a much smaller number. So, it was absolutely a network of cooperation and creativity and really recognizing that each one of these individuals around the world that were supporting their segment of the community with merchandise understood that community in a way that we never could over here in Seattle. So really respecting the knowledge they had, the passion they had, and then collectively trying to figure out, again, what is the best overall solution we could come up with for everybody.

09:32 CR: You also mentioned API being part of what you do overseeing that program. That’s something that certainly touches the entire geocaching community as well. For people that aren’t familiar with that, what does that entail?

09:49 TP: We completely understand that, with all of the ability we have to work on a limited amount of products, there are things people need that go beyond what we’re able to provide. So the API partnership becomes a wonderful way for us to invite other creative developers out there into this overall collective community and make sure we can get the right products and services and features into the hands of geocachers that need them.

10:16 CR: And then marketing is the other thing. And I think sometimes people hear marketing, and they immediately think, “Oh, well, it’s all about how much money can you make.” Is that what it is?

[laughter]

10:26 TP: See, you asked me why I woke up every day.

10:30 CR: Here’s the tough question here.

10:33 TP: All too often, people sort of reduce marketing to the idea that it’s about packaging and selling things to people. And there certainly is an aspect of that to the term marketing, but the idea of marketing extends much, much further than that simple element. Marketing, in it’s truest sense, is really trying to understand an audience, a community, a customer group. To really understand what it is they need and then turn around and say, in really understanding this authentic need of the community, is there anything we can do as an organization to provide that product, that service, that feature back to them? So once you have that solution in place, yes, you wanna make people aware that that exists, you wanna tell people how to use it, you wanna make sure people understand that it’s there, but really it is this end-to-end process that starts with a genuine understanding of what is it people need and trying to figure out how we might be able to provide that.

11:38 TP: For me, a really simple example of that, when you think about geocaching, is at the very beginning of geocaching.com, Jeremy Irish was very much in a marketing process. When he became part of the community, he started to get involved with what individual geocachers were doing, from Dave Ulmer on out, and really stepped back and said, “What this activity needs that it doesn’t currently have, is it really needs a place where people can connect with each other, a place where people can list things that they’ve created so people know where they can go find what’s been hidden and get the information to go figure out if they can go out into the world and try to find it and log it.” So the true sense of that was understanding what the community needed at that time, and then going back to say, “What can I do, as somebody who develops websites,” being Jeremy. To sit there and say, “Hey, I could create a community website that could help grow and build this.”

12:48 TP: So there wasn’t anything about that process where he was turning around trying to say, “How do I sell people this website?” He basically was trying to understand what this needed, is there a way he could provide it and then, as soon as it was available, how can I tell more people about it?

13:08 CR: And so today, how does the marketing team go about finding out what people want and listening to people and coming up with useful information to go on to say, “Okay, here’s what they want, here’s what they’re asking for and here’s how we’ll go about giving it to them.”

13:27 TP: Well, a big piece, and especially if you see any of us out in the community at events, traveling, anything else, is just being connected to the community. Ideally, we’d love people to come up, talk to us, introduce themselves. We do the same. And what we are most interested in is what are the things about this activity that you would love to see more of? What are the things you wish were there that aren’t, potentially. And one of the big elements of our job is often to start to understand where do geocachers even get their information. One of the simplest things was we spend a lot of time and energy every week putting a newsletter out to this global audience of geocachers. And over time, one of the things we discovered is we were sending this newsletter out in a language, being English, that not everybody could deal with.

14:26 TP: And so, really simple, to take that learning and say, “Oh, people like what we’re doing, but it’s just not accessible to them ’cause it’s in the wrong language. So how can we start to think differently?” And now that newsletter goes out to premium members in the language of their choice. So we don’t have every language, but everything goes out the door in English, in German, in Dutch and French. And we wanna make sure as much as possible that we’re able to have this conversation with people in the language that it’s easiest to communicate.

14:58 CR: You talked about when you first met Bryan and you thought this sounded like a really interesting game and you became a fan of it. I wonder, from a marketer’s standpoint, approaching something like geocaching, how does it differ from… You spent 20 years at Nike, this massive organization. Huge product lines and all that stuff. And massive, I would imagine, budgets, compared to a place like Geocaching HQ. What are the differences, what are the… I don’t know, the unique challenges here or the opportunities here, compared to maybe what you were used to in those many years that you spent at a company like that?

15:40 TP: There are two really significant differences that are as energizing as they are interesting, and one of those is that this, like I mentioned before, this truly is a collaboration. So this isn’t a company that is looking to, in a very one-directional way, say, “How do I get a community insight and create something that you will want to buy?” But this really is a collaborative conversation that oftentimes leads to, here is something the community needs overall. And the solution may be something that Geocaching HQ steps up and is able to do. Lots of times it might absolutely be something the community already has in place and they just need to know what exists and they need to share that idea with more people.

16:25 TP: So this idea that not everything needs to flow through us, we are not the people that need to try to come up with all the solutions. It’s really important for us to stay very focused on what are the things the community is doing that really are innovative, powerful, effective solutions and can we help more people understand what they are, where they are and how they might be able to model something like that themselves. So again, this collective spirit is very different than a traditional company would look at a marketplace, and I think secondarily, a lot of times you hear Geocaching HQ described as an organization, as a bootstrap business. So it’s a business that doesn’t take outside investment and never has in the 20 years it’s been around, which has a good side and a challenging side to it.

17:23 TP: So, the challenging side is that this organization might not have the financial resources that a big publicly traded company would have. So oftentimes we have to try to figure things out as cost effectively as possible. So that’s the challenging energizing side of it. The really positive side of it is that without any outside investors, we have the opportunity to stay completely focused on our original mission, which is Geocaching HQ wasn’t created as something to make money. Geocaching HQ is something that is here to make sure we’re supporting the sustainable growth of this activity around the world. Yeah, revenue is a part of that, but it’s not the goal of it. Revenue is something that helps us hire the right people, invest in the tools that we’re trying to create. It keeps everything moving forward, but the goal is to keep this activity growing, to keep this activity expanding, and to make sure the community has what it needs to stay actively engaged and involved.

18:32 CR: This is obviously a big year with the big anniversary, the 20th anniversary and the big party in Seattle in August and it’s kind of a time to look back and celebrate things that have happened in the past, but also to look forward. For you, as someone who’s worked here now for 11 years, and one of the more longer tenured people here at HQ, are there things that you especially… Memories, there are projects that you’ve enjoyed in the past or moments in the last 11 years that come to mind for you and also are there things that you’re especially looking forward to either this year or in the near future?

19:09 TP: It actually is a really fun moment for me in that it sort of bookends my current experience here at Geocaching HQ. When I first joined, I mentioned it was back in 2009, and one of the things we were doing as an organization was getting ready for the 10-year anniversary. That was the very first time we ever threw an official event from Geocaching HQ. It was hosted in Seattle and it was sort of partnered next to GeoWoodstock, which was happening the day before. And then what we had called our Lost and Found event was happening that next day. So it was a big weekend, super exciting, and I think overall we got 2000 people, 3000 people, something like that. So now, to be here in this moment, looking towards August 15th this summer, hosting the 20-year anniversary in Seattle with GeoWoodstock just north of the border the weekend after, we’re expecting a whole lot more in terms of friends and family coming in to celebrate with us, which is great. So we’ll probably be somewhere between 5000 people and 20,000 people. We don’t know, but it’s super exciting to be in this moment.

20:23 TP: One of the things that we’ve done in planning towards it, is really adopted this theme of, it is fun to look back and think about the really great moments that have happened in the last 20 years and it’s also really exciting to look forward and think about the possibilities of this game in front of us. When I think of the things that are most exciting about the game going forward right now, there are three that absolutely come to mind, especially when you think about the possibility of this game in the future. So this game has always been about how can we take what’s available out in the world and really put it in the hands of creators to do new and interesting things and challenge the community overall. So some of those new and interesting things that are being worked on, we got a tease of it last summer with Mystery at the Museum. But one of those elements is how do we actually put Digital Treasures back into the world’s largest treasure hunting game. So Digital Treasures becomes something that, hopefully you’ll see the next version of that that we’re working on towards this summer, but it’s a really exciting way to add more and more delight into the caches that you will find in the future.

21:44 TP: Secondarily, everyone I think is pretty aware of a new platform out there called Adventure Lab. And Adventure Lab really is an exciting opportunity to take some of the things we’ve experienced along the way, whether that’s Wherigo cartridges or virtuals, other elements, and put them into a platform where some of those moments are available to creators again. You can now create an experience that’s packaged for people. It can be linear and storytelling, it can have multimedia elements to it. Much simpler to create and play than sort of the challenges of Whereigo in the past, but it’s really exciting to see new tools coming into the hands of creators and I think much in the spirit that this organization has always lived by, it’s not about us trying to dream up what we would do with it here in Seattle, it’s very much putting it in the hands of geocachers to see what they would do with it. And do they find value and do they find interest to keep driving a platform like this forward?

22:53 TP: So Adventure Lab is a really exciting theme that is making its way forward in 2020. And then finally, there’s one that’s out there that it’s a little bit more of a tease than a solution right now. But you saw us begin last year, start playing with augmented reality within the game. And so there’s a big appetite of people saying, “How could we bring elements like that into the game in a way that feels really energizing and available and excited to people?” So those are really three things that I’m most excited about Digital Treasures, Adventure Lab and the possibilities of AR going forward.

23:32 CR: Well, I feel pretty good about this conversation. I think we covered it again.

[laughter]

23:40 TP: Does it feel like déjà vu?

[overlapping conversation]

23:42 CR: I don’t know, I’ll have to go back and play these side by side and see, but do you feel good about everything?

23:47 TP: I do as long as you do.

23:49 CR: I felt good the first time.

[laughter]

23:52 CR: So I want you to feel good.

23:54 TP: So, I feel even better then.

23:55 CR: You feel? Oh good. So okay, so one other question. If people come for the 2020 celebration where are they most likely to find you if they’re going caching. What kind of a cacher are you and what kind of caches do you enjoy? If they’re gonna go out looking for Tom, what caches should they go searching for?

24:12 TP: There are two ways to find me. One would be go to the merchandise booth and I’ll probably be behind the counter, sort of helping people and being there and welcoming people into the event. But when we’re out caching and I’ve been able to sort of hand those responsibilities off to somebody else in the merchandise tent, for me, when geocaching is at its best, it really is inviting me into new experiences that feel like I’ve never done that before. So if it’s a cache container that is a really creative gadget. If it’s a mystery that isn’t too hard to solve. [chuckle] If it’s a location that I am just delighted because I’ve never, ever contemplated that that spot was there. Those are all moments that just delight me within this game. I am not, and you can tell by my geocaching name on my stats, it is not all about the numbers for me. So you won’t find me on a power trail, you won’t find me trying to gather as many caches as possible in 24 hours, but I will likely ask you what was the coolest thing you found that day, and that might be the one thing I go do.

25:28 CR: That was Tom Phillips, Vice President for merchandising and marketing at Geocaching HQ. If you come to the 20th Anniversary Celebration in Seattle on August 15th you should definitely seek him out and say hello. And if you would like to hear about something here on the HQ podcast, if there’s a good topic or if there’s a specific lackey that you would like to hear from, please send me an email. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is: Podcast@geocaching.com. I always really appreciate your ideas and any other feedback that you might have about Inside Geocaching HQ. From me and from all the other lackeys at HQ, happy caching!

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 33): Bryan Roth

[music]

00:12 Chris: Greetings, geocachers. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris aka Rock Chalk, and today we get to catch up with Bryan Roth, who is the president and co-founder here at HQ. We covered a variety of topics, including 2020 celebration plans. Privacy was also something we touched on. By now. You have surely heard about GDPR which is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy. You’re about to hear a lot about CCPA which is the California Consumer Privacy Act. Those laws will continue to have an impact on our website and apps. And besides being our company president, Bryan is also an attorney, so he can speak to the importance of this subject. But don’t worry, we also talk about fun stuff too. So without further ado, here is me and Bryan Roth.

[music]

01:17 Chris: Okay, you ready?

01:18 Bryan Roth: I am ready.

01:19 Chris: Okay. Well, Bryan, It’s been a while since we’ve chatted. I was trying to think how long… I should have looked if I was prepared and I’m not, if I was preparing I would’ve looked. It’s been several months since you’ve since you’ve been on here and we’ve had a chance to catch up and I thought, being… It’s kinda the end of the year, getting towards a big 2020 coming up. We could touch on a number of things. And I know you, you’re always busy, you’ve traveled a little bit this year. Most recently you were at Going Caching correct?

01:49 BR: I sure was. What a fantastic event that is. I have to say it was certainly one of the highlights of my geocaching experience career, whatever you wanna call it. That is a phenomenal event. For those of you out there in geocaching land who are interested in looking at a really, really fun event, certainly consider Going Caching. I know me and a bunch of lackeys that attended had such a fantastic time. Yeah, it was a great trip.

02:16 Chris: And speaking of big events, next year the Geocaching 20th anniversary celebration here in Seattle and planning continues for that. And I know you are involved in that planning and in those meetings, there’s a lot of folks here at HQ that are. What would you like to tell people about what’s in store for next year?

02:37 BR: Well, next year we are planning a number of things, one of which as you mentioned is the 2020 celebration here in Seattle, we’ve got the Seattle Center rented out. I think that there’s gonna be quite a few adventure labs. There’s gonna be discussions, there’ll be stage presentations, there’s gonna be really good food and a beer garden. Obviously a lot of geocaching taking place throughout the city and then we’re expecting quite a few people. So for those of you who haven’t made plans yet come on out to Seattle and visit us. We’re not quite sure how many to expect in early January we’ll be releasing a registration site, where people can register for the event, formally, let us know how many people will be coming. I think they’ll be opportunities to pre-order some of the merchandise, that we’re gonna have available at the event, and then it should be a really fun time. We can’t wait.

03:28 BR: The event is on Saturday, August 15th for those of you who don’t know, and then the following day will be the Going Ape event sponsored by the WSGA and then one week later is Geo Woodstock, in Canada which should be a whole lot of fun. So it’s gonna be an action packed couple of weeks in the Pacific Northwest. So again for those of you who haven’t booked your plans get your hotels and travel book, and we’ll look forward to seeing you here in Seattle.

03:55 Chris: As we’re planning this 2020 celebration of… I’m kind of wondering how it compares to your memories of 2010, that 10th anniversary, because there’s a little bit about the 10th anniversary that is carrying over in some ways. We’ve taken the Lost and Found event that’s going to become community celebration events. People have a chance to get that icon again, but this feels like it’s a lot bigger. Certainly, the Seattle Center having an event right at the Space Needle, that people are so familiar with around the world, feels like an even bigger thing then probably was happening 10 years ago.

04:32 BR: I think you’re absolutely right. It’s funny when I look back to… It’s probably around 10 years ago, at this time, maybe a little bit earlier, we were talking about the lost and found event and the concept was in 10 years, there have been so many story worthy moments that have taken place throughout the community, how can we surface those stories, how can we share those again and kind of celebrate all of the joy that geocaching has brought to the lives of millions of people around the world. And now we’ve got 10 more years of that to add to it, and it’s another 10 years of stories, it’s another 10 years of amazing events that have taken place and Seto work that has been done by the community to clean up spaces and creating and sharing that has been done by cache owners and participants and people finding out about the game and getting out with their family, and their kids or their grandparents.

05:30 BR: And there’s all these story-worthy moments that have been created worldwide, and here’s an opportunity for us to once again celebrate that as a global community. And as you mentioned, we’re gonna be coming together in Seattle as one segment of the community, but in the grand scheme of things, if we get 10,000 people here, for example, that’s a pretty small segment of the overall community. And so what we’re looking to do is find opportunities for the global community to participate in this celebration in their local areas and share the stories and talk about what it is that they love about the game and what they’ve learned from the game and how it’s changed their lives in a positive way. And so here we are, 20 years later, and it does feel bigger in the Lost and Found event. The first one we did, we didn’t know how many people to expect, I don’t think there were… I don’t think that there were gigas back then.

06:26 Chris: Nope.

06:28 BR: And so, we hadn’t had more than a few thousand people at an event, I believe, at that time. So we said, “Okay we’re gonna have maybe 1000, a couple of thousand people show up”. So we kind of rented out the area just next to our office and we closed down the street, and we worked with the city of Seattle and an event planner and we said, “Okay let’s see who shows up”. And we had this really fun event and obviously we decided to do it again for another five years and then we took a break, and now, it’s maybe there’s some pent-up excitement. I know there certainly is here, there’s a number of lackeys who did not get to participate. Who just haven’t been here for 10 years. In fact, there’s very few lackeys who have been here for 10 years, those of us who have know that this is something really to look forward to and now that we get to do it again another 10 years later, we knew it was gonna be bigger. There’s more people playing the game. There’s more awareness of geocaching globally. There’s more people who understand that this is something worth visiting, and so maybe we get 5,000 people, maybe we get 10,000 people, maybe we get more than that, but what we really wanted to do is make sure that we could accommodate that amount of people.

07:41 BR: So we went in and we created quite a bigger budget, and we said “This is a gift that we wanna give to the community in terms of this event and a really fun time” So we rented out the Seattle Center, which is one of the primary tourist attractions in all of Seattle, there’s a number of very big festivals that take place there and there’s gonna be opportunities for vendors and plenty of geocaching and as I said, adventure labs, presentations, some special guests will be there. I’m not gonna give that away just yet. I would agree with you that there is much more excitement this year than there was 10 years ago, but only because now we know what to expect in a way that we never knew what to expect, before.

08:27 Chris: There will be a lot of looking back here in the next several months and celebrating the past but also a lot of new things to talk about, and one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, get an update on, is the adventure lab app. Certainly adventures are much more visible than it just… More and more visible as time goes on, as people create more and more of them, they’re showing up more on the map. So people are talking about them more. I was at a Mega down in Australia and that was a very popular topic was the adventure lab app. And I’m just curious how you’re feeling about it right now, it’s been a while since you and I have chatted about it. A lot of new features have been added but I know there’s a lot more to come and so maybe we just talk about the state of it and what your feelings are and what you see for it in the near future.

09:16 BR: Sure, well I know I speak for just about everybody here at headquarters when I say that there’s a lot of excitement around the adventure Lab application and platform in general. For those of you who don’t know, we built adventure lab as an extension of core geocaching. We looked at the tools that we have for traditional caches and multi-stage caches, and event caches, and earth caches. And we said, How can we give the creative geocachers out there opportunities and a tool set to create something that is more robust than just traditional geocaching? So how can we add elements like multi-media like triggers allow people to create both linear and non-linear experiences and adventures for people to enjoy? And so, since January, when we launched the adventure lab app… Well, I’ll take a step back. Prior to January, adventures or let’s say lab caches, were really only available at mega events and giga events, and for a period of years, we gave the lab cache program to event organizers, the big event organizers and we said, “Hey, if you’re gonna have guests for the weekend or for a series of days, here’s a tool set that will allow you to create essentially temporary geocaching experiences where people can earn finds by participating but you don’t have to maintain them for three months or six months, as individual caches”.

10:49 BR: Traditional guidelines, some of the traditional guidelines don’t necessarily apply, things like proximity, so that we wanted to make it easy for event organizers to engage the community. Since January with the launch of the adventure labs application, we have given credits for creating an adventure lab experience to a few thousand geocachers and what we wanna do is we wanna see what they build with them. And there have been, as of today, I think that there are 800 or so adventures that have been created worldwide. Our goal is to get more of them, we wanna make them more accessible to people so that when you download the adventure lab app, and you open it, you don’t have to travel 100 miles or 500 miles to go try one. Ideally, they’re much more accessible in a way that they haven’t been in the past. One of the things that we recognized that we needed to add to the platform was a way for the people who participate in these experiences to be able to provide feedback to the creators.

11:50 BR: So very recently, I think within the last month, we added an activity log. So essentially, if you complete an adventure lab experience, you can go and write a log for that and the person that created it can see what you think. It’s a way of providing feedback, like geocache logs. We’ve also added prior to that, a rating system where if you complete it, you can rate it on a one to five star basis, and then we’ll show in the experience, in sort of the detail page for the experience, this has been found or completed 35 times and it’s got a four-and-a-half star rating and so, the goal is to get to a point where when there are many more adventure lab experiences available, people will be able to decide for themselves which ones they wanna do based on the ratings and the reviews that they can read which, kind of ties it more closely to geocaching in a way that… We’ve had favorite points, we’ve had cache logs, things like that, in geocaching historically. So when you go and you look at a map that’s full of geocaches you can make a better decision of which ones you wanna go find.

12:56 BR: Similarly, we see a day with adventure labs where the game board is much more populated with these types of experiences and we wanna give players the same type of tools to go and make good decisions on what types of experiences they wanna participate in, and then they could provide feedback subsequent to that, so that other people will be better informed when they’re making their choices.

13:20 Chris: When I was at the Mega and people were talking about the adventure lab app, there were various questions about feature ideas and, for instance, searching for adventure labs, that wanting to have a more robust search functionality. And other things as well. Is it fair to say that it is still in the early development stages? There’s still a long ways to go. It’s a very nice app and it is… Use it, it’s very polished, but at the same time, I know, from talking to other lackeys and folks involved in the project, that there’s a lot that they would like to do still. And I’m just wondering, is there a way to even put a percentage on it, to say, “Okay, we wanna get to 100% and now we’re at such and such percent”, or as just to even generally describe where it is in its development?

14:10 BR: Sure. I would say generally speaking, we’re just getting started, we really are just getting started, we just hired another person for the adventures team within the last, I think six weeks or so, he just started. And we’ve got a team that is dedicated solely and exclusively to building this platform, enhancing it, making it better. So for those of you who have suggestions, please send them our way. It is still rough around the edges. There are still plenty of features that we want to add to the application. I don’t wanna spoil anything, but the team is constantly working on improving it. Fixing bugs is just one part of it, but we are doing discovery and research into what are the features that are gonna make it better. Not just better for players but better for creators. What additional aspects can we add to the platform that will allow creators to express their creativity in even better ways or take an idea that maybe the platform won’t support today, but it might support tomorrow.

15:19 BR: So yeah, we’re just getting started. In terms of overall percent, I would say we’re in the single digits. And as a company, this is something that we’re investing in, we believe in the project, we believe that it has the capacity to help us achieve the mission that we have as a company which is to inspire and enable adventure, exploration, and community, by getting people off of their couches, away from their televisions, outside, playing in the real world. And so for those of you who have ideas about creating this type of experience, one of the things I can tell you is that in 2020, we will be opening up additional opportunities for people to create adventure lab experiences. In doing so, we will be opening up more opportunities for people to play these types of experiences. We believe that it helps to add to the ecosystem that geocaching presents. And so for those of you who have friends or family or relatives who haven’t tried this yet, show them the app. Let them know about it. And ideally, in the coming months and certainly in the coming years, there will be more of these experiences, that are accessible to people everywhere, around the world.

16:30 Chris: You had mentioned adventure lab being an extension of geocaching, of core Geocaching. And a question that I’ve heard a number of times, is, what are the plans or the expectations about integrating adventure Lab with, for instance, the Geocaching app, if you’re out looking for caches in a mega event and you don’t wanna miss labs or… I say labs [chuckle], adventures Lab… Whatever, or vice versa, if you’re out on an adventure journey. And you don’t wanna miss Geocaches. I don’t know how far we’re into things, but what are the thoughts on that? Is there a hope of making that kind of integration sometime in the future?

17:12 BR: I think it’s better than a hope, there is a goal of creating a better integrated experience. So yes, at some point in the future, we foresee a time where if you are looking at the map of geocaches in the Geocaching app, and ideally even in some of the API partner apps, like the cachelies of the world, you will be able to see an adventure lab point on the map and you’ll be able to click on it and it will switch over, if assuming you’re interested in playing it, it will switch over to the adventure lab app, where you can play. And I think that the opportunity to present geo-caches within the adventure lab app, is something else that we’re considering. At the same time, We really wanna be thoughtful about how we do this, we want this to be a constantly improving experience for the geocaching community, so we’re not just gonna go in, add dots on the map for the sake of adding dots, we wanna do it in such a way where it’s going to resonate positively with the players and the creators, so that it’s a better experience. So it’s not just adding dots on a map, it’s how do we add dots on a map, in the best way possible that is something we’re actively thinking about.

18:24 BR: We have a fully built-out product team that we’ve added a number of people over the last year. Product managers and product designers who are gonna help us build better products and part of building better products is taking a platform, like adventure lab and taking a platform like core geocaching and finding the best way to integrate them. So, that’s coming soon. I can’t tell you what soon means but I would say certainly at some point in 2020, and you will continue to see improvements in this platform, we will continue to see improvements in this platform because as a company, we are dedicated to making that happen.

19:00 Chris: And we talk a lot here, obviously, about how geocachers are using adventure lab, but it’s not just for geocachers, right? There are other audiences that will hopefully be using this app over time.

19:14 BR: Absolutely. One of the things we wanna do with adventure lab is experiments. We see a lot of potential for the use of the adventure Lab application in arenas like education. So, I believe we’ve talked about this in the past, but when you look at core geocaching, if I’m an educator and I wanna create a, say, a multi-stage Geocaching experience to teach a history lesson to my students on school grounds, that’s really hard to do because if I place a multi-stage cache on school grounds, I’m gonna have random geocachers showing up on school grounds, which is just not… It’s not appropriate, it’s not okay for an educational environment. I think parents of students would be rightfully concerned about something like that. So one of the aspects of the Adventure Lab platform that I think allows us to address this type of use case is the fact that we can now create a private adventure experience. So we can give a teacher, for example, an adventure lab credit for a private experience and say “Go create your history lesson. Let’s not confine your students to their desks as they’re learning, let’s get them up, let’s get them outside, moving around as they learn history or math or science”.

20:35 BR: And in doing so, again, I think it helps us get people outside. If we can… We talk all the time about getting geocachers off of their couches and away from their televisions and out into the real world having these experiences. But wouldn’t it be cool if we could take it a step further and get students out of their classrooms? Out of their desk chairs? Out of what some might see as a pretty boring sterile environment, and out onto school grounds, on a sunny day, or even not a sunny day ’cause as geocachers, we know there’s no bad weather, only bad gear, but get students out of their chairs. And if we can help do that, well, then I think it helps us as a Geocaching community and ecosystem. It’s another step in changing the world in a positive way. So that’s an example. Another example of a use case would be universities, so one of the… We’re currently working with a number of universities across the country and around the world to run some experiments with the adventure Lab application, so we’re saying “Oh they’re doing tours of the university, maybe there’s a historical tour of the university, maybe there’s a story-driven adventure that a university or a college, or some type of school wants to use to create an experience for their students”. Well, here you go.

21:58 BR: It’s another educational experience, but maybe it’s not a lesson that’s being provided, and maybe it’s an orientation experience, so that students can get to better know the campus of the new university as new students. Another use case where we’ve done some experiments is there are some companies out there who will do events for their employees. This one company in particular who I can’t name they do a trip to Hawaii, which sounds really nice for their employees every year.

22:29 Chris: Yes, it just sound really nice. That does…

22:30 BR: I know it’s a good idea.

22:33 Chris: I’m pretty sure there’s not a downside to that.

(laughter)

22:37 BR: Sadly, I don’t think we’re doing that any time soon. So this company wanted to create a fun experience for their employees on one of the islands in Hawaii so we said, “Hey here’s an adventure lab credit. Go build an experience, go build this pseudo-treasure hunt” and this company doesn’t want other people showing up during their company event. They want their company to be able to enjoy it. So this was another opportunity to leverage the private aspect of the adventure Lab application to enable them to do something that they simply couldn’t do with core geocaching. Many of them have become interested in core geocaching as a result of being exposed to geocaching through adventure lab, so we think that there’s an opportunity for people who are introduced to adventures to become interested in geocaching as a result of having a great experience outside with this platform and this ecosystem.

23:32 Chris: Well, one of the things you mentioned there was the private feature of adventure lab, and that segues nicely into another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is increasingly popular topic and that is privacy, it’s something that’s come up a few times related to geocaching products. Most recently, I think, was when we removed the audit feature from premium member only caches, but there have been a number of other things that have been impacted by various privacy laws, for instance, the GDPR in Europe, and the upcoming law in California that’s getting a lot of news. And I just wanted to touch base with you about this. You’re an attorney and you’re very involved in these decisions that are made here at HQ about how these new laws will impact or products and they will continue to be impacted, correct? This is a big subject and it’s not going away any time soon.

24:29 BR: It’s very true, it’s not going away, with both GDPR and CCPA, which effectively comes online in January in California, what we’re seeing is a basically a global push, in governance towards holding companies accountable for treating the privacy of their customers in the right way. And as a company, this is something that we’ve always been focused on, we wanna be a good company. The relationship that we have with the global geocaching community is the most important relationship that we have, and so we’ve always focused on trying to treat our customers well. I think that there’s a lot of companies out there who have played a little bit more loosely with their customers’ privacy and I think what we’re seeing is a crackdown on that type of behavior and so there’s some very specific laws and regulations being created around what qualifies as private data for users and how that data needs to be presented, how it needs to be preserved, how it needs to be honored and used. And so one of the things that we are focused on is we wanna be in compliance, we play by the rules, we wanna follow the law.

25:52 BR: And I can tell you that in the last year and a half, we have spent a tremendous amount of money and a tremendous amount of time working with consultants and working on our systems, and trying to bring everything that we do into compliance with these very specific regulations. What we’re seeing in California, with the CCPA is a very deliberate interpretation of what data privacy means and how user data needs to be treated. California is normally a leader in setting regulations and I know that there’s other states throughout the United States that are focused on developing their own regulations, some of which will be based on California’s regulations, and some of them will be new to everybody. And so as a relatively small company here in Seattle, I can tell you, it’s a lot of work to try and interpret what all of these regulations mean with respect to the way that we do business. And so, as geocachers, as members of the community, you will be seeing changes. You will be seeing changes on our site and I think the ultimate goal is that we wanna honor the expectations of our customers in terms of how their data is treated, and so there will be changes on the website. There have been changes already there will be more changes like many corporations and ideally all corporations out there taking people’s privacy seriously is something that has to be done.

27:20 BR: One of the things that just came out in the news this week, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple said that products should be designed with consumer privacy in mind from the start, it shouldn’t be bolted on after. And I agree with that, it’s privacy by design and I think with everything that we do, we should be contemplating how we treat our customers in the best possible way. And privacy is an aspect of that. At the same time, we’ve been doing this for 19 years now, and so we do have to go back and we have to look at everything that we’ve done historically and say, “Does this meet the expectations of our customers? Does this meet the expectations of the EU? Does this meet the expectations of California and every other state who’s gonna bring one of these policies online?” That is a lot of work. Fortunately, we have some really talented folks here at HQ that are focused on it, both from an engineering side and a design side and a legal side. But what I can tell you is, we’re focused on it, it’s something we take very seriously, and there’s more to come.

28:28 BR: This is a rapidly changing area of the law. I believe that it will continue to change and as individual customers, I think we’re the beneficiaries of these types of policies because we’ve all read the news and we’ve seen cases where as individual consumers, our privacy is not taken seriously, our location is sold, our data is sold to the highest bidder, and as customers, that doesn’t feel right. We don’t wanna be in that position, we wanna take good care of our customers and the governments of the world wanna see companies do more to take care of their customers. So again you’ll see some changes, you’ll see some improvements in that area. You’re going to read more about these laws. And I think that in the coming months and years, you will see more in terms of enforcement from those government agencies going after the companies that either by choice or by omission, are not complying with these rules and regulations, so you will see us as a company making all efforts to be in compliance.

29:35 Chris: And from what I’ve seen, those enforcements can be very severe. There’s some pretty serious fines and things like that, if you’re not in compliance.

29:43 BR: Very severe absolutely. And to get hit with those kind of fines, at the end of the day, that just impacts our ability to do the kind of projects that we wanna work on, and it’s not that we don’t wanna work on these, we have to work on these, but there’s a lot of other stuff that you get hit with a fine, that’s money that can be applied to a team that’s working on Adventure labs, or a team that’s building the next feature of our mobile app for core geocaching to deliver a better experience to our customers. So it’s really about finding the right balance and it’s something that again, we take very seriously and we are focused on it going forward.

30:19 Chris: Well, we don’t wanna end on that. So let’s talk in general about… I just feel like there’s an excitement around here about things that are happening. There’s a lot of teams working on a number of very exciting things. And besides the 2020 celebration excitement, I think there is going to be a lot to celebrate in terms of new features and new functionality and things like that and I think you’re probably sensing the same thing.

30:47 BR: Absolutely. I think what I can tell you, as a global community, what I can tell everybody is that they’re about 85 lackeys here, who are really excited about the next evolution of geocaching. We have seen changes in technology, and we’ve seen changes in gameplay. As a company, we are dedicated to making this game better, making it more engaging, getting people outside, giving them more fun things to do. There’s a lot of excitement around here about the list of opportunities that we have to do that. There are features, there’s functionality, there are applications, there are enhancements, that are on our roadmap, both near-term and long-term that we believe will be great for the game, great for the community, great for the volunteers, and our plan is to deliver those. Like no other time in the history of this company, I believe that we have a fantastic team here. They are geocachers like the geocachers in the community, they’re excited about this game, they’re looking forward to giving more as a company, and it’s going to happen. And it started a long time ago, and it’s gonna continue as we go forward and I’m just excited to hear the feedback.

32:03 BR: So for those of you out there who have ideas or suggestions of what you wanna see from us, or how we can do a better job, please let us know, we take it really seriously. We’ve got a long list of things that we know will make this game better, but we also know that the best ideas can come from everywhere. And that includes coming from you out there in geocaching land, so please send them our way and we will do our best to keep moving forward.

(music)

32:32 Chris: So there you have it. Bryan Roth, President and Co-Founder here at Geocaching HQ. Folks, thanks for listening to our podcast in 2019. If there is something you would like to hear us talk about in 2020, please send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com, we always appreciate hearing from you. From me, and from all of my fellow lackeys, happy new year and happy caching.

(music)

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 32): Community Celebration Events and the 2020 Locationless Cache

(music)

00:13 Chris: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ, where we talk about what’s happening inside Geocaching HQ, in Seattle. I am Chris, my Geocaching user name is Rock Chalk. And today, kind of a special edition of the podcast, we are talking about two recent announcements for community celebration events and the location-less cache that will be available to find in 2020. Cindy Potter knows a lot about these things, she is the Director of Community at HQ, and we chatted about the details of these projects. So here we go.

(music)

01:02 Chris: Okay, Cindy is here. And we are talking about a couple of big 2020 projects, different stuff that we’re getting ready for this big anniversary in 2020, the 20th anniversary of Geocaching and the first of those projects to talk about is community celebration events and this is something that kind of harkens back to the tenth anniversary of Geocaching, those what were called Lost and Found events and for people who weren’t around for those, and I wasn’t around for those, what were those about? 

01:34 Cindy: Right, yeah, I just missed it too. I started in 2011. Yeah, so the lost and found events were to celebrate our 10 years of geocaching and those were special events all over the world, and I think that was around 362, if I remember correctly.

01:50 Chris: Around.

01:51 Cindy: Around, it was an opportunity for people to celebrate all over the world, the 10 years.

01:58 Chris: And that was the only opportunity to get that there was an icon for it of course…

02:02 Cindy: That’s right.

02:03 Chris: And so a pretty limited number of people were able to get that. And so where did the idea for… It’s obviously not the same thing but for kind of sort of bringing that kind of an idea back, where did that start? 

02:16 Cindy: Well, I was looking at my notes, and it was actually about a year and a half ago, we started talking about it in the office, and I think it was just that feeling that we all have… That it’s this argh feeling like, “argh, this is an icon that I don’t have, and I know that the community feels like it’s more fun to be able to still find things. And so we started talking about, “Well we knew we were gonna do the HQ celebration here.” And I think that we started to think… Well, that’s not right to only have something at HQ, we’ll wanna do something worldwide anyway. And then we started talking about, “Well what’s this lost and found thing, what’s the history on that?”

02:58 Cindy: And so, you dig into it, just more and you realize, “Wow, that was an icon we used once, literally for four days.” So we started talking to some engineers about how hard would it be if we decided to rebrand these and bring them back with a different kind of look, so that we felt that they could be used as a celebration event more frequently than just once. And it turned out it wasn’t a ton of work, it certainly was work. But so we decided to re-brand both of those icons, the celebration event that HQ had used and then the lost and found events.

03:34 Chris: And so we have this opt-in page now, where people can go and apply to host one of these community celebration events in 2020, and there is a little bit of criteria in order to be able to qualify to host one of these.

03:48 Cindy: Right, well, this is the 20th birthday year. And we still wanted it to be special, we wanted to not just open it up so that we could end up having the same cache owners doing multiple events, but we wanted to have it be more special. And so we have a fairly small criteria. It’s not that hard to qualify as long as you’ve gone to a few events, and that you’ve been recently active as a geocacher. And then we’ll make sure that there’s some geographic distribution so that they are all around the world and each of these events is also supposed to be at least two hours long.

04:26 Cindy: We didn’t really want flash mob style events, we wanted people to spend a bit more time celebrating together, so… Yeah, so we created an opt-in page that had worked fairly successfully with the adventure lab and virtual reward 2.0 where people can more consciously decide, “Yeah, this is something I’m excited about.” And then it’s a little bit of a surprise when they get them.

04:52 Chris: And so, the opt-in page is open now, people can apply before June 3rd of next year, but the earlier you apply, the more opportunities, you have right to maybe have your name drawn because we’re gonna start doing these drawings when? 

05:07 Cindy: Right, yeah, January 3rd, is the first set that will be given out so that you make a fair point, you know, don’t just sit on it and apply it yeah June 3rd, it would be better to, if you think you wanna do it, go ahead and apply now because we’ll be pulling from those names. And someone had asked, I think in social media like it does it matter… We’ll still be pulling from the same pool every month. That’s not like you’ve lost your opportunity if you applied in December, you’ll still get an opportunity. If you didn’t get it in January, then you might get it in February, every month all the way through till October.

05:44 Cindy: And part of the reason we’re spreading it out there that way I know it makes it a little challenging for the community ’cause they don’t know if they’re gonna earn one but we wanted it to spread it out so that everybody isn’t all choosing the same dates at the same time, and they’re frustrated. The community volunteer reviewers would be frustrated all seeing things piling up in this way. They can look on a map and see, “Oh, there’s already events in my area, on these certain dates, so I’m gonna choose a different date for mine,” so we hope it will help to spread things out a little bit more.

06:00 Chris: And winners have to host those events between May 2nd 2020 and December 31st, 2020, of course, May 2nd, a significant date.

06:00 Cindy: That’s right, that was a significant date in geocaching, The Blue Switch Day. Yeah, we chose that date specifically because we knew we would be giving things out in January, and that would give people a bit of time for planning. You’re also allowed to submit these up to six months in advance normally you can only do events, three months in advance for regular events. The other thing I wanna point out is you don’t really have to wait for one of these if you wanna celebrate geocaching you could do a regular event and then start thinking about a date and planning for that, and then if you do get one of these, you could choose this icon instead but it doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate geocaching.

07:06 Chris: Well, I think it’s gonna be really interesting to see what people come up with, I guess, I’m thinking about gift events and how creative people have gotten with those over the past few years.

07:15 Cindy: Yeah.

07:16 Chris: And I think it’s gonna be pretty cool to see what people come up with for these… What should be really special celebrations.

07:24 Cindy: Yeah, we did help a little bit with some fun art that’s linked to from the guidelines page actually right now, so people can see it, there’s a party hat that we created that people can cut out and get some of that, I don’t know what you call it, the elastic string or whatever to put it on your heads, and take photos together, and then there’s another graphic of signal with a balloon I believe and those could be used to bake your cake or whatever. I know people who do really creative things. And of course for birthday parties, they’re gonna do creative things anyway. So we provide a few artwork ideas.

08:00 Chris: And there’s a lot more information in the blog post if people go to geocaching.com/blog, and then there’s… Including there’s a link to see a list of those community celebration events once they start being published.

08:14 Cindy: Yeah, once they start being published and I would suspect that will be fairly soon after July. I’m sorry, not July, January, fairly soon after January.

08:23 Chris: The other big recent announcement, the location-less cache that will be available to find in 2020. And that is, again, for somebody like myself who I started playing in 2011 that was well after location-less caches went away. So this is a brand new thing. Where did this idea germinate from? 

08:45 Cindy: Yeah, good question. I actually looked that up recently and found out it was a community member that had I believe written into us because I wrote the text down in my document and they basically said, “Hey what if HQ owned location-less cache, then you could be in control of how it’s done. And actually, I think they had the idea of we could have two different ones and cycle them around and then about a month later, I met somebody else from British Colombia in the Visitor Center and that person said, “Hey I have an idea to pitch to you.” It turns out it was basically the same idea and in this case, he said, “How about signal the frog, the mascot, is the location-less cache?” And I said, “I’m gonna write that idea down. That’s a good idea.”

09:31 Cindy: So that was, gosh, summer of 2018, so about a year and a half ago. And so it takes a while for these things to germinate. And then it seemed like with the 20th year as I started to talk to people about the idea we liked it for nostalgia reasons. So kind of looking back on 20 years and what used to be more a part of Geocaching, it’s now of course become way marking, but it started in geocaching so this is kind of a way to celebrate its beginning.

10:02 Chris: Yeah, and for people that don’t understand what a location-less cache was back when they were part of geocaching.com essentially you would… A cache listing would give you instructions for finding something somewhere in the world and taking a picture of it and saying where you found it. And I think the example we use in the blog post is a draw bridge, find a draw bridge, take a picture of it with its… In the up position and give the coordinates of where you found it. And that doesn’t really fit in with geocaching necessarily, because you don’t use a GPS to go and find something like that. You tell other people what the coordinates are.

10:44 Chris: So it’s almost a little bit the opposite of what most geo-caches are. So there are reasons why they went away. But again, as you mentioned, it’s a fun way to just pay tribute to the past of the game and kind of enjoy some of that nostalgia.

11:01 Cindy: Right. Yeah, there was fun categories like murals across America. So you’re finding different murals on the sides of buildings, and yeah, you had to post your latitude and longitude. And part of what I understand part of the struggle was that the cache owner was supposed to determine whether or not the next person that logged, whether they were logging something that somebody had already found. So that becomes after 2000 logs that’s pretty tough that you’re trying to determine that. And from what I understand, that’s managed more readily with way marking. And so, there are categories. I was just looking today we have up to almost a million way marks on waymarking.com. So, location-less caches basically became way marks, and so people are maybe location-less cache that we’re doing this upcoming year might get people excited about this idea, then they can go check it out on way marking.

11:56 Chris: So the way this will work is, during 2020, you need to find signal the frog, the official mascot which is generally at mega events, or the official 2020 signal the frog banner which again is most often at mega and giga events. And we have a link to a list of events from the blog post where you can keep an eye on signals travel information, but the idea is that you would find signal at one of these events, take a photo with signal, and then post that with your log. There won’t be any of the latitude and longitude fields that from days gone by that isn’t gonna be a part of this, although you could put that information in your cache log if you wanted to.

12:44 Cindy: Right you could add it as text, but you won’t have specific fields for it like we used to.

12:49 Chris: Yeah, so again, a lot of people have of course met signal over the years. But this will be another incentive to do that this year, 2020 I should say.

12:55 Cindy: That’s right, and it’s important to say where you’re not supposed to be posting pictures of yourself from previous megas. These signals will be unique to 2020, so the banner is a unique banner that’s only used for mega events in 2020, and then the signal mascot is gonna have a special pin that it’s going to have on that’s gonna be wearing just for a location-less so that should be hopefully visible in your pictures.

13:28 Chris: And so again, you can go to the blog and there will be a direct link to that location-less cache page or you can search for this great GC code which you’re responsible for.

13:38 Cindy: Yes, GC8 frog, F-R-O-G.

13:42 Chris: Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s an easy to remember one and that will… That page will be where you go to log, once it’s open for logging, we’re gonna open it up once signal the official mascot and/or the banner make their first appearances of 2020 and at that point, people can get in there and give it a try and you can only log it once. So no matter how many… You might go out and see signal hopefully lots of times in 2020, but just the one…

14:10 Cindy: Right just one time. And also only for the year 2020 we’re not planning to bring back location-less caches. This is really just a nod to the past but people that are excited about location-less like I said, we have waymarking.com but we’re not intending to have this be some secret re-launch of location-less it’s… We recognize this isn’t… This launch is not doing it authentically the way it used to be because you’re not required to do the latitude or longitude. So instead, we’re thinking someone can post their picture and say, “I saw it at the Hamburg mega event or wherever they actually saw signal, so it’s… Or they can put the latitude and longitude in the text but it’s really more just for nostalgia and history and not quite as authentic as it would need to be if we were truly bringing it back.

15:04 Chris: Right and another point I know we talked a lot about was a concern that obviously signal doesn’t go everywhere in the world, and that’s a little bit of a bummer that some people are gonna have to work harder than other people to be able to be part of this, but we’re hoping that by originally, we were thinking it might not only be able to be the signal, the frog mascot which is even more limited, but hopefully with the banner which will appear at more events, it will give more people an opportunity but acknowledging that it’s going to be more difficult for some people.

15:38 Cindy: Right, but you can think of it like geocaching in general that you can’t find every type of geo-cache in every country or every continent. We tried to come up with an idea that we thought was fairly inclusive, but it’s also meant to be fun, and it’s a good opportunity to gather people together and to give people… Maybe they haven’t gone to mega events in a few years, and it gives them further incentive to gather with friends again.

16:06 Chris: Well, between these things and I know we’re both involved in some of the planning for the HQ celebration event here in Seattle, there’s a lot of fun stuff coming down the pike.

16:17 Cindy: There’s a lot in coming down the pike next year. That’s very true, we’re gonna be very busy.

(music)
16:27 Chris: That was Cindy Potter Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. If you would like to learn more about community celebration events or the signal, the frog location-less cache, the geocaching blog is where you wanna be. You will find articles about both projects there. And as always, if you have an idea for the podcast, drop us a line at podcast@geocaching.com. Thanks for listening, from me and from all of my fellow Lackeys at Geocaching HQ. Happy caching.

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 31): Jen Smith, Front End Developer Lead

00:14 Chris: Hey, everyone. This is Inside Geocaching HQ from Seattle. I am Chris, my Geocaching username is Rock Chalk, I am one of the lackeys here at Geocaching HQ and we thank you for listening to our podcast. Our episodes are often focused on specific projects or issues but every so often we just check in with one of my fellow lackeys to ask them about their jobs and that is what we are doing today. I am chatting with Jen Smith who is a Front End Developer Lead. I’m always asking for podcast ideas and a few people have asked to hear about Wherigo. Well, Jen was very involved with creating Wherigo. So for the people who have asked to hear about that you will enjoy this conversation and you will enjoy hearing about all the other cool stuff that she is working on today. So here is me and Jen Smith, enjoy.

[music]

01:22 Chris: And then I gotta figure out I should write down how I wanna start these things. I never know.

01:25 Jen Smith: Yeah, you should have your own schtick.

01:27 Chris: I should.

01:28 JS: Like an intro and an ending. [chuckle]

01:32 Chris: Yeah, I should do one of those like a talk show host does. But yeah, I’m not that professional about it, I guess.

[laughter]

01:43 Chris: Alright, I think I’m ready. Well, Jen, thank you for being on the podcast, you’re one of the longer tenured lackeys here at Geocaching HQ. How many years has it been for you now? 

01:55 JS: It’s been a lot of years, it’s 13 and a half. My 14th anniversary will be next July.

02:01 Chris: And you were talking, before we started here, about how many of the different offices you’ve been… I think you said maybe this is your fourth? 

02:07 JS: Yeah, four offices. I think that the company’s only been in five. So, I came into the first, I think what was the first official office and it was a tiny… Basically, just a couple of rooms above an art studio in downtown Seattle which is really fun. But, yeah, there’s been that one, there was Riverton, actually Downtown, Belltown, 5th Ave and then we’ve been in Fremonts in the Fremont neighborhood ever since, across the street from where we are now. And then Google took that over and so we moved into the current office.

02:35 Chris: Had you heard of Geocaching before you started? What was it? We said 14 years ago. [chuckle]

02:40 JS: That was 14 years ago. No, I had not. And it’s funny because I was actually part of the… One of the first interns that they hired, there were a group of four of us. I had just graduated from college and I needed a job and so I was scouring the ads on Craigslist and found an ad for a job doing I think they called it Creative Content Development and having an art degree I thought, “Oh, this sounds like something I should look into.” And it turned out to be for a little project called Wherigo.

03:08 Chris: Well, so you said you have an art degree. So it wasn’t a… You didn’t have a computer background at that? Or an engineering or whatever…

03:17 JS: No, no, my back…

03:18 Chris: It was more art. Yeah. Wow.

03:19 JS: Yeah, my background is in sequential art so essentially comic books, graphic novels, storyboarding, I really wanted to be a graphic novelist. So that’s what I was really focused on when I graduated, then got hired here at Groundspeak and over the course of my years here discovered that I just really loved programming. So I ended up going to school and getting my CS degree while I was working here on Wherigo and then on the web team. The rest is kind of history.

03:44 Chris: Wow, I never knew that, that’s amazing. So, do you still keep up with the stuff that interested you in college then? The art side of it? 

03:53 JS: Not as much anymore. It’s one of those things that I always want to and I always think about it. My partner is a designer and so the two of us do a lot of… We have a lot of art related inside jokes and we’re constantly drawing stupid pictures for each other or thinking about, “Oh, we should open a T-shirt shop or something and sell T-shirts or something.”

04:16 Chris: I would think that having that background though must be very helpful with what you do now because there is that marriage of design and the engineering side of things that goes into creating products, apps and websites and all that stuff, I gotta think that’s really useful for you.

04:33 JS: Yeah, I think it is, it’s incredibly helpful. First of all, so as a little bit of background currently I’m a Front End Developer. I’m the Front End Developer Lead, so I… Actually, I’m working on the adventures project right now, so I’m not involved in the web as much but I do run the weekly team meetings, architecture meetings, and try to make sure that anyone who works in the Front End, so the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the website is supported and is able to do their best work. And it is super helpful when you’re working on the client side because it’s very much you’re responsible for the interactions and the visuals and we have a design team who comes up with the design systems and actually defines what’s our product on the web is supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to behave, and then we’re the ones responsible for implementing it. So you do need to be able to speak that language. So it’s very, very helpful to have that marriage of an art or a design background and then be technical enough to be able to write decent code that works as expected.

05:39 Chris: So you referred to Front End Developer, for people that might not be familiar with the terminology, does that mean there’s a Back End Developer? 

[chuckle]

05:47 JS: Yes, there absolutely is.

05:49 Chris: What is the difference between the two? 

05:51 JS: So, I like cars. So, I’m going to give a car metaphor. Back End Development is the services that you don’t necessarily interact directly with but it’s the data that powers, everything that you see and touch and interact with on the website. And so, front end would be the… It would be the body, the styling, the center console, the dashboard, steering wheel, gear shift, all of that. Anything that you as a user can interact with. That’s what we build, but we need the Back End Developers and then the Full Stack and Middle Tier Developers as well who will split between both of those sometimes, everybody has to work together to build that car.

06:31 Chris: Right, right, and you said you first came here as an intern and then here you are now, 14 Years later, I… I mean, there must have continued to be things that have been compelling for you and interesting and challenging.

06:46 JS: Yeah, it definitely hasn’t been boring. There’s always something new to learn, something new to do, some new problem that needs to be solved, and I’ve actually… I mentioned I started on Wherigo, so I worked on that for a few years and then when we sort of backburnered that project a little bit, I ended up working in the marketing department for a very short period of time, and then I was recruited by who was at the time our lead web designer to work on the web team. And so, I’ve stayed on the web team ever since. So I’ve been able to move around, which I’ve always thought was really cool. It’s… I know a lot of people, or a lot of companies don’t really invest in their employees that much and give them so many opportunities to grow and to gain new skill sets, and to step outside of their comfort zones and do something completely new or change careers. And I’ve been able to do that, so I feel incredibly fortunate. But it’s also been… Yeah, it’s been a blast.

07:39 Chris: Okay, so you mentioned Wherigo a couple of times. That’s a very popular thing that I hear about when people write in and suggest podcast ideas, because it is a part of the game’s history and it’s something that people have just always been interested in. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your memories of that project and how it’s… Did you first know about it as an intern? Is it going back that far? 

08:05 JS: That’s what… Yeah, that’s what I was hired to work on. So Wherigo was in the very, very early stages and there was, I think, if I remember correctly, one full-time developer who would built out the builder and the player, so it was… I think it ran on… It was an actual application for your desktop. I think it ran on Windows, it may have been XP, it might have been even earlier than that, I don’t exactly remember, but that was the builder and then the player application was for GPS enabled pocket PCs. So it was a very interesting, very niche platform. Anyway, they had this… We had this application and the company wanted content for it because…

08:45 JS: Well, I mean, how do you know? Is anybody going to even use it? How do you draw them in? And so, they were specifically looking for interns to develop that content. So people who would be the storytellers, creatives, I think, we had a couple of artists, one was a musician, just people who liked telling stories and wanted to explore what it would be like to make games and not necessarily video games, but specifically text-based interactive, like the old text-based RPGs. I’ve never played any of them, but I understand that Jeremy really… Jeremy Irish really liked them. And I think that was the… That might have been the inspiration for Wherigo is to have a location-based text-based RPG platform, which is… It could be really… I mean, was… I think it was… I still think it’s an incredibly cool platform.

09:41 Chris: Right. And what do you remember about… I don’t know. Just kind of, what went into it and the kind of work that you did on it there over the course of at that time.

[chuckle]

09:51 JS: Well, there were four of us that we formed a super user, I guess, and that’s where our J2B2 came from is… There were… It was Jen, Jared, Bryan and Ben, so “J2B2”. And it just so happened to sound like R2D2 and we were all nerds and thought, “This is great. There’s a double entendre there.” So we were responsible for creating all of the content that went into those cartridges and most of them are still up on Wherigo.com if you search for cartridges by J2B2. So we… Essentially, we… In the very, very early stages, we picked parks around the city that we thought were interesting, and then we’d actually take a field trip out there, look around, plot out all the locations and think about what kind of story would be compelling to tell here? What could we do? What parts… What are the interesting areas in this park that we can create some interesting interactions around? So for example it was the… The first time that I’d ever been to discovery Park was for on one of those Wherigo field trips, and just went out there and walked around. And you’d have a handheld GPS device with you, and you’d be…

11:00 JS: You’d go to a place where you thought that it looked interesting and you’d record a way point, and just keep going. And that was kinda how we plotted that out. And then we’d come back to the office and think, “Okay, what would be a fun story to tell?” And so we ended up… We did everything from puzzles. Some of them were really, really involved narratives. So there was an actual story that you’d have to be part of and characters that you’d play with, and some of them were really simple. Like, we did a series of bug hunts where we had custom travel bugs that weren’t actually trackable but they had custom tags or a custom codes stamped into them, and we’d go hide them around the parks and we’d have a different Bug Hunt for each park. And you’d go and you’d find the tags. Those weren’t very successful because people would find them and steal them, and then we wouldn’t have a game anymore.

[chuckle]

11:47 Chris: And so now today, you’re working on the Adventure Lab project, and there’s… It’s certainly some components of that that hearken back to the Wherigo experience. I would think that there are… There’ve been a lot of learnings, I would assume, from your work in past years on Wherigo and now what’s happening with this event… With the Adventure Lab Project.

12:09 JS: Yeah, absolutely. One of, I think, the failures of Wherigo was the fact that it was so incredibly complicated. You, essentially, had to have a programming background to be able to build even a simple Wherigo cartridge and our builder… Even our builder app, which did have a sort of rudimentary user interface, it was still very difficult to learn. So I think, that’s probably the biggest learning or the biggest take away, that one thing we’re being very careful about with Adventure Lab is eventually, we want to enable really interesting and flexible experiences, but we have to figure out how to… What tools can we give people to unlock their storytelling abilities easily, and that’s, I think, the hardest part. So we’re starting very, very simple. There’s still a bit of narrative capacity, but who knows what we’re going to add to it. It’s going to be an interesting balance, I think, between trying to give people the tools to be creative and flexible, and not hamstring them, but also not give them so much that they can’t get…

13:15 Chris: Yeah. No, I think, I totally… I think a lot of people listening to this will be nodding their heads when they heard you talking about how difficult it could be to build a Wherigo cartridge. I know I’ve owned a couple of them, but they were all built by someone else. I would give them the story that I… And the actions that I wanted to have within the cartridge, but I didn’t have any idea where to start as far as to build it. And it’s exciting to know that with Adventure Lab that it’s… There’s not that barrier to entry that there may have been with Wherigo.

13:46 JS: Yeah, and I think… I don’t just think that Adventure Lab is necessarily going to end up being Wherigo 2.0, but I think that it will share some of those original features, and it’ll definitely be… ‘Cause if you want… We wanna be able to help people again tell that story, or whatever that is. If they wanna write a narrative adventure, then that’s great, we’ll give them a way to do that. If they want like a simple, like upleveled multi-cache or a walking tour, or whatever, they could do that as well. But there’s a lot of work to be done to get there.

[chuckle]

14:21 Chris: For you personally, I know you’re an outdoorsy person and that you do some challenging hikes and stuff like that, and you also said you didn’t know about geocaching before you started here, are you able to integrate your love of hiking and being outside [chuckle] in finding some caches? It seems like… I wanna say that I maybe found one over the summer that you had been in that area too, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, she’s hardcore at getting up too.” [chuckle] You went, I think, you went well further than I did, and I thought that what I’d done was pretty hardcore, and then I was like, “Oh, Jen’s a level above me,” because you were mentioning some cliff or… I think you said something like, “Hey, did you ever… ” Do you remember what I’m talking about? It was…

15:01 JS: Oh, yeah, that was a bit a… That was lake Melakwa, I think.

15:04 Chris: Yeah, and you were talking about some climb you had done or some, I don’t know, repelling? I don’t know what it was, but it sounded a lot more hardcore than what I was doing.

[chuckle]

15:14 JS: It was… That’s a beautiful area. We generally don’t rope up, but I would say that the majority of my geocaching happens while hiking. I love being outside. I’m not a big walk-around-the-city fan, I guess, and I feel very self-conscious. So I’m not… When I have to search for a cache that involves some amount of stealth, I feel like I just look really suspicious.

[chuckle]

15:38 Chris: I think we all do, yeah.

[chuckle]

15:40 JS: So… But something about, well, not something about, the going-out hiking, especially as you get more remote… Some of the best caches I found are the ones that have only been found like maybe once a year or maybe once every couple of years. And sometimes if I’m going out and I’ve spent a whole day bushwhacking off-trail to get up to this perfect little lake and there’s a cache there, and I open the ammo can ’cause it’s always an ammo can, because ammo cans are everywhere in the woods.

[chuckle]

16:07 Chris: Right. Of course, yeah.

16:09 JS: And it’s… There will be geo-coins in there, and I think I picked up a geocoin at one point that hadn’t moved in seven years or something, and it was on one of my favorite off-trail adventures, Preacher Mountain, up in the cascades. No trail up there, gorgeous lake. It’s just something about that journey to get there, and you feel like you’ve accomplished something, and then you find the cache there. And now you’re sharing this accomplishment with these other people, so you feel like you’re part of an elite club. And if it was a really, really difficult journey, then there’s this element of relief that, “Oh, somebody else has been there and they know what I’ve gone through, and… ” And then I just make for really cool logs as well having that experience to write about. And I love it when I’ll post a log on a cache that I really enjoyed, and then the CEO will contact me and would say, “Oh, this is like I’m… Thank you so much, I loved reading your log.” And I’m like, “I loved writing the log and finding the cache. Thank you for placing it.” And so you have this kind of mutual admiration society thing going on. But that’s… Yeah, I love lonely caches, things of high terrain, high difficulty, that’s cool. Finding… Going places that I usually, I maybe wouldn’t think to go or that I have to expend actual effort to get there. That, to me, that’s an adventure, and that’s what it’s all about.

17:26 Chris: Right, and does that inform then your, the work that you do on these products, that you’re creating tools that help people to do that kind of stuff must be fun to, I don’t know, think about the experiences that you personally have and then trying to help, have that inform the work that you’re doing on…

17:46 JS: Yeah, absolutely.

17:46 Chris: Whatever the project might be, yeah.

17:48 JS: Yeah, I hope so. One of the things that I’m excited about, or I’m hoping that we can do in the future for the Adventure Lab app is have a better offline experience. ‘Cause for me, I want that adventure that’s 15 miles out into the back-country, that is… There’s no data, it’s GPS only. I want to… How do I write a narrative around that? How do I… There are so many opportunities for really cool storytelling, I think, and also just having a good… Even taking a hike that might otherwise be kind of boring, like something like Mailbox Peak, which I hate… [chuckle] The worst hike ever… It’s… But if you had something to keep you occupied and to keep your mind… Or to keep yourself interested, I guess, well, while doing it, that’s, to me, I think that’s one of the beauties, I think, of the platform that the Adventure Lab can have that… Well, even the Wherigo had, is that fun offline experience. You take that… Anything that can happen in your imagination, and if you blend it with the real world, that’s cool. So, I hope… I imagine that sometimes my co-workers get really tired of me being like, “What about the offline experience?” But one of these days, I think we’re gonna get there.

19:01 Chris: Well, it’s funny, you mentioned Mailbox Peak, I did that hike with Jeremy Irish, and all I… If you just would have said the words “Mailbox Peak,” I would have thought, “Oh, yeah, I remember we were at the summit, and there was the mailbox and we had great pictures.” But then you started talking about it a little bit, and I did remember switchback after switchback after switchback with no view at all…

19:22 JS: [chuckle] No view, yeah.

19:22 Chris: Except for just forest. There was nothing. It wasn’t until the very end that you got a view, and, yeah, in retrospect, I didn’t love it. [chuckle] I loved Jeremy and I had a nice time together, but, yeah, I would have liked to have had a little story to follow on some sort of an adventure app or something like that.

19:43 JS: Yeah, yeah, me too. So maybe one of these days we’ll build something.

[chuckle]

19:48 JS: I think it’s fun.

19:49 Chris: And so, obviously there’s always new challenges with this job, different things that keep you engaged and keep you having fun.

19:58 JS: Never boring working here. That’s one of the things about having such a global community, is you can’t really make any assumptions about who’s going to be using any of your products, what circumstances they’re going to be using them in… Are they going to be at home on their laptop, like, planning their next caching outing? Are they going to be actually outdoors in the middle of nowhere with no data connection on a cell phone? Or maybe they’re using a handheld GPS. There are always, always edge cases, and as a developer you’re in tune with edge cases. And yet, our community somehow manages to find every possible use case, and so, yeah, you’re never bored and you’re always like, are there still features on the website that people will bring up and I’ll think, “Huh. I didn’t know that you could use it that way.” But someone has figured out how, and it’s become a very important part of their workflow, which is really interesting to see how people… ‘Cause you anticipate that somebody’s going to use your product or your work in a certain way, and then they do a complete 180 from what you thought they were going to do and it’s still a valid and interesting use case.

[music]

21:09 Chris: That was Jen Smith, a front end developer lead, here at Geocaching HQ. Do you have something you would like us to cover on the podcast, then send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com, again, that is podcast@geocaching.com. I always enjoy hearing your suggestions and any feedback that you might have. From me and from all of my fellow lackeys here at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

[music]