October 11, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 30): GIFF

[music]

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. This is Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, aka Rock Chalk, one of the lackey at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Thank you for having a listen to our podcast. Today, I am chatting with Sven, who is our GIFF guru here at HQ. GIFF stands for Geocaching International Film Festival. You can see the 219 GIFF films at GIFF events, which are held around the world from November 7th through the 17th. So here we go with Sven to get the lowdown on GIFF.

[music]

01:01 CR: Sven. This is your first time on the HQ podcast, so you have to tell us about what you do here, what your day-to-day job is. We’re mostly talking about GIFF here today, but when you’re not doing GIFF, what else are you doing at HQ?

01:17 Sven: Well, first of all, thanks I having me Chris, excited to be here. In my day-to-day job, what I do is I support the community volunteers as part of the CBS team, and especially more on the technical side, in that I do quality assurance for the various admin pages that are available to volunteers behind the scenes to review caches, for example, and do the day-to-day tasks that they do to help the community.

01:47 CR: And this is just the latest thing that you’ve done. You’ve been at HQ for how long now?

01:51 Sven: It’s been almost two and a half years now. I started in the Visitor Center for a good while and I had the pleasure to welcome in visitors from across the world. Being German helps with all the German visitors that we get as well. So that was a great pleasure, it really gave me a good insight into the details of the game, and I think prepared me pretty well for when I ultimately moved behind the scenes and joined the team that I’m on today.

02:19 CR: So for people that have met you and are familiar with your background, what part of Germany are you from?

02:27 Sven: I’m from the Lower Saxony area. I’m from a tiny, tiny 1,000 soul village. The closest place near it that people will know will probably be Hanover, which also has two geo-tours in it. And yeah, it’s up north, at least I would consider it that. And people always joke that it’s as flat as a pancake and that you can see for miles and miles and miles.

02:53 CR: We have that in common then. Being from Kansas, people joke about that too, for me.

02:57 Sven: Yeah, being in the mountains now here is really odd sometimes.

03:01 CR: Well, I don’t know if it’s like this for you in Germany, from where you’re from in Germany, like people say, Kansas is flat as a pancake, and I always tell people, “Well, where I’m from, it’s on the very eastern part of the state and it’s right around, I don’t know, 600 to 1,000 feet elevation there. And then, the far western side, with the border of Colorado, it’s getting up towards 5,000 feet.” And I always say, “Could it really be flat as a pancake if it starts at 600 to 700 and then makes it up to almost 5,000 at the other end. Something doesn’t compute there.”

03:34 Sven: I think you could probably make the same argument for my area with the southern end of the state being near the Harz mountain region, which has the Brocken, which is one of the highest mountains in Germany other than outside the Alps of course. But then, yeah, as you get closer to the coast, the more flat it gets.

03:56 CR: And I can, for anybody, I can vouch for Sven knowing his geocaching in Germany, because he’s great about sending people like myself to good places to find caches, as I was there not too long ago, for a couple of events, and you definitely directed me to some good spots. So if people happen to meet you out in the wild, not just caches in Germany, but you also know a lot about caching around here, because you’ve gotten pretty hardcore into it over the last couple of years, wouldn’t you say?

04:25 Sven: Yeah, I started with a good 48 finds when I got hired at HQ. I had gotten into it because my then fiance, and now wife, was a geocacher and it gave us a thing to talk about when we were at long distance, kind of adventures on the weekend type stuff. And yeah, over the past two years or so I’ve had a good 2,400 finds to my record, and have really thoroughly enjoyed my travels and the trips to the mountains on the weekends and such.

05:00 CR: And so, what’s your favorite kind of caching to do?

05:03 Sven: Definitely caching in the mountains. The ideal cache for me will usually involve driving off-road for a little while to get to a trail head or to get out into the boonies and no cell reception land to really unplug for a little bit. And then potentially some hiking, get out there and then just have a nice big container in a nice view point at the end. That’s probably my favorite.

05:30 CR: So, work-wise, we gotta talk about work a little bit.

05:33 Sven: Right.

05:33 CR: Yeah, ugh, it’s terrible. But this is a good thing about work, GIFF, which is an event that you are very involved with. For people that don’t know what GIFF is, let’s give them an overview of it.

05:45 Sven: So, GIFF is the short form of the Geocaching International Film Festival, and it started a couple of years ago in the context of the block parties, when we asked the community to create and send in video submissions of capturing what they felt was the essence of geocaching on film, and a selection of these clips were then shown on the big screen at block party. One year, the weather was very liquid sunshine, as we like to call it in Seattle, and we got terribly rained out, and as a result of that, decided to open things up a little more and make the film reel that had been created for the block party at the time available to Geocaching events across the world. And it kinda took off from there, we’ve now headed as a world-wide event series and GIFF season, you could say, for a number of years and it’s been great fun and a great success.

06:53 CR: So what is the process like, let’s say GIFF last year ended, how does the circle start again for this year’s GIFF? Yeah, just from start to finish, what’s the first step?

07:08 Sven: So GIFF, the last announcement essentially would have gone out towards the end of November last year announcing the Signal award winner. So the overall winner of a reviewer voting and also public winner for the best film. So pretty much around that time, we would already start our planning for the next year, so the year that we’re in right now, just getting a burn-down ready so really a step-by-step schedule of when the certain milestones have to be completed, eventually we will start the planning process for the next year.

07:48 CR: And so a call goes out at some point, asking people to submit their films. And from what I gather some people are working on these things even before that call goes out, there are some folks that really put an awful lot of effort and resources from themselves to create these films for consideration for GIFF.

08:11 Sven: Yeah, absolutely, that couldn’t be more true, what you just said. In fact got an email just the other day of somebody asking questions about what could be in a film, what could not be in a film for the next production that they’re starting to work on. So people, especially with more extensive production efforts are really starting early. And one thing that is for sure is that over the cause of the years that we’ve done GIFF now, the average quality of the video submissions that we are receiving has increased to an impressive extent. At the end of the day, it’s still an amateur film festival but some of the clips that we’re getting are really, really raising the bar for everybody else for sure, which is both a blessing and a curse, right.

[chuckle]

09:04 Sven: But yeah, so usually in the spring time, we’re gonna send out or we gonna update the GIFF website and we’re gonna open up a submission form for people to submit their film submissions for the year, the submission form usually closes some time mid-summer. And as soon as all submissions are in and then also as they continue to trickle in a panel of judges will review the submissions based on guideline compliance, like is there a cache that has depicted that maybe wouldn’t meet the guideline or is there any commercial concern with the video clip. Is it family friendly first and foremost, those kinds of things. And then this ultimately goes through an iteration of three or four different stages with the final stage being a movie night of sorts at HQ, where we all sit down and review the final, let’s say 25 submissions and then pick what usually ends up being like 16-18 finalist movies to make the final film reel.

10:21 CR: You mentioned a couple of things about what can or can’t be in one of these film submissions, talked about family-friendly and caches, wanna make sure the caches that are depicted are complying with the guidelines and things like that. Is there anything else that is really important to either include or not include when you’re considering putting one of these films together?

10:45 Sven: One big thing definitely is that you get permission for everything, just like you should get permission for your placing geocaches at a certain location, you should get permission to use audio in your clips, which is great in the day of free audio databases, you should get permission from the cache owners, if you’re showing caches that are not your own, because some people don’t like spoilers, believe it or not.

11:08 CR: I love them myself, but no, that’s okay.

[laughter]

11:12 Sven: Other than that there’s good documentation of what you would wanna do and what you would not wanna do on the GIFF website, which is geocachingfilmfestival.com. And if in doubt you can also always shoot us an email with more specific questions to giff@geocaching.com.

11:30 CR: So when do the films start coming in for consideration?

11:35 Sven: Well, some people have it in the pipeline and essentially are just tapping their feed ready to go as soon as the form goes live, others will wait and are still busy cutting things and compiling files and getting their videos ready. And so this year, for example, we received a good quarter of the total submissions during the final week of the window. So for me, sitting on the other end, seeing them come in, that’s always both nerve wracking and exciting, ’cause you never really know what you’re gonna get until the very end.

12:10 CR: Right. So these films come in over the course of a few months, how many are we talking about?

12:17 Sven: This year we had roughly 60 submissions from I wanna say 23 different countries. So really international set of submissions, some countries of course being more predominant than others, we usually get a lot of submissions from the US. We get a lot of submissions from Germany. We have a couple established teams that submit stuff from Spain for example. But one thing that we were really delighted to see this year is that we received a lot of submissions also from Czechia and Slovenia and Slovakia, countries that hadn’t been as involved in GIFF in past years. So that was really great.

12:58 CR: And it is whittled down to how many for the final reel?

13:01 Sven: This year, it’s gonna be 16.

13:03 CR: So 16 films and now we’re getting ready for the events, and there are events all over the world. How many events right now for… Well, I guess this might change by the time that we air this podcast, but generally a rough range of how many events?

13:22 Sven: So, as we speak, we’ve just crossed the 400-proof GIFF events mark, and we’re expecting more to come in over the last couple of weeks until GIFF officially starts. Usually the form to submit your GIFF Event goes life sometime in August, so usually with three months to spare until GIFF officially starts. And how that would usually work is that you create an event listing, you make it all about GIFF, if you have some artwork and that you might already have, you can put it on there but it’s important that the focus of the event is on GIFF. You submit it for review, it gets published by your local reviewer. And then you submit it to HQ where event form for approval and then either me or one of my colleagues, ’cause luckily I have a lot of great support and people supporting me in the overall GIFF project. We’ll take a look at this submission, and if all looks well they will add it to the official list that is hosted on the HQ account, and shortly after you will receive an email from us with various creative assets that are in this year’s GIFF spirit to create art work for your event. Some people like to make even cakes that look like the GIFF norms for example or make a fun lock book or just make your cache page even more fun than it was before really.

14:52 CR: Yeah, we’ve seen some pretty remarkable events over the last few years, people that really looks like with anything else, people get creative with geocaches, they get creative with films and now they’ve found a way to get creative with these events. Some of the pictures we’ve seen from events and videos and stuff it’s really pretty amazing.

15:12 Sven: Absolutely, I’ve been involved with GIFF for a good three years now, the past two years I’ve been helping out as a supporting member essentially, and this is the first year that I’m leading the GIFF project. But last year for example, we even had a mega event that was the GIFF Event where they rented out a whole car cinema. And we’ve had, like I said, we’ve had cakes made, we’ve had whole fancy ball attire events where people are expected to wear a suit and tie and evening dresses. It’s really impressive to see how people are going above and beyond to make this as special as it can be and to honor both GIFF and also the film makers that make GIFF possible every year.

16:07 CR: And so when are the dates when the GIFF Film events will be happening?

16:12 Sven: So that’s another exciting thing about this year. So we’re gonna be hosting GIFF starting November 7th, but because in last years it was always only one weekend and we’ve had the community reach out and say, “Hey, if I can’t make it the first weekend, the window is too short.” We opened it up for a second weekend this year, so GIFF is gonna be closing on November 17th.

16:37 CR: So people will go and watch these films at these events, what happens next?

16:42 Sven: What happens next is there’s gonna be a public vote again this year, around the time that we GIFF events take place, slightly before and probably keep your eyes peeled for an announcement on the event cache pages, that will ask you to after watching the GIFF films, cast your public vote for what your favorite film was. And of course at the events a lot of voting happens also so a lot of events try to do their little internal votes and decide to reach out to the filmmakers who got the award at their local events and share the love. The events is really when all the work and all the effort that went into GIFF comes to fruition and comes together and people are having a good time.

17:35 CR: I wouldn’t ask you what your favorite film is either this year or from past years, but are there certain things for you just as a viewer that you find particularly enjoyable about the films that come through?

17:47 Sven: For me personally I like when people don’t take themselves too seriously, and there’s a couple of submissions again, this year, not to take away too much that really excel at that and that bring a great sense of humor to the game, and to certain components and experiences that we’ve all experienced while being out there caching and present them in a new way, let’s put it that way.

18:14 CR: Yeah, sometimes I’ll be watching these films and think, if I wasn’t a geocacher none of this would make any sense but it’s so cool that there’s something here for me and people like me, who we know about this world and to see it on the screen is such new thing.

18:30 Sven: Absolutely. I think the films being relatable is one of the things that makes GIFF so special, ’cause you get to share the experience of watching these clips with fellow geocachers, some of which you’ve been on adventures with together as well. And you’re seeing these moments and it just triggers all kinds of great memories both good and bad and moments where you’re like shaking your head of like, “Oh yeah, remember that one time when that happened to us.” Yeah, it really is a great thing.

19:05 CR: So if people wanna know more about GIFF or find a GIFF event, what do they do?

19:11 Sven: They should check out the public list section on the Geocaching HQ account, the GIFF 2019 event list will be available there. It’s also linked to on the GIFF website, so your geocatchinginternationalfestival.com. And it’s also linked to from various copy that is available on our blog, on our Facebook channels, on our Instagram, on our… What else do we have? Twitter, that’s right.

19:42 CR: So many places?

19:43 Sven: So many places, social media these days. So yeah, it’s gonna be available in the social media as well and people can access it there. I’m sure there’s gonna be one in your neck of the woods if not, maybe it’s your time to host one this year.

[music]

20:00 CR: So there you go, Sven has thrown down the GIFF gauntlet. If you would like to learn more about GIFF, visit geocachingfilmfestival.com. You cannot only learn about this year’s events but you can get links to GIFF Films dating back to 2013. It is quite a rabbit hole, you can spend a lot of time on that website if you’re not careful, believe me. If you have an idea for the HQ podcast, send us an email to podcast at geocaching.com. And please rate and review us on iTunes, we would love that. Until next time from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

September 23, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 29): Lists

[music]

00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast where we talk about stuff happening here at HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My Geocaching user name is Rock Chalk. As always, thank you for downloading our podcast. On this episode, a return guest, Brendan Walsh from HQ’s product team. He is here to chat about a project that you might not see immediately, but you will definitely see it eventually. So we want you to know what’s coming. Some fun updates to list functionality on geocaching.com. I am personally pretty excited about what I’ve seen so far. I think you will be too. So here we go, me and Brendan talking Lists.

[music]

01:10 CR: Alright, well, Brendan, people are used to hearing you here on the podcast talking about the new Search and the new Map. We had you on a couple of times to talk about that. The next logical place to go is list, I think, and here you are talking about list. It is kind of a, a logical progression, isn’t it?

01:29 Brendan Walsh: It is, it is. In fact, in the mobile view, we have a nice little toggle to go from map to list, so it’s just a different visualization. If you’re looking at your caches plotted on a map, or in a list base. And thanks for having me back on, Chris. It’s always great to talk to the community. Yeah, so I’m a product manager here at HQ. And most recently, I worked on the Maps search project as you mentioned, and in that project, we run the web a lot, checking it out, of course, and really diving deep on the features that we are building for Map. We noticed we probably should give lists a little love as well. So, the same team of engineers that I worked on the Maps project with have been working on lists for the past three months or so, and we’re at a place where we’re really excited to share it with the community. We’re launching a new list hub and a new list details. And what that really means is a list hub is the visualization on the website of your list of lists.

02:31 CR: So when you go to the dashboard and it says your list, click there, that’s your list hub you go to.

02:36 BW: Exactly. The old or the existing, the one that the community is familiar with now, is very good at doing what it does, and we thought, “Okay, let’s take what has been done, the work there, and kind of take it to the next level. So we re-imagined the UI through a great work of one of our product designers here at HQ and now it looks a little more modern. We have all the controls for things you can do with a list, be it a copy or a map, or a download as GPX. Those are really obvious now and they’re not hidden behind another control or an overflow menu, so you can get to the stuff you wanna get to much quicker. If you’re on the list hub and one of your lists is maybe it’s a list you made for a Jasmer challenge you’re doing… You could click into that really easily and now you’re on the list detail page so it’s a similar view. But now, you’re seeing all the caches.

03:33 CR: And that’s a big change. The list, as I’ve looked at it, in testing, the list hub is very different. It’s exciting. It is as you said, much more accessible, even though the old one did a great job. The list details, though, it’s a big, big difference from what people were used to in the past.

03:53 BW: It’s a big difference. Thanks for calling that out. It’s gonna look a lot like or very similar to what the search results list looks like on our homepage, so you’re gonna have a list of caches, going left to right. The data… The data points we’re showing are different and more varied and more in-depth. Give you… Telling you more about the cache. If you’re logged in as yourself, Chris, and you’re looking at a list, it, be it my list, or one of your owns, where you have an indications that if you DNF’d it or if you found it, you’ll see right there the status of each cache, right? Backing up a little bit, if you’re on the list hub and you’re looking at that Chris’s favorite favorites in Washington that he’s gonna go after, we’ll tell you right there the progress you’ve made on that list. Now, it’s not always a competition, but it’s nice to know like, okay, if that list is 150 caches, you found 90 of them, and you only have this many left to go and it’s…

04:52 CR: I can’t tell you how many times I have clicked through to a list and I just scroll through it on the old version. Let’s say, I’ve got 100 caches in a list and I’ll scroll through, looking for ones that don’t have a smiley face next to them, and okay, I need to find four but it drives me crazy. Now, I’ve got this status bar that can tell me right away. Right.

05:11 BW: It tells you right upfront. Yeah, thank you. I’m glad that speaks to you guys, too. The other cool thing is, obviously, we have this multi-select control. So, this idea where I could maybe go to your profile or someone like mountain bikes who are these wonderful curators in the community building these lists that I may wanna take advantage of. So, go to your… As long as it’s public, I can go to your profile, make a copy of that list, and now I have that list too, right, and I can map it or make a subset of it.

05:44 BW: And we’re hearing from a lot of people that that is gonna be in our initial testing that that’s real pretty powerful to have access to other folks’ lists that have done the taste-making, the curation maybe ahead of time and you can reap the benefits of that. Maybe in the future, you’ll be one of those people to create lists and put them out there for others to share.

06:04 CR: We were talking about there are so many geocaching organizations out there that they maintain lists of popular caches in their areas, and to be able to go and copy those lists and then have them for yourself and, let’s say, I’m gonna be traveling somewhere and I look up an organization in… Oh, let’s say, Germany. I’m gonna go to Germany and I’m gonna… Oh, there’s this organization in this town and they’ve kept these great lists. Now I can just copy ’em, and when I go to that town, I can keep track of them on my own, which is really great.

06:35 BW: Yeah, it’s great. And I think there are other… This is sort of our first put for this new revamped, pardon me, list details and list hub. But I think as folks use lists more and perhaps share them, and we’re gonna encourage that sharing them within the community from user to user, sharing them and opening them on your mobile device, which is a great use case. It’s a little bit more friction now than we’d like so with this release, we’ll get closer to actually having a deep link right to that list details page, if you’re sharing it. So you can go from planning to caching pretty easily without a lot of copy, paste, open in this tab, and send to this friend. It’s just gonna be a lot more direct. Probably a good time to talk about how we’re gonna roll it out.

07:22 BW: We’re looking to get this new list project out beginning on September 5th. And we’re gonna start rolling it out in a slow and deliberate manner. In the past, we did a slow rollout with maps and we had quite a bit of learnings from that rollouts. And in this one, we are doing a lot of pre-release show and tell, if you will, with not only lackeys, but with some reviewers and a group we have called play testers, which are actual community members who are opted into this group, who get a first look at some things. And they’re giving us some feedback on it as well.

07:57 BW: So beginning on the 5th, we’ll start this rollout using a tool we have here at HQ that allows us to kind of put this out to a small percentage of users, new users, and assess feedback, see what they’re thinking about it, take that feedback in, and either make changes or not, depending on how it goes, and then continue to roll it out. And we’re looking at having the entire list, the new list experience out some time in the end of October of this year. So it’s very slow and deliberate. It’s our first time doing it quite like this. Some tech organizations call it a canary rollout, in the sense that, you put a little bit out there, and you get some feedback or some signals from that canary in the coal mine telling you how your release is going through the community. And then you can make decisions about whether you wanna roll it out faster or keep that same pace.

08:51 CR: Yeah, so if you’re hearing this right now and you’re not seeing it, you’re gonna see it eventually. It might take some time. There’s no way for somebody to come and ask for it. They just have to wait their turn, [chuckle] essentially.

09:02 BW: It would be difficult for us to scale that in terms of offering that to each individual member. The hope here is that by doing this slow, deliberate, rollout, we actually hit the market fit, meaning, we deliver what we expect the customer would want. So we’ve done lots of, some research and user testing, but we don’t really know until we put it out there. The other part is our focus on quality. We wanna make sure this is rock solid. So by putting it out slowly, our risk is minimized.

09:35 CR: There’s some great features to talk about here, but before we get into those, how does your team prioritize which features to tackle, and what to try to incorporate into both the hub and the list details? There’s all kinds of stuff you could do, but how do you decide what’s gonna go in there?

09:55 BW: That’s a good question. Well, the cool thing here about HQ is we have a community who’s really passionate and we have so much feedback. Product managers who were here before I even started working here have handed me oodles of notes and feedback on all things, not just lists, but specific to the lists project, what we did is we did a process I would call customer development. So really understanding your customers, the different types of customers that are out there. So, not everybody is the most experienced geocacher who might go out every day or every weekend, there’s different stripes of geocachers.

10:33 BW: So, trying to engage with all different types who represent sort of a different segment of the geocaching community, asking them what works, what doesn’t work, asking lackeys what works and what doesn’t work, using tools. Once we get through the initial design process when we feel like we have perhaps a new list hub that is interesting, we started testing that. So we use tools like user testing, where we crowdsource actual users who have geocaching accounts and they give us feedback. We rinse and repeat and on all that, and just try to get better as we go with taking in feedback and making changes to our designs or our code. And we get to a place where you’re never gonna have 100% certainty, but we have enough that we wanna share it with the community and we start getting real feedback and that’s when we go to production.

11:23 BW: In terms of, I think, at a higher level, prioritizing what we go build on or what we go build for each quarter, and stepping away from lists a little bit. It’s a combination of looking at what our company’s goals are for that year and what our mission statement is, and then what we can do as a team in the space that we work in, on the web, to go help go influence those goals, whatever they may be.

11:47 CR: Well, like I said, there’s a lot of interesting features here, and [chuckle] this being audio and not video, we can’t show them, but just some of the things that stood out to me is, especially on the… Well, let’s start with the list hub. As you said, it used to be that, well, on the current one that a lot of people might still be seeing when they listen to this, but eventually, when you get the new list hub, the stuff’s just more accessible. It used to be you would have to tap on that little dot, dot, dot. And now, stuff is more… There’s still a few things in there.

12:20 BW: There are.

12:21 CR: But what is the dot, dot, dot called? Is that a…

12:23 BW: Well, we call it an…

[laughter]

12:25 CR: Is it not the dot dot dot officially?

12:27 BW: We’re officially changing it to the dot dot dot. I think, officially, it’s been called the overflow menu, and then, anecdotally, it’s been called the meatball menu by…

12:38 CR: Meatball might be better than dot dot dot.

12:39 BW: Meatballs, if you haven’t had lunch, you you might not wanna call it that, but… That is where things have been basically resided. That’s more of a mobile design aspect as well. And because the mobile space, you have very little of it, you’re hiding not hiding, you’re storing lots of controls behind that panel. We have, in our new list hub and list details, we have what we’re calling an action bar, which is a horizontal bar that looks like a header. It sits on top of all the lists. If you’re on the list hub or all the caches, if you’re on details, now, across that bar are gonna be the various controls that you could do for the list, so you could map the list if you click that. You could copy the list. You could download it as GPX, you could change your privacy settings on it. You could turn on notifications you could create a pocket query. All the things you can do now they’re just represented differently. And you’re one click, excuse me, one click away as opposed to two or three.

13:43 CR: Right, right. And then once you choose a list and you’re in the list details, being able to sort those columns.

13:51 BW: That’s new.

13:52 CR: Totally new.

13:53 BW: That’s totally new.

13:53 CR: And a lot of different columns, stuff we didn’t see before. So things like favorite points and difficulty in terrain and it’s much more robust than it used to be.

14:04 BW: Yeah, thanks. And we… This came from the engineers. They’re looking at what the work we just did on the search results page, we’re showing that level of data and they’re coming to me and saying, “Hey, we have space on the page, let’s show more stuff. So that really came from within and that was great. Let’s show favorite points, especially on a page like Favorites, where don’t you wanna sort on favorite points to see. You gave that cache a favorite but wouldn’t it be interesting to see who else did? And it sort of almost a validation moment. Yeah, that cache really was great, it wasn’t just me. And now that we’re talking about favorites. One thing that’s very small, but I think it’s gonna be really helpful for everybody is right across the top, on list hub, we have what we call a segmented controller, so you’ll see it says my lists. So when you’re on list hub, it says my lists, and then going over one, it’s gonna say favorites, and you click there, you got your favorites view. And then a list that a lot of us may or may not use, or may not know about.

15:08 BW: We have a list called ignored caches. So you add a cache to this list, if you just want it out of the realm of your Geocaching experience. So if you went and searched on a location and you added that, you sorted by ignore list, you wouldn’t see the caches that are on that list. Those kind of things.

15:26 CR: I tend to forget it’s even there, because it’s right now, at the very bottom.

15:30 BW: It’s hard to find.

15:31 CR: Yeah, it’s at the very bottom and now it has a lot more visibility up there at the top, which is really good. Are there other things that new features and we could go on forever about some of the new stuff but is there anything else that is standing out to you heading into this?

15:46 BW: I think the one thing that is interesting is the ability to take giant lists, and make subsets of them and then within the… So, for instance, using the multi-control, you could take a list, let’s say, like 500, maybe it’s yours, for instance, I can copy it and just make a subset of it, of the 20 or so I need… And from there, I can also continue to add more geocaches. We built a nice little UI that you can engage with that you could put in the GC code if you know it.

16:14 BW: If you wanted to add a specific cache to your list or you could quickly go to the map, do a search, then add those caches to your list. So, it’s a start for sure. I’m really excited to get it out there. And like I said, the mantra I’ve been going with is collect. So collect the caches that you want in your planning stage, that you wanna go after, connect, so you could use the list as a way to connect with your friends by sharing it. It sort of could be the connective tissue within the game and then go caching, once you’ve done that work, you just… You’re consuming that list out in the field.

16:53 CR: Collect Connect Cache, that’s a t-shirt, right there.

16:57 BW: I like t-shirts.

16:58 CR: I know you do. Yeah, I wanna see that. We gotta see that t-shirt. Collect Connect Cache.

17:02 BW: Think of them… I think one of the inspirations too was playlists. So the way you would share a playlist with your friends, if you’re into music, could lists have the power to be something like that? And what if we made them really cool? And then, we’ll eventually be partnering with our marketing team to get the word out and start talking about these and hopefully, folks enjoy them as much as we had enjoyment building them.

17:28 CR: So September 5th, around then, this will start. It will continue up until early October. What’s your team doing during that time period as you’re pulling, as you’re gathering feedback, and what have you?

17:42 BW: Gotcha. We’re gathering feedback, for sure. We’re also doing our final polish passes. So, for instance, there’s too much white space here. We wanna change the pattern here, so like our last minute fit and finish on the actual look and feel, and any kind of bugs that reveal themselves through this process. We’ll be working on those. So like I said, we’ll be pretty much heads down on this into the September timeframe, and at which point, we liked at HQ here, we have what we call a warranty period. So after we ship something, the team that’s responsible for it is still all hands on deck for that initial 30 days. And then after that, we’ll be assessing our priorities for 2020 per the product and engineering direction and perhaps working on something else or perhaps, based on the feedback, adding more features to lists.

[music]

18:35 CR: That was Brendan Walsh, Senior Product Manager at Geocaching HQ. For more about lists, check out the Geocaching Help Center and the release notes section of the Geocaching forums. We will also have a blog post coming soon as the scaled roll-out proceeds. Got something you’d like to hear about on the podcast? Just drop us a line to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. And as always, thanks for listening. From me and my fellow lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

June 24, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 26): Mystery at the Museum, Virtual Rewards 2.0 update, 20th Anniversary Celebration, geocaching etiquette

[music]

00:13 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, our podcast from Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, my user name is Rock Chalk. You might know me from my breaking news reporting on HQTV. And if that doesn’t make sense now, it will in just a few minutes. On this show, we will hear from two of my fellow lackeys, Cindy Potter is back for an update on Virtual Rewards 2.0, as well as news about next year’s 20th anniversary celebration, and to talk about our recent blog articles on geocaching etiquette. But first, Brigitte from the marketing department is here to chat about Mystery at the Museum, which begins on July 11th. Here we go.

[music]

01:06 CR: Well, Brigitte, you’ve been here at HQ for how long now?

01:11 Brigitte: Two-and-a-half years.

01:11 CR: And you avoided the podcast until now.

01:14 BC: I did manage to do that.

01:15 CR: You did manage. That was impressive. Some people… I think your fellow teammates on the marketing team, Annika and Audrey, they’ve both been on at least once, each of them, maybe multiple times, and somehow you’ve managed to just stay on the outskirts.

01:31 BC: Is this a new record?

01:33 CR: No, there’s lots of people that are still hiding in corners and closets, and… In fact, Mario just walked by. Mario is one of our engineers, and he came in and asked what was going on, and I said, “Oh we’re doing the podcast, and he was very interested, and I said, “We’ll have to get you on here sometime.” And he said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. I can’t, I couldn’t do that.

01:54 BC: Well, I’ll have to get some tips from him on how he’s avoided it. [chuckle]

01:58 CR: I think he avoids it by not making… It’s not like I can tell that he’s hiding. He comes in, he acts interested, and then he just demurs, and goes off.

02:11 BC: Interesting.

02:12 CR: I told him that our French Canadian listeners would be very interested to hear what he has to say, as a person of French Canadian background. [chuckle]

02:22 BC: Well, you’ve got a half-French Canadian sitting on the other side of the table right now.

02:27 CR: Really?

02:28 BC: Yeah.

02:29 CR: Well, now I don’t have to talk to Mario. [chuckle] You’ll just…

02:31 BC: [chuckle] He’s off the hook.

[chuckle]

02:33 CR: He’s off the hook now. Well, okay, so you’ve been here for two and half years. What kind of things do you do at HQ?

02:40 BC: I’m on the marketing team, and I do product and content marketing, which primarily involves sending the weekly Logbook Newsletter to premium members, and the Geocaching Monthly Newsletter to our free players. And I work with our product teams. Any time they have any updates or new features, help communicate those.

03:01 CR: So you are in the know?

03:01 BC: I like to think so.

03:03 CR: Most of the team… Yeah, and people that… Even if they haven’t heard your… Heard of you until now, or heard your… Certainly heard your voice, they almost… They do kind of know you, whether they realize it or not. They’ve read a lot of stuff that you’ve written and put together.

03:16 BC: Yeah, that’s true. There’s a lot of people who get things that I’ve written in their inbox every week.

03:21 CR: That’s a little creepy. That’s, uh…

03:22 BC: Yeah it is, when you say it like that.

[laughter]

03:26 CR: Okay well, today we’re talking about Mystery at the Museum, the new summer… What are we calling it? A promotion, a challenge? What’s the correct terminology for what we do during the summer time?

03:39 BC: We kinda go back and forth between either a summer promotion or a summer souvenir challenge.

03:43 CR: Okay, so one of those things, this… [chuckle] Mystery at the…

03:45 BC: Yeah, promotion. [chuckle]

03:47 CR: Right. [chuckle] Mystery at the Museum. What is it? Give us the scoop on this promotion.

03:53 BC: Mystery at the Museum is themed around the biggest jewel heist in history. So we’re asking geocachers to go out and act as detectives, search for clues, by finding geo-caches. And you’re trying to recover these stolen gems before you can return them to the museum vaults. But of course, there is a snag, because the vault combination was changed by the thieves, and they…

04:17 CR: There’s always a snag.

04:18 BC: There always is. You know, can’t make it too easy. [chuckle] And so, the code to the vault has been hidden throughout the campaign, so geocachers will have to discover what that is as they move through the promotion.

04:31 CR: You mentioned clues. What are clues? I mean, I…

04:34 BC: Clues?

04:35 CR: [chuckle] I’m not a moron, I know what a clue is. What are clues in relation to Mystery at the Museum? [chuckle]

04:40 BC: That’s a valid question, because clues are new to geocaching and they’re essentially a digital artifact that is placed in a geocache. So it’s not a physical item, like a trackable or a swag would be. But when you log certain geocaches, you will acquire a piece… Or a clue, which is a digital icon that will fill in on the Mystery at the Museum page.

05:02 CR: So, for people that might be used to… There have been a few times in the past when the leader board has been used for the summer promotions. This is a new thing, this is a new way to do it. Leader board, not involved. We’re using this new thing, and calling it “clues”.

05:17 BC: Yes, yeah. So leader board is not involved this time around. I’m sure it will be back in the future, but Mystery at the Museum has a, it’s… A whole new landing page, and all new clues.

05:28 CR: Well, it sounds like a big project. When does your team start thinking about what’s gonna happen during the summer?

05:36 BC: Well, we’re always trying to dream up what’s next, but the main summer planning usually starts at the beginning of the year. That’s because we’ve now had time to see how the past campaigns from the prior year have done, any feedback from the community, and we can start figuring out what’s next, and how to up-level that. So definitely beginning of the year, and it gets more and more ramped-up the closer we get.

05:57 CR: So let’s go back to last summer. You get to the end of the promotion, which was the hidden creatures. What does the team do, in terms of looking at how the promotion went, and trying to have some… I’m sure discussion about, like you said, what went right, what went wrong. What kind of things is the team looking at to determine if a promotion was successful, and if the community had a good time with it?

06:22 BC: I think the most important feedback is actually anecdotal, coming from the community, whether they’re saying it over social media or blog posts, if they’re writing in to us. And then after each promotion, we also send out a survey to those who participated in them, to get a feel for, “Was this really challenging for you, or too easy, or did we get it just right? And then we look at all of that and try and figure out what to do again. So for Hidden Creatures, while there’s a lot of positive feedback, we asked the community to find a lot of geocaches, and we all know that quantity over quality is not always the best way to do things. So for this year, we tried to even that out with a focus on cache quality.

07:04 CR: You talked a little bit about the nuts and bolts of Mystery at the Museum, and how… It sounds like there’s a lot of people that are involved in putting something like this together. Exactly what does that look like, when you start putting these pieces in place? How many teams, how many people are we talking about at HQ?

07:23 BC: Mystery at the Museum involved almost every team at HQ. It was a big effort. And so, it really started off with the community teams, marketing of course, design, both creative and product design, and our product and engineering teams. We all got in one room, had a big brainstorm of what could we do this summer that would be new and different and exciting, but still true to the heart of geocaching. I mean, we all kinda feel like detectives when we’re out there searching for our geocaches. So the theme seemed to resonate well. And then from there, it’s figuring out, “What can we actually build within this time-frame of several months?” And from there, it’s the creative team making all the creative assets for the theme, it’s the marketing team writing all of the content, and it’s the engineering actually building out the pages that you’ll see, in the app and on the website. So we all start in one room, and then it just spreads out from there.

08:16 CR: You mention that many people at the company are involved in some way or another, but it’s not as though people are putting down everything else they’re doing and working only on one project. Everybody’s got a lot of different stuff to do, and this is just one of those things. Right? So I would think it would be a challenge to try to identify something that is exciting, but also is reasonable in with everything else that folks are trying to do with their jobs.

08:44 BC: Absolutely, it’s definitely a balance every year, trying to figure out something really cool for the summertime, but also all the other responsibilities that we have here. But I think so far, we’ve found a pretty good balance.

08:55 CR: It’s always interesting for me, as I look at social media or I look at emails that come in, or look at the blog, and listen to people talking about the summer promotion. Inevitably, you’ll get some folks that say, “This was too hard.” You’ll get some people that say it’s too easy. Which I think is probably good, that you’re hearing both of those things, because it probably means that you’re hitting it right in the middle there, but that’s something your team takes into account, right? Is trying to find a way to appeal to as many people as possible, even though it’s not necessarily possible that 100% cover everybody. [chuckle]

09:34 BC: Yeah, that’s right, this is probably one of the more challenging aspects, because we want our promotions to be accessible enough for newer players so they feel accomplished when they’re moving through the promotion. But we also wanted to have a nod to the geocachers that are more active every day, and how can we keep them intrigued and satisfied and challenged. So it’s hard to find that place in the middle, but we’re hoping… Every time we do a promotion, it’s an experiment to see if we’re getting closer to that mark.

10:04 CR: [chuckle] One of the neat things for me is to see the design work that comes out of the summer promotions, whether it’s Hidden Creatures or 31 Days or anything, and just seeing what will be on the web page, and oftentimes in Geocoins and tags and that kind of stuff. Who are the folks that put that together?

10:22 BC: Nathan and Roxie get all of the credit for designing all of the promotional assets. They’re a great duo that does a lot of the artwork that you’ll see throughout the emails and social media. They are the ones that really bring a promotion to life, in terms of how they want the art to feel, and how you feel when you see it, and the time period, and all the little details. And if there’s any hidden messages in the souvenirs, they are the ones that are the masterminds behind all of that.

10:51 CR: How much direction do you give them when you start working on the design of this stuff? Is it just the title of it, or do you give them more specifics about how the promotion’s gonna work before they go off and put their creativity to work?

11:06 BC: It varies a little bit every time. They’re usually in the room when we do our initial brainstorm for a promotion. And from there, they usually have a pretty distinct point of view already, that we love. But if there’s… If it’s a little too broad or something, then we’ll turn to Pinterest and make a Pinterest board with a bunch of designs that kind of have the aesthetic that we’re looking for, and then they’ll just take that and run, and everything turns out amazing.

[chuckle]

11:32 CR: Speaking of creative people, you had a couple of amazing television talents. Award-winning one might say? I’ve heard it said, but I don’t know, that might be going too far. I might be biased, I don’t know, but HQTV…

11:49 BC: Yes.

11:49 CR: Made its… I don’t know if it was its debut. I haven’t seen HQTV in action, but maybe it was around before. But it’s been a while if it was around before. And Gia Coin, the anchor…

12:02 BC: Yes, lead anchor.

12:04 CR: Very impressive stuff. And then you had some breaking news that was being reported.

12:09 BC: Yeah, well, we can’t forget our lead anchor in the field, Chris Ronan, also true talent. [chuckle]

12:15 CR: Your words.

12:16 BC: Yeah. No, but we couldn’t have done it without Geocoin, and our anchor in the field. HQTV was a fun idea that we came up with as a way to kind of give a sneak peak of what Mystery at the Museum might be. In the past, we’ve led people to a landing page or a blog post that had at some teaser information on it, but we wanted to do something different this time. And with the biggest jewel heist in history, it seemed like that would be the sort of stuff that would be breaking news. So, we dreamed up this video, and we weren’t sure if we would actually be able to get our in-house talent to agree to it, but sure enough, that was an easy yes.

[laughter]

12:57 CR: Easy might be a stretch, but it was a…

13:00 BC: Oh, well, it was…

13:00 CR: It was a yes.

13:00 BC: It was a yes. [chuckle]

13:01 CR: It was a yes, that’s right.

13:02 BC: And then we worked with our community team, who did an awesome job with recording all of the video and sound, and editing and laying over all of the assets to create a fun breaking news video.

13:17 CR: [chuckle] Okay, so when does Mystery at the Museum get going, and how long does it run for, and where can people get more information?

13:23 BC: Yeah, Mystery at the Museum begins on July 11th at noon UTC, and it runs through August 11th, so it’s just over four weeks long, easy dates to remember. You can find more information at mysteryatthemuseum.com or on our blog or social media channels.

13:40 CR: I didn’t know we had a website for… Like an actual URL, that’s great.

13:42 BC: Yeah, fancy this time.

13:44 CR: I’m surprised that was available. Mysteryatthemuseum.com…

13:46 BC: Me too. Yeah, but we swiped that one up. It was pretty affordable.

13:50 CR: Nice work. That’s really cool. Easy to remember too. I’m excited, that…

13:53 BC: Yeah. And then once the promotion gets started, you’ll be able to find it in the geocaching app, on iOS and Android and also from the dashboard on geocaching.com.

[music]

14:08 CR: That was Brigitte, from Geocaching HQ’s marketing department. Go to mysteryatthemuseum.com for more information. Next up, Cindy Potter, who is HQ’s Director of Community. We had her on a recent episode, to introduce Virtual Rewards 2.0… She’ll have an update on that. We will also talk about the geocaching 20th anniversary celebration, which is scheduled for August 15th, 2020, here in Seattle. And we will touch on the recent geocaching etiquette articles that we shared on the geocaching blog. Well, Cindy, last time we joked about how we only bring you on to talk about virtuals. We’re gonna talk about virtuals.

14:53 Cindy Potter: Oh, good.

14:53 CR: But first, we’re gonna talk about other stuff. So recently, it was announced that next year there will be a big party here in Seattle, the Geocaching 20th Anniversary Celebration. And we haven’t had a chance to talk about it here on our podcast, so let’s talk about it. What’s happening, for people that have been under a rock and haven’t heard the big news? [chuckle]

15:16 CP: [chuckle] Right. Yeah well, first off, it’s very exciting for us to finally announce it, because it’s been something we’ve been wanting to do and to commit to for a while, because the 20th anniversary is a really exciting time period. So as you said, it’s the Geocaching 20th Anniversary Celebration that’s gonna happen August 15th, 2020 at Seattle Center. And it’s gonna be similar to what we’ve hosted before, a block party, but it’s actually gonna be at a larger venue, and hopefully a venue that’s really easy for tourists. It’ll be really close to hotels and other fun things that are happening downtown.

15:52 CR: You mentioned it being like Block Party. The last Block Party was in 2015, and there was a lot of consternation about that going away, both here and then in the community. We loved having it, it was a lot of fun. The community loved to come. Maybe recap a little bit for people that weren’t around back then, or maybe they’ve forgotten why it was decided that Block Party would not happen on an annual basis.

16:19 CP: Right. Well, when we had first started it, we hadn’t really expected that it was gonna be something that happened annually, it sort of just happened…

16:27 CR: And it started back in 2010.

16:29 CP: Yes, sorry. It started in 2010 with the Lost and Found celebration. And then we did keep it going for a while, but it got to this point where it was using a lot of staff time and resources. And generally, there were new people that would come for sure, but there were kind of some regulars that would come each year, and we felt like it was probably better for us to be spending staff time on bigger things that the entire community could enjoy, and focusing on mega events, and supporting those events that are happening all over the world instead of the one that’s just in Seattle. But in the back of our minds, of course, we always knew we wanted to host an event at some point again.

17:11 CR: And of course, a big anniversary like this is a great reason to do it. Twenty years of geocaching, next year. There will be a lot of details, obviously, coming in the months ahead. But one of the things that, as we have now published the cache page as… When this runs, we will have published the cache page, that people will notice the cache type for this event. And also, we have a blog post where we’re explaining another cache type, that will be returning in 2020. Let’s talk about that a little bit, ’cause that’s kind of exciting.

17:47 CP: Sure. So we were looking at the icons that are available on Geocaching.com, and of course there was the Lost and Found event icons, before there was the Groundspeak Lost and Found Celebration, and then the Lost and Found event cache type. And both of those were brought out in 2010 to celebrate the anniversary, the 10-year anniversary of Geocaching. And I think that it was all done with good intent. We thought, “This is great. Let’s have a cache type.” But we didn’t necessarily brand it in a way that made it obvious that it could be used every 10 years. And so we’re looking at that and thinking, “Well sure, yeah, you could make a new cache type. But why would you make a new cache type, and leave this thing that no one can ever get again, when its intent was to celebrate an anniversary. So we thought, rather than having dual icons and still having something that is basically extinct, we thought it would be better to rebrand that. The Lost and Found was always a bit confusing both in English and in other languages, since we mostly find things, we don’t normally lose them in geo-caching. So I we are re-branding at that name of the formerly non-ground speak loss and found celebration. It’s going to be titled Geocaching HQ celebration, so that’s an icon that we can use every 10 years. And then for the community events, we will be taking the Lost and Found event cache type and changing that to be community celebration event.

19:21 CR: So somebody that did attend the big party in 2010, they’ve got that one next to that in their stats so if they come next year it’ll be two.

19:32 CP: Exactly they’ll be a two. And if they attended the community events, maybe they attended only one in the past, or maybe the attended none because many of them were in the US, a few in Europe, but there are many, many players that never had a chance to attend one of those events. So we’re hoping that this will feel more inclusive for the whole community and build some excitement about revisiting this kind of concept every 10 years.

19:57 CR: And then more information to come about, the community events.

20:01 CP: Yes. Yes. We don’t have that all sorted out yet.

20:03 CR: We don’t have a scoop here today for that. So the question that some folks would have, given that those two things are being re-branded and brought back, is there was also the loss on found attribute that is hanging out there that can’t be found anymore. Any discussion of bringing that back?

20:20 CP: We had a little bit of discussion, but that one we decided not to bring back, we felt like it didn’t add any value to the events. And the way it was in 2010 was actually quite confusing. It was only added to events when lackeys were attended… Attended, that was the intent anyway, and that’s not something that we felt added a lot of value. This go around. So we thought, “let’s just keep the attribute the way it is and focus our attention on making the events good.

20:50 CR: So, big party next year in 2020, here in Seattle. More information on that to come. Of course, I’m a planner, I’m already thinking 2025-2030. What’s down the road here? What’s, at least in mind right now for future parties and celebrations.

21:05 CP: Yeah, so what we’ve been talking about, is having Block Party still, so maybe doing that on the five-year mark. So in 2025, we could consider instead of the celebration event we’ll keep that for the 10 year marks 10, 20, 30, and then block party for the five so that there’s still celebrations happening in Seattle, but not every year.

21:30 CR: Well, other exciting news recently that we did talk to you about before was the virtual rewards 2.0. Can’t have you on here without talking about virtual rewards again. So how has it been going so far as the roll out has been happening?

21:45 CP: Yeah, well not as many angry people.

[laughter]

21:50 CP: But in all honesty, we take that feedback and we listened last go around to what the concerns were… And we tried to build a process that felt more fair and transparent. So there really has been a lot of enthusiasm. I think people like that they can see the criteria and everyone who actually gets one is somebody that actually had physically had to press a button to agree to it, that they wanted it so it’s resulted in far fewer complaints.

22:25 CR: Still pretty early in the process. People have a year from when the cache pages were awarded to people to have their cache submitted. So, we’re still early, but what can you tell people about what’s out there so far of what’s been published?

22:44 CP: Well, it’s coming fast. People are publishing fast, so it’s only been a couple of weeks. And we already have 650 published in 52 countries. That is a lot faster than the last go around. So I think what happened with the last go around, is there were some people that were very surprised and didn’t necessarily wanna do a virtual this time, people had some time to think about it that if they did win where would they put theirs and so I think there’s been a little bit more lead time for them to come up with their ideas so that they could get it published more quickly, so that’s really exciting. I noticed that the ones with the highest favorite points right now are in Norway and Denmark which is fun. I think last go around Germany went to the top pretty quickly but this time, it’s a couple of the Scandinavian countries.

23:34 CR: And as you said, generally speaking, people seem pleased with how things are going and certainly there were a lot of lessons learned from the first go around that have been applied and they seemed to have bore fruit to this point, yeah.

23:50 CP: Yes. That they have. And there’s also a wider geographic distribution this time and people have noticed that there’s, I think on average, 22% of the people that applied received them, but in some countries, it would be a higher percentage than in others, because there were a lot of people that applied from some countries, a lot of people that qualified and then in some countries not as many people qualified but we still wanted to make sure, they got plenty of virtuals there.

24:17 CR: And people have until… What’s the data again that people have to finally submit.

24:21 CP: June 4th 2020, yes.

24:24 CR: Right. So this will be a developing story, as we say in… I’m kind of thinking of HQTV now in my mind.

24:31 CP: [chuckle] Yes, they’re famous again.

24:32 CR: HQTV. They’re developing story. Yeah, breaking news. So the other thing we wanted to talk about was geocaching etiquette. We’ve had a couple of blog posts about this subject. One was about finding and logging geocaches and the other one about cache ownership and since I was the author of those articles, and I can’t interview myself.

[chuckle]

25:00 CR: I thought we’ll bounce this topic off of each other a little bit. You were very involved as was our team and then the reviewer community, we checked in with the world-wide reviewer community. And so basically the way this started, was that Geocaching HQ gets a lot of emails and reviewers get a lot of emails and we hear out in the community people ask us, “What do you think about “fill in the blank.” And it might be, what do you think about logging practices? What do you think about throw downs? What do you think about… And a lot of this stuff is covered in the guidelines, but some of it is covered in a way that you could maybe read a different ways or you can interpret it different ways. And so, we’ve had guidance that we’ve given people via email or what have you, but I think as we talked within our team, we thought wouldn’t it be great if we could collect some of the topics that seem most top of mind to people and that we hear about the most and that we really want to get a viewpoint or view point, our viewpoint out there about it and kind of share what we found to be best practices. And not wanting it to be as I was writing the articles and as we were talking about them during the process, not wanting it to be, “Oh, there goes HQ again telling everybody what to do.”

26:23 CR: It wasn’t about that, it was about saying, “Hey here’s what we’ve found to be… Again, best practices and… But still somehow even though if it is in the guidelines or if it is best practices still they’re being some confusion in various places about these things. And it was interesting process to… For us to start with the list of things that we wanted to cover and then going out to the reviewer, community and saying “Hey here’s what we’ve got. What do you all have? And seeing them come up with, because the game’s played in different ways all over the world and finding what are the biggest concerns in this country versus that country. It was kind of fascinating to me at least to see that there was A, a lot of agreement, but then B, there was also a lot of bringing up things that I personally hadn’t thought about or maybe here within the team, we hadn’t thought about it, it was just kind of a fun process, an interesting process, just from that standpoint to me.

27:23 CP: Right. I think that the community is passionate about the game and there are rules that you can’t necessarily enforce very easily, but it’s still okay for us to say, this is how the game is supposed to work.

27:39 CR: Right.

27:39 CP: So is it gonna be okay for a cache owner to track down every single person that log their cache and tell them they have to take a photo of themselves at the coordinates so that you can double check that they were actually there. No, that’s not what we’re saying, but we are saying that this is the way it’s supposed to work and being at the coordinates to find the cache. And we actually had to put those words into the guidelines recently and it was because people were confused and there was kind of the spin we were hearing in the community, that HQ says that all you have to do is have your name in the log book. So we looked at our guidelines and we’re like, “Well gosh, that’s what it says. But no.”

28:25 CR: Right.

28:25 CP: You think they think that’s all it is. Oh my goodness, that’s not a game. We’re a location-based game if we’re a location-based game. Okay, alright, we’ll add it in there. You must go to the coordinates and put your name in the log book, okay? There, we added it. And so this article kind of helps to highlight things like that, where, okay, now that part in the guidelines, but there are other things that aren’t as obvious where it’s not in the guidelines but we’re just giving examples of things that really are the way the game is supposed to work.

29:01 CR: Right, yeah, you mentioned being at the coordinates. Group logging is something that we covered in there. That’s something that we hear a lot about. We get a lot of emails about that. The people get frustrated when they see logs on their caches, where somebody says, I was here with a group, I went and found a lot of caches, then the rest of my group found a lot too. And boy between the two of us, we had a really great day right, and we wanted to point out that, Okay well, look, let’s say a group of five people goes out and all five of you spread out and find your own caches and put each other’s names on it. At the end of the day, we’re not a police force. We’re not gonna go out and do a handwriting analysis to see if it was really you that signed these logs. So yeah, maybe if your name is in the log, okay, at the end of the day, that’s probably it. But we want you to know that that’s not the spirit of the way things are supposed to be done. You’re supposed to go to each one of those caches and not… Yeah.

30:00 CP: Right, no. Exactly, but one thing I did wanna point out just so it’s clear, we’re not saying that people can’t cache together as a team and have a team name. Like for that day you might say Team knuckle heads, I don’t know why that came to my head.

30:14 CR: ’cause you’re with me here right now. Yeah. I know it is.

[laughter]

30:15 CP: No, no. ’cause I’m teenagers at home may be. So we’re team knuckle heads which no one would do ’cause it’s too long to write.

30:23 CR: TK. [chuckle]

30:24 CP: TK for the day. But to ask for the day, but you should be staying together, and doing your day together, and then just saying, in your log, we logged on the paper as team whatever, so that’s okay, as long as you’re really clear what you did together. But splitting up, we do see examples of people like they’re literally in different countries on the same day logging caches so that’s just not the way it’s supposed to work and it’s pretty hard for us to identify and enforce that kind of stuff. We have egregious cases, but mostly, we wanna get the message out that come on guys, let’s just be honest and say, “That’s not the way this game is supposed to be set up.”

31:10 CR: Another thing we hit on was appropriate logging when you can’t find a cache. We had our recent cache quality survey and one of the questions we asked was, what steps can geo-cache finders do to improve cache quality? I was actually a little bit surprised I guess, maybe pleasantly surprised that the most popular answer was log your DNFs and your needs maintenance and your needs archive when you need to. Because I think in some corners of the game, there is this feeling that, “Oh no, I shouldn’t do that”, for any number of reasons. It could be, you don’t want people to know that you couldn’t find it, or you’re afraid if you log a DNF, it will somehow lead to maybe a reviewer taking action on the cache if it’s not there and so it ends up being a… There’s just a bad feeling about using these logs and we wanted to try and to make it clear to people that you shouldn’t feel that way, that they serve a really… Well, they serve multiple important purposes, not just one.

32:13 CP: Yeah, I also was really surprised by that answer but in a way, not so surprised ’cause our community is very passionate and they do understand the game mechanics and these logs serve a very important purpose. They help the cache owner first to discover problems early in maybe the life of a cache. If there might be a problem. I know I personally on my cache cache, there’s a DNF, there. I keep an eye on it, it doesn’t mean I necessarily run over there right away, but I’ll see what’s the next log. Because there’s already an indication there might be something that it depends on what information they provide. So as a cache owner, I really appreciate this. If they don’t say anything, and the cache is in bad condition, that doesn’t serve me any good. And then the next finder gets a bad experience. So, certainly in the survey that you created about cache quality, it makes sense that the community is saying, if we’re gonna improve cache quality, we actually have to be honest about the condition of the cache and not feel like we have to pretend the cache was in good condition when it really wasn’t.

33:22 CR: Or use some code to describe it.

[chuckle]

33:27 CP: Yeah. Yeah.

33:27 CR: Another thing we hit on in the blog was preserving the cache experience for other people, to enjoy, and we specifically called out not sharing answers to puzzles and virtual and earth caches and things like that because you’re just kind of ruining what the cache owners trying to do. And again, it kinda goes it’s almost in a similar way to what we talked about being at the coordinates. It’s just kind of a part of the game, it’s just something that you wish you didn’t have to say but come on, let’s not spoil it for everybody, right?

34:00 CP: Right. Yeah. We’ve recently taken some actions to try to help make this easier. For example, earth cache owners can now have a photo requirement. And that wasn’t possible in the past. So we’re hoping that will help make it so that people don’t just share the answers online and just get to log it. But yeah, let’s go to the core of what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get people outside and experiencing a location and honoring the cache owners that have come up with a creative idea, creative puzzle, a multi-cache, whatever it is, and treating them the way you would wanna be treated if you had created a similar experience. Treat them with respect and give them some feedback about your experience, but do do the experience.

34:46 CR: Right, exactly. The other, okay, so we had one blog post about finding and logging caches and then we have a second one which should be out by the time this podcast is published about cache ownership and again, we can’t go through everything here, but just touching on a couple of the things, one of them was don’t damage the environment when you put a cache out there. And again, that’s something that came up really high in that cache quality survey that we put out there. And it’s not just important within the game, but it’s really important for how the game is perceived by the Muggles of the world and that we wanna play nice with everybody and make sure that our game is seen in a really positive light. And it’s important to be respectful of the environment when you’re obviously when you’re finding caches, but also when you’re putting them out there.

35:37 CP: Right. Yeah, if we wanna have geocaching continue to go on for decades, we have to respect that there are parks and natural areas that we wanna preserve and we don’t wanna have geo trails all over the place, so as much as possible, trying to find ways to hide caches so that you don’t have to go too far from the trail or there’s already a trail that you can use. I was really impressed that that ended up being such a high result, on the cache quality survey as well. And I think it speaks a lot to our community and the ethics that they carry. They like doing the CITO-events to give back but they also like to have our game be represented with the same values that they carry, which is that they do enjoy nature, and they wanna keep it for future generations as well.

36:26 CR: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing was proper use of the owner-maintenance log, which is kind of a personal pet peeve of mine, but just that you use the owner maintenance log every time you do maintenance and not when you’re planning on doing maintenance. Sometimes we’ll see that people will say, “Oh there will be a couple of DNFs who are in, who needs maintenance log and they’ll respond with an owner maintenance and say, “Hey I’m gonna get out there in the next month and then it turns out life gets in the way and you don’t get out there in the next month. And so, just trying to reiterate when to use that owner maintenance log, and to you… ’cause the other thing sometimes that we see, is somebody will… They do maintain their cache regularly, but they think… Oh well, you know it’s fine, it’s I see it, it’s there, everything’s good, and they just don’t post anything, or they’ll post a right note. And that, for reasons of how the website works doesn’t… It has some drawbacks too. So when you got there, post under the maintenance log.

37:30 CP: Yeah, yes. So somebody’s posted a needs maintenance. The only way to remove that attribute is to post an owner maintenance, so that’s why it’s such an important log type. But it needs to be used properly because if I’m gonna go out and find a cache that has a needs maintenance attribute on it, then I’m gonna wanna know, this might have a problem, I shouldn’t count on this one for the day, I probably should have a back-up plan if I really wanna make sure I find something with my kids or something.

38:02 CR: Right.

38:03 CP: But if they’ve done the owner maintenance, and they state what they actually did in their log, that can be really helpful to know. Oh, they replaced the containers. Well great, this is a great time to go to then because I know it’s gonna be in good condition but yeah, it’s a pet peeve of mine as well, too.

[chuckle]

38:22 CR: As we kind of alluded to earlier, there’s some of the stuff that can be enforced and some of it is just kind of best practice and that comes to mind when we talk about difficulty to rank ratings and attributes. It’s something that we often hear from people in the community that will say, “Hey I found this cache. I really think this is a D or a T4 or whatever, and the CO has it as a one and a half. And same thing with attributes. I went and I didn’t realize that I was gonna have to swim to this cache or whatever. There’s any number of scenarios, but… And it’s not always that the CO is trying to cause a problem or anything, it’s just maybe not being mindful of it and just kind of a reminder to people to… There’s a reason for that DT was created, there’s a reason that attributes were created in the first place, and sometimes we tend to forget that right.

39:21 CP: And we tell reviewers, that they don’t need to review for DT or attributes except for the basic wheelchair one for attributes, but at the same time, the onus is on the cache owner to just be honest with the community so that they know what they’re gonna what to expect from the experience. We don’t wanna have a beginner, for example, that’s never found a cache before, try something that’s really tricky and they can’t get it open and then it breaks or something, it’s like, “Well maybe you should have had a higher D rating on that.

39:55 CR: Right.

39:55 CP: Because it wasn’t something you just walk up to and can figure out how to open. Yeah, honesty.

40:03 CR: Yeah, well it’s gonna be interesting to… ’cause I think the spirit of this again, was we wanted to hit on some of these topics that we hear about a lot, but then also hopefully it opens a conversation and people engage on these topics and it gives them something to think about and talk about, that maybe they haven’t been talking about.

40:24 CP: Yeah, I’ve seen it being shared quite a lot of Facebook in the last few days, so I think it’s making the rounds.

[music]

40:33 CR: That was Cindy Potter, Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. You can read those articles about geocaching etiquette at blog.geocaching.com. If there’s a topic you would like us to consider for the podcast, shoot us an email, podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear from you. Until then, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

[music]

June 3, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 25): Jeremy Irish

[music]

00:12 Chris Ronan: Hi there! This is Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, geocaching username Rock Chalk. Hope you’re in the right place, but even if you’re not, stick around, sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale. A tale of the beginnings of geocaching.com. Jeremy Irish joins me for a conversation. Jeremy is one of Geocaching HQ’s co-founders, currently a senior vice president here. He started geocaching.com, so he’s kind of a big deal. He has a lot of great stories, and you’ll hear many of them today. I’ve looked forward to having him on our podcast for a long time, and he really delivered. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did. This is me and Jeremy Irish talking, what else, geocaching.

[music]

01:04 CR: Well, Jeremy, thank you for doing this. You’ve never struck me as somebody who’s a look-back kind of a guy, you’re look forward kind of a guy, aren’t you?

01:10 Jeremy Irish: That’s pretty true, yeah.

01:12 CR: You don’t really… You don’t really seem to revel in talking about the glory days and all that stuff.

01:15 JI: I get bored really quickly.

01:17 CR: You get bored. [laughter] So we appreciate you humoring us and talking a little bit about stuff here as we’ve got this big anniversary coming up next year, 20 years since the website started, since geocaching started. When you think back to 20 years ago today, it’d be 1999, you were still a little ways off from hearing about this game. What kind of stuff were you doing back then?

01:41 JI: Oh geez, let me see. Well, I was originally from the East Coast, so I grew up in Virginia. I was working for General Electric; actually, I was a webmaster when that was a term. And I was on the East Coast, and I was really just bored of being on the East Coast, and I’d lived there my whole life, and I always said it was like one of those flavor ices, once you suck all the… All the really sweetness out of it, then all you’re left with is a little bit like an ice cube.

02:05 CR: Yeah, right.

02:07 JI: I was really thinking about where I wanted to go next. And I had joined the Air Force, and I traveled to South Korea, and then I actually did my training in California, and went down to Texas. So I ended up back in Maryland, just close to my home, and really got that travel lust, so decided to go out to the Pacific Northwest. And I was a webmaster for GE, so I was basically one of the first web developers out there, so I was trying to figure the thing out. And I was looking online for tech jobs… And this was in ’98. And I found out that Microsoft was out in the Pacific Northwest, out in Seattle, and I got a job offer to come out, so that fall of ’98 I came out to Bellevue, where Microsoft is, and I started working for them as a contractor. So that’s what I was doing originally.

03:00 JI: I did that for a year. I was building internal websites and doing work for them, and it was coming up on one year of my contract, and at that point they give you a couple of months off before you can do contract with Microsoft again. So there was a company that wanted to do some contracting work for the same company I was working for, and I started working at Savvy Shopper, and Savvy Shopper was online… They called it Bricks to Mortar. No, Bricks to Clicks was what they called it. So it was basically taking on a physical store and then putting it online where that was kind of new and fancy. So I worked on the e-commerce platform shopping cart application for this men’s online retailer, and that’s where I met Bryan and Elias, so we were all working for this company together. So that was the beginning of the three of us meeting and working together as co-workers instead of as entrepreneurs or partners in that. And we were working for an entrepreneur, so it was our first experience working together, which allowed us to have a really strong relationship before we started geocaching.

04:08 CR: So May 3rd, 2000, Dave Ulmer hides the first stash, as it was called then. Mike Teague is the first person to find it. People are hiding stashes and posting the coordinates online. Mike Teague is documenting them on his personal home page, and some time around July 2000 you stumble on that home page. What was it that piqued your interest about what you were seeing?

04:33 JI: At Savvy Shopper, we had moved to a new location, and we had a lot… I had 20 employees, something like that, I don’t exactly know how many. But we had this warehouse, and one of the guys who worked at the company, he brought in a Garmin eTrex, it was one of those yellow eTrex units, into the office and he was showing it around. And I knew about GPS before, but I thought about it in car navigation stuff, so I didn’t know a lot about the technology. And when I saw this handheld, it was… I don’t know, two AA batteries and you could walk around with this thing. And I went outside with it, ’cause I’m still a gadget geek, so I went outside and I turned it on. And the original eTrexes, and you can probably see the pictures online, they would show this little guy, and he’s this little pixelated guy, and there were, I think, four satellites up above him that were digital. And every time you connected to a satellite there was this little lightning symbol that went to each one of them. And then once you connected to three of them, then you could start getting your location.

05:31 JI: And there were no maps, it was just this screen, this blank screen. When you connected to it and you were walking around, the little guy started walking too, and you would notice that it would draw a track behind you. And I was like, this is like a video game, there’s this… It’s like Tron in a way, or Snake, one of the original games. I was like, well, there must be games related to GPS, because this looks like a game. So I did some searching online, and I came across the Great American GPS Stash Hunt, and the newsgroup as well that was talking about it, and realized there was this game that had just started.

06:12 JI: So I ended up on, I think… I forget the website, I think it maybe was Matt Stum, he was the one who coined the name geocaching. And saw that there were a bunch of caches listed. Mike Teague’s website actually was the first one I went to. And I saw that there was like a couple, maybe one or two in the state of Washington, I don’t recall exactly. But there was one and I was able to plot it by going to RAI and looking at a topographic map, ’cause I knew it was in Washington State, but I had no idea where it was. I immediately went out and then I bought my own GPS that weekend. I went to a marine supply store since I don’t even think RAI had it.

06:46 JI: I bought one of these things, it was like 115 bucks, so it was a big purchase, but I was excited. I was like, “I’m gonna find this container. This is really cool.” So I went and I looked at the topographic maps and kinda got a general idea of where this area was, but I didn’t have much more information, other than this map and my GPS. So I basically put the GPS on. It gave me a distance and direction and I just started driving.

07:08 JI: So I went with another co-worker of mine and my puppy. I had a beagle puppy. So I was like, “I’m gonna take my puppy out for a walk.” So he and I and the puppy went down and drove along this old logging trail, ended up at this… We just parked on the side of the road and then just started hiking and we found a trail that led us up through… It was kind of a deforested area. So there’s a lot of logging in the Pacific Northwest. So I was in this area that they do logging. So it was like a lot of stumps and following up the trail, and I realized a few things. I didn’t have any water with me, so I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have water for me. I didn’t have snacks. I didn’t backpack. I just… We just started walking like it was no big deal.

07:51 CR: Like you’re playing a video game.

07:51 JI: Like I was playing a video game, yeah. I didn’t think about it. I was just following the arrow, and just like, “Okay, let’s do this.” So, we’re hiking up. Of course, my friend, he was a former army, he actually had an IV in his backpack, so he was prepared. I was totally not prepared.

08:05 CR: Wow.

08:05 JI: But he still didn’t have water, but he had a water filtration system. So there was a point like along the trail where we don’t have any water and we have to find some old murky swamp that we have to get some water out of just so we can continue on, because we’re all totally unprepared for this, but over-prepared in one way and under-prepared in the other. So, it was really hilarious. There was bugs and I… In the Pacific Northwest, I’m not used to seeing a lot of bugs, like in East Coast all the time. So I didn’t have any bug spray either. So it was miserable. The whole experience was miserable getting to the top of this mountain.

08:37 JI: But once we got to the top, and there was this just a stumpy area, and I noticed that we were getting close, within 20 feet, looked around and I found this container. And it had a notebook in it. It a had a disposable camera. It had a Sunny Delight drink in it, which… This is one of the reasons why we have no food in caches because you don’t put a Sunny Delight drink. I know that it’s not really orange juice, but it’s not really drinkable after it’s been out there for that long.

09:06 JI: So yeah, so I was so excited about it and all those problems that I had along the way and that we had getting there, didn’t really matter ’cause we found this thing that somebody had posted online in these coordinates and all we did was follow the coordinates to this location. So, I was pretty elated and from then on, and I’ve heard this quote before, but it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong. That’s kind of how it was. So it became a story, and at the time it was miserable and stuff, but that excitement of finding it, called the eureka moment that you get when you find it. I was like, “I need to find more of these. I got my fix. I need to do this again.”

09:43 JI: So as we’re coming back down the mountain and at this point I think I’m carrying my puppy, ’cause the puppy’s exhausted. I get to the car. I get to my Saturn, which of course I’m driving a Saturn on logging trails, so don’t do that either. I get in the car and I’m like, “Well, I want this to be something bigger than just a few. What can I do to make this thing more accessible and people are more prepared, and I can explain this better and there needs to be a community around this. And how am I gonna do this? I wanna do this, I wanna support it.” so driving…

10:15 CR: You were thinking that then?

10:17 JI: Well, yeah, ’cause I was like, “Well, if we can get a lot of people to do this then there will be more for me to do, ’cause I can’t hide them and find them.” It’s like I don’t… I need some serious memory loss to do that. So I need a community of people to go out there and place these things so I can place them. So, it was really like selfish reasons, originally, for creating this was, “Hey, if I help with this, then I’ll be able to do this more often.” So coming back, I was like, “Well, I have dev skills. I have some web skills. So what if I could create a website to do this?” So, I looked around to see if is anybody else doing this? And people were more just placing them, posting them to the news group. Mike Teague was documenting those locations, some people was writing bits of code they could put it in a postal code or something like that and it would return like a list or you put your coordinates in and it’ll sort by distance, so you can at least know which ones are near you, that sort of thing.

11:11 JI: So, I kinda took about a lot of those ideas, and I had to learn about great circle calculations to figure out how to do a distance calculation between two points on the planet and how do I code that? How do I create a database for this? All these things, which got me excited because it sort of touched on my interest in technology, but also really encouraged me to go outside, which is something that I hadn’t done since I was in the Boy Scouts, when I was more of a kid. When I became an adult it was more a sedentary existence where I was traveling from the office to home and home to the office. Being a video game, I’d say addict, I also played lots of video games. So it was more like video game indoors.

11:53 JI: So my thought was, “Well, this touches… This will get me healthy. This will hit my tech interest here and my gadget… My interest for gadgets. So, why don’t combine those two?” And then maybe other people will do that too, and they’ll get excited and they’ll place these things. So it was like the symbiotic relationship that I wanted to have with other people in doing this.

12:14 JI: So, eventually I built something that made sense, it worked. And actually just one tidbit is I was looking for something that would relate to technology and nature, and I found… I was on the Ansel Adams website and the Ansel Adams website had a lot of really good black and white photography ’cause that’s what Adam, what he’s known about. So I thought, well, I’ll just basically copy Ansel Adams’ [chuckle] website in some ways. So a lot of that initial website was based on that website, and using some color versus black and white imagery, and trying to put some pictures of the outdoors to get people excited about it and stuff like that.

12:56 JI: So I built this website, and I reached out to Mike Teague and said, “Hey, I’ve got this website. Can you give me some feedback?” And he gave me a little feedback, and some back and forth, and I continued to build the website. And then I think it was September… Was it first?

13:12 CR: Second.

13:12 JI: Second, okay, it was September 2nd of 2000, his website went down for maintenance or something. His provider, his ISP shut down his site. And people were like, “Well, I wanna go and find out where these geocaches are,” and they weren’t geocaches, but the stashes. And Mike Teague said, “Well, go over to geocaching.com. Jeremy’s been working on this. You can go there and check it out.” So that’s really where we consider the first launch of geocaching. It had been up before then, but at that time it was all hand-entered for me, people would email me locations and information, and then I would put them in the database. So the earliest geocaches don’t even have usernames associated with the caches.

13:56 JI: But at the time of the launch, there were 75 caches that I documented and entered into the system, and then over time those people… As we created accounts and that sort of thing, people would adopt those. But some people who just left the activity don’t, so sometimes you’ll see some and they’re associated with one of my old accounts because could never find the owner for those.

14:15 CR: And it’s not long before word really gets out about this. Slashdot did something in September 2000, then you mentioned New York Times article, which I believe was in October, and then CNN did something in December. Was that an exciting time? Was it overwhelming? Was it a mix of the two?

14:33 JI: Well, at that time, I had just created the website on my own, and I’d been working on it, and I was actually running it out of my bedroom. So I had, I think, an ISDN connection or something like that, a low internet connection. So it wasn’t in a server room, and it wasn’t… It didn’t have any capacity at all. So when you get slashdotted, when it was a thing, it brought the server to its knees, and nobody could interact with it, so it shut it down. We got slashdotted, so that was scary. And then I was starting to get some inquiries like, “Oh, I saw this Slashdot article or Slashdot post. I’d like to write an article about this, New York Times, and don’t let anybody scoop me. I want to talk about this, I wanna be the first whatever,” I’m like, “Well, you are the New York Times, so yeah, of course.” So that was crazy.

15:21 JI: And then CNN picked up on the New York Times, and over the course of… I think it was the holidays, they would just repeatedly play me awkwardly walking on the beach, [chuckle] talking about geocaching. And they picked the beach, I think, ’cause maybe pirates, I’m not really sure.

15:37 CR: Oh, we gotta find that. I need to find that clip.

15:38 JI: Yeah, but you can’t really… You can’t be cool when you’re walking in the sand, it just doesn’t… [laughter]

15:43 CR: No, no.

15:44 JI: It doesn’t work that way. So yeah, so I was like… That was weird ’cause I’d never done any kind of interviews with that and… Like that, and I didn’t know where it was going, but I knew that I didn’t wanna do this alone, so at that point I reached out to Bryan and Elias and said, “Hey, you guys are… You fill the areas that I can’t do.” Elias was really… A lot of the back-end work that keeps the site running, or that kept the site running back then, I was the designer and developer, and then Bryan really had a lot of business acumen. And being a lawyer doesn’t help either. It does help, sorry.

[laughter]

16:24 JI: That’s my subconscious talking about lawyers but…

16:26 CR: We won’t let Bryan hear that part.

16:27 JI: No, no, he’s heard all the lawyer jokes, so… [chuckle]

16:30 CR: No doubt, no doubt.

16:30 JI: So it’s fine. And having somebody with a lot of business experience. And so the three of us really worked well together, and I said, “Well, it’s great,” ’cause having three is really great for running a business because there’s always a tie-breaker. Either you all agree, or one person disagrees, or two people disagrees, but there’s always gonna be a decision that gets made. So I didn’t realize at the time, I just thought these are two people that really… I really respect, and I’ve worked with them, and I understand them, and they’re excited for this, but they don’t know where it’s going either. It’s gonna be this side project that we’ll work on. It’ll be fun, but we’re not gonna spend… I even remember writing an email to them at one point… I was thinking it was 2001, and saying, “I don’t think this thing will ever make money, so we need to figure out a way for it to support itself. Because if it can’t support itself, I can’t spend all of my nonworking time working on this.” I’m kind of getting ahead, but that was… Having two partners was definitely key to being successful in this.

17:32 CR: The company has around 75 employees now, but it didn’t… Just as you alluded to, it didn’t just take off like a rocket, right?

17:38 JI: No. [chuckle]

17:39 CR: It was five years, for instance, before Bryan became a full-time employee. During the early days, as you said, it was you and all of you guys, doing this as you were doing your regular jobs, and then as time went on you were able to devote your focus to geocaching. But it wasn’t like that right off the bat.

17:58 JI: No, no, it… So yeah, after the… We were selling Travel Bugs, I think, in 2001, and we were selling t-shirts. So originally we started the company by using shared server space and selling t-shirts. We were working with this company that basically acquired the assets and us. And they were a… They do imprinting, they do silk screening, and embroidery, and that sort of thing. So I was building e-commerce sites for them, and that was my full-time job for… I think it was two or three years that I was doing that. And my side gig was doing geocaching, and that was more of a passion project ’cause I really didn’t… I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know if it was gonna be sustainable on its own. So yeah, we sold 144 t-shirts originally, that was our original geocaching logo, which is definitely more complex than today’s logo. That ended up keeping the server costs and buying more shirts. So we keep… With that profit we get more shirts and then we buy more shirts, and…

19:00 JI: In 2001, we came up with this idea… I came up with this idea for Travel Bugs and that would help fund as well. I remember just sitting and watching TV, and then just peeling stickers of activation codes and tracking codes and we were completely disorganized with it, so I’d have to find the tracking number of the Travel Bug on this list, and then stick it on the envelope, and then ship them out. So we’re all doing this by hand. So any of the ones you see, there’re literally imprinted or numerical, those are like the original Travel Bugs that were out there that we had. And we had to figure out how to source it, who’s gonna print Travel Bugs.

19:36 CR: When Nate was on the show a while back, we had a fun conversation with him and Bryan about the big machine you guys had, the…

19:43 JI: Oh yeah, it would go…

[vocalization]

19:44 CR: It shook the building and… [laughter]

19:46 JI: Yeah, I know, yeah, that was for the Jeep promotion originally, ’cause we were trying to do alphanumeric codes ’cause the original numeric codes were easily breakable and for this we wanted to have something a little bit harder. So we had to figure out how to program this thing, which used to print or stamp dog tags. So it was a dog tag stamper. Yeah, and that thing… [chuckle] It was so loud, yeah, so we all had to wear headphones or just deal with it. But that was all part of it…

20:14 CR: Right.

20:14 JI: The experience.

20:15 CR: The game of geocaching is unique for a lot of reasons, and I think one of the most important is that the community invented the game. The community creates the content. And for that reason, you and Bryan and Elias and this company have always had a unique relationship with the community. Could you talk about that a bit?

20:36 JI: Obviously, starting this thing out, I realized that I needed to have a bunch of people that will participate in this thing so I could participate in it as well. So… And I hadn’t run communities before, so this is all new to me. But creating the forum, that was one of the first… Well, actually, the mailing list, we had a geocaching mailing list that we started with first and that was just like… In this community, I need to encourage people to do this. And people… And I remember the first person in California to place a cache was like, “Well if I place one of these things, will anybody actually find it?” We had this… We kept saying, “If you hide it, they will come. We just say, “If you hide it they will come.” People will hide it and they say, “Oh wow, somebody logged my cache and I got an email,” and you’re like, “Yep, alright well, thank you.”

21:18 CR: Tell your friends. [chuckle]

21:18 JI: And tell your friends, yeah, literally, tell your friends. Key things I was thinking about when the geocaching activity started, one of them was… ‘Cause there was some counter-culture, “Let’s go to abandoned buildings and take pictures,” kind of thing, “let’s go trespass.” And people would… And I think there’s still websites out there that do that. It’s like, “Oh hey, I went into Disney property, I went to this old ride and I snuck in, I took all these photos,” and they uploaded it, and then it’s basically encouraging people to go and… The pictures are great, but encouraging people to go trespassing in these locations, I was like, “Well we can’t be committing crimes. We need to be above board. This needs to be a public website. We need to work with people if people are trespassing or littering or they’re doing something that they’re not supposed to do.”

22:01 JI: And then the other big thing was family-friendly was important. And being family-friendly meant that if I ever had kids, and now I have three, and I go to a geocache, I’m not going to expect something that I shouldn’t or go to a place that I wouldn’t wanna bring my kids. Keep that above board. And then the third one, commercialization.

22:22 JI: Okay, so no solicitation. And over the years, this has been a controversial one. There’s always exceptions to the rule, and that’s why we always call them guidelines instead of rules, because there has to be some allowances to creativity. But we didn’t want people to be actively using these to get you to go and buy ice cream or put coupons in them, or create little contests and stuff like that unless if we manage it in some way that is better for the community. And we’ve experimented with ideas in doing promotions over the years and the end result is like any kind of activity that we incorporate or advertise and incorporate into the game. It’s something that enhances the game, it doesn’t detract from it. So that was probably the three core pillars, I guess, that we had considered originally when starting the website.

23:08 CR: You briefly mentioned it earlier, but maybe talk a little bit more about Travel Bugs because that’s become such a big part of the game and it’s something that you came up with. What was the impetus for that?

23:19 JI: Well, originally, I would go to geocaches and people would put objects in Ziploc bags and they would have a piece of paper in it and it would say, “Hey, if you found this, send me an email, let me know that you found it and where you found it.” And this is… And some of them are like, “And this is from such-and-such a location, I’m trying to get to this location.” So that was happening naturally. People were just wanting to put them in caches and just see where they went. So it was like putting a message in a bottle, and then seeing where it floats to based on people moving it. Also, at the same time, there was an activity called Where’s George. And Where’s George is when you take… Every dollar bill has its own serial numbers, so you would enter the serial number of a bill into this website, and then you could write a message like when you found it, and then they would spend the bill, and then they would write or stamp a Where’s George stamp on there to say, “Go to wheresgeorge.com and enter in this code and tell me where it’s been.”

24:16 JI: I was like, “Well I can combine the idea that here, somebody has a goal with this object that they put in a cash container with this idea where you take a serial number, a unique identifier, and then you can go to a website and find out where it’s been. If you combine those two, and then somehow integrate it to the game, and then charge for the tags, this would be a funding opportunity for us to get more functionality, maybe hire some people, maybe not do this as my side gig anymore, so I can focus on this more.”

24:43 JI: So that’s basically the idea, how it got started originally, just finding how to source it and get the first ones printed and that sort of thing. That took some… A little bit of time, but that was the idea. And then, of course, you’re bitten by the Travel Bug, the idea that this thing is vicariously moving… You are vicariously living through the bugs that are moving around. Hopefully, people post photos of them and you’ll get emails about these adventures these little bugs go on. So that was the basic idea.

25:10 CR: I could spend all day asking you about lots of other projects, but are there things that… Moments that are top of mind for you? I mean when… And the rare times that you do think back, because I know you like to look forward, but if you are just reminiscing, are there certain projects that come to mind or certain moments in the history that are particularly memorable for you?

25:31 JI: So I think the Jeep one was really cool just because I love Jeeps, and I finally bought a Jeep after all these years in 2014, I think, or something like that. I finally bought a Jeep. This promotion really hit just some buttons for me, the happy buttons. The idea of finding out there are brands that really integrate with the game. The fact that we had these little diecast metal Jeeps that… Just fun things like, how do we print them, and how do we get them out to the world so people can move them around? Do we ship them? I remember packaging them were fun ’cause we’d get… We just had shipments of these little diecast metal Jeeps that would arrive and I think it was the yellow Jeep originally, which then we did locationless caches around and one of them was the find yellow jeep. So it was kind of a fun mix of the two projects. And then releasing them out, and then seeing the photography that people would submit, because there was a sweepstakes, but there was also a photography… There was an essay and a photography portion of it, and then people would choose like the best pictures; somebody won a Jeep at the end of the promotion, which is pretty awesome, along with the sweepstakes and that sort of thing.

26:35 JI: So that was cool, just because it combined Jeep, this amazing brand experience with geocaching. Never thought I had the opportunity to do something like that. And then just the promotion itself was very unique and seeing the creative user content that people are creating out there with the photography, or even like geocaches. So that’s the Jeep promotion. The things that have stood out to me over the years is traveling. The first time I was able to travel, I was flown to Denmark to speak at an event and I’d never done that before. So I got to go to Copenhagen, and then met up with the folks that had sponsored me to come out, drove on a Segway; it was the first time I was on a Segway, and then got to see Copenhagen, got to fly to a new… Or was it… Yeah, fly to a new country.

27:27 JI: And then I went to Aarhus and met now our first employee’s husband in Aarhus, Denmark and that was where I did my speaking event. So just being able to travel outside the United States and have my experience, first experience talking about geocaching. And then just all the events I’ve gone to; to GeoWoodstock where I used to get in line and serve, what was it, Caesar salad; I did that like a couple of years. It was fun just to be in line to be able to… It’s hard to meet 500 geocachers in an event. So the best way to do that is serve them food, ’cause everybody’s coming to the same location. [chuckle] So it was like, “Hey, here’s some Caesar salad. Nice to meet you.”

[laughter]

28:06 JI: And then we don’t have a lot of time, so move along, and then we’ll talk to the next person because you’re limited with your time. So there’s… I went down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest and Richard Garriott has a geocache there where you end up at a tower that he created, really cool. You end up walking along this trail with all of this like Halloween-themed stuff along the way after solving all these puzzles, and even meeting Richard Garriott, which as a videogame geek guy, grew up with Ultima series of games. So I played all the Ultima single player games as the avatar to the Ultima online experience. So meetings like… So, childhood hero, also now, tourist astronaut, really cool.

28:49 CR: Yeah, very cool. Yeah.

28:50 JI: Got to meet some really cool people. They don’t have to be celebrities, [chuckle] like meet geocachers that are gadget cachers that create these amazing experiences. I could go on on all the really cool experiences that I’ve done because of this game.

29:06 CR: So there was a lot of excitement fairly recently, it’s been a couple of years, but about the return of the… There was the APE cache that was found in Washington and now there’s two active APE caches. And you actually were… You hid that Washington, you and John Stanley, right, were the ones that actually hid it. How about that promotion? That was something that is part of geocaching lore and people love talking about the APE cache and I just kinda wonder when you think back to working with 20th Century Fox on that whole thing.

29:32 JI: It was interesting at the time. It’s outlived the movie. Nobody watches the movie after they go and find one of these geocaches. They basically approached us and said, “We wanna do something with you for this movie coming out,” and they had this concept of this alternate history of evolution where there’s these apes that have been evolved, just like man has been evolved and there’s this evidence out there. So there’s this organization that’s going to release this proof. So each location, they basically asked, “How do we do this?” It was a collaborative experience. So coming up with the idea where we get excitement around Project APE with the entire world, but at the same time, there’s only 12, and then I think 13 locations that you could place them, that a lot of people are not gonna be able to play this game. So how are you gonna live vicariously through the people who are finding it? How do you get that excitement around it and try to mitigate some of the disappointment?

30:31 JI: So we picked all the locations and we found local geocachers that would place it for us. I had that all coordinated. And then there’s so much trust in there, too. This is like if I’m sending a prop from the movie in this big container to somebody I’ve never met and that person actually placed the container and didn’t take the prop from the movie, that’s pretty impressive. So it’s like this absolute trust that happened. We had very trustworthy amazing geocachers that worked on it. And then this idea that throughout the week, we would sort of slowly reduce the radius of where the geocache is so they could find it. That was a lot of fun, just trying to schedule that even personally, like sending out a message so people are ready for this thing. And then I think it was every Friday, releasing it, and then seeing how quickly people would find it.

31:17 JI: I used to say that we could get a geocacher to somewhere faster than the US government could. [laughter] ‘Cause you’d just post a coordinate of a new geocache and send out an instant email that says, “Hey everybody, there’s a geocache there, go find it,” and it would be found within less than an hour.

31:32 CR: That’s true.

31:32 JI: It would be found anywhere in the world, more or less. So anyway, that was really exciting. And geocaches were found within an hour. Once people found out it was in Washington State or something, people are waiting for that message to go out, where multiple people would show up at the same time. And nobody ever fought over a geocache as far as I knew. But just the fact that it lived on beyond the promotion and has become legendary, and the fact that now there’s the trifecta that you can find the three geocaches in the Pacific Northwest and a lot of people will travel here, and then the interest in going to Brazil to find a geocache that’s out there, and the fact that that thing still exists today is pretty impressive.

32:16 CR: Yeah, I mean I never would’ve… I don’t know if I ever would have gone to Brazil if it wasn’t for that cache.

[chuckle]

32:21 JI: So yeah, it’s awesome that this has created that. I wanted to feel like Indiana Jones every time I found a geocache. But you literally can go to Brazil and find a geocache now and it feels like that kind of adventure. So, yeah, and then the fact that I think it was really well introduced back into the game, getting that geocache back to make that trifecta happen, having that community involvement for it. Honestly, in the past, I would have shut down those geocaches if I hadn’t… At that time, I used to have regrets not shutting them down because they were such a pain. People would constantly wanna have the old geocaches returned to those locations with a new container and we had to create rules around it and it was frustrating because I wanted to capture the original experience, but replacing the container just wasn’t… It didn’t seem right to me. So, being the bad guy often throughout the game has not been the most comfortable part of the experience, but I think it’s helped the game.

33:24 CR: A couple of years ago, after many years as the company president, you shifted gears, you moved into a senior VP role, what made you wanna do that?

33:32 JI: Yeah, it’s been about two years now. I had a lot of life changes and realized… I joke when I was… I became 42, that’s the answer to life, the universe and everything, if you know Douglas Adams books. So that was my year of living uncomfortably, is how I themed it. And I just got to thinking about what’s important and how much energy and time that I put into the game. And I love all the energy and time I put in the game, but really, I think as a result, a lot of my personal side suffered.

34:04 JI: So I kinda went through some changes there and I was still president and working through it and that sort of thing. But there was a point where I thought, “Well, my passion, it is about… Passion is building something.” And you’re right, I’m more of a forward thinker. I like to break things because I think breaking things make things change over time and you can’t just do the same thing. So, I came to the realization that I wanted to do something else. I wanted to do something within the company, but I didn’t wanna manage the company. I think I manage okay, but I’m better at building product and coming up with new ideas and it was keeping me from doing that.

34:42 JI: So it’s been over two years now. Bryan, Elias and I talked and I thought, “Well, I think the best thing to do is me to step down, and then look at other concepts around geocaching and location-based games in general. So why don’t I take this time and focus on figuring out new ideas, playing around with those ideas, and if those ideas take off and there’s some spark of… Something fits within the game, then we’ll go for it.”

[music]

35:12 CR: So there you have it, Jeremy Irish. I learned a lot during that talk. I heard several fun stories that I had not heard before, hope you did, too. If you have an idea for our podcast, something you’d like to hear us talk about, you can send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear your ideas. Hard to top this talk with Jeremy, but we will try. So, hey, thanks for downloading our podcast. Please tell your friends. And from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

May 15, 2019 / Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 24) Virtual Rewards 2.0

[music]

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, Special Edition. I’m Chris Ronan, also known by my Geocaching user name which is Rock Chalk. So what makes this a special edition? Well, we’re announcing Virtual Rewards 2.0 today. You can read about it on the Geocaching blog or hear all about it, right here, right now. I am joined by Cindy Potter, who is the Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. So here we go, talking in Virtual Rewards 2.0.

[music]

00:54 CR: Well, the last time, Cindy, you were on our podcast, was this exact same subject. So apparently, we only bring you on here when it’s time to talk about Virtual Rewards. So, Virtual Rewards 2.0. Let’s talk about this project and just an overview of what this is all about.

01:12 Cindy Potter: Okay, sure. No, that’s funny that I guess I have nothing else to talk about besides Virtuals, but that’s okay. We’re very excited to announce another round of Virtuals. We’re calling it Virtual Rewards 2.0. Still using the same name but it is different. We’ll talk more about that. It’s more similar to the process of what we did for Adventure Labs. So there’s going to be a page going live either today or very soon thereafter, where people can opt in to receive a virtual reward if they meet the minimum qualifications and those will be visible on the page. And then we’ll randomly select up to 4,000 individuals by geographic distribution.

01:55 CR: So compared to the first round of Virtual Rewards, I think with any project, we try to learn from it and see if we can improve on it and make it better and certainly the process here is a little bit different than the first time around, and a lot of that is because of input, both from the community and volunteer and community volunteers and so forth.

02:15 CP: Right. Yeah. We heard what people said. There are lots of very passionate responses. We tried not to get too hung up on like does that mean we can’t ever do Virtuals again? We listen to the feedback and we did promise that we would do it differently for the future. We didn’t know if we were gonna be able to do it but we did say that if we did it again, we would do it differently so, it would target different users. So this time, we know everybody loves Virtuals, we do too, but we’re not going to try to target “top hiders” since there are challenges with doing that, this time, we’re making it more open. By our estimates, about 40,000 people worldwide would qualify for the criteria that we’ve come up with. It’s gonna be more putting the power in the hands of the cache owners that they will know if they qualify. They can see the criteria visibly so there’s not some secret algorithm like we had before and they can sort of make a promise to the community by opting in saying, “Yes I’m committed to this. I would like to make a virtual.”

03:30 CP: The last round, I think most people know about two-thirds of the people ended up making Virtuals and that felt to the community like that wasn’t enough. They would like to see closer to the full 4,000 being used. So we’re gonna see if this process helps to improve that. And so with the random selection too, it’s kind of acknowledging that this game is made up of all kinds of cache hiders and we need everybody to help participate. Yes, there’s a minimum quality of hides we’re looking for and quality of participation but it’s easier to qualify this, go around.

04:07 CR: Why did HQ decide, “Let’s do this again.” What were some of the things that contributed to saying, “Hey, it went well the first time. Let’s give it another go.”

04:16 CP: Right. I think despite people’s dissatisfaction with the algorithm, they were really happy to see new Virtuals come out, and so we thought, “Let’s just try to find another method that might work.” We also saw that the overall quality of Virtuals is much higher than your average cache that is put out so both the total favorite points, the percentage of favorite points, if you look at log length or the frequency at which they’re found is quite high. So, we looked at lots of different data and it was quite clear. Now maybe some of that is because Virtuals are rare and people like to go find them, but I do believe they do have a place in geocaching and it helps us to show something in a community that we’re maybe a box, just isn’t really appropriate at that location.

05:09 CP: The other huge factor was that the reviewers said, “The process went fairly smoothly.” We had some pretty tight guidelines but then kind of loose guidelines like not too much work on the reviewers. No standard of quality that they had to assess going in. And so they were really open when we presented them with the idea, but even more importantly, they were the ones that came up with the opt-in idea that we tried first with Adventure Labs and now we’re doing with Virtuals. We started with Adventure Labs as a test to see how it went. Reviewers felt like that’s what they heard from the community was, “Let’s make sure people really want to make a virtual and so they’re probably gonna put a little more effort in than if we had just selected them based on a secret algorithm.”

06:00 CR: Are the goals of 2.0 different from the first round of Virtual Rewards?

06:06 CP: Yeah. So they are somewhat different. Like I’ve said before, we’re not trying to identify top hiders and reward top hiders, although we’re still keeping the word reward in there because we feel that we are rewarding cache hiders in general. So yes, there’s a huge range of cache hiders and we hope we can always find fun things for cache hiders to do like we also gave some cache hiders the opportunity to do the Adventure Lab. So it’s a thank you to those cache hiders but it’s also another attempt at geographic distribution so we’re looking at, when we do the random selection, being more mindful to do it by country. So you’re competing against your peers, within your own country and we’re trying to stretch it to more countries world-Wide.

06:54 CR: We’ve talked a little bit about how things are different this time than the first time. Is there anything else about 2.0 that people will, for instance, you talked about the opt-in process and then the criteria is visible, what kinds of criteria in general are we talking about?

07:12 CP: Well. First and foremost, people might be glad to know that if you receive virtual reward last time even if you didn’t publish it, you’re not qualified or you don’t meet the criteria to get one again. So this would be a fresh set of people. So, some certain number of favorite points total on your caches, a certain number of hides. You need to have logged a cache within a certain number of months and I’m trying to think of, you need to have publish to cache within a certain time period. And I’ll be honest, this criteria is not super high. Like if you’re in a country like the US, or Germany you might look at this criteria and say, “Oh my goodness, all my friends qualify for this. Well, in some of those countries that might be true, but consider that we’re trying to make a criteria that works for the whole world. And so in some of the less active countries, we still want them to be able to qualify for virtual so although there won’t be quite as many qualifiers it’ll be easier for them to earn one.

08:20 CR: So you were here when we announce virtual rewards. You’re back for 2.0. Am I supposed to schedule a 3.0 interview in the future? I think that’s something people will inevitably, well, I will certainly ask about it over the last couple of years. Is there gonna be another round of these? And alright, now there is. Does that mean there’s gonna be another one in the future?

08:37 CP: That’s the million dollar question, Chris, I can’t answer that.

08:41 CR: That’s why it’s a million dollar question. That’s why I have to ask.

08:45 CP: Yeah, I think, we’ll see how this round goes. Hopefully, the community will feel like this is a positive change that we’ve made. I’m sure there will be things about it that they might not like. I think the tricky part people wonder if… Well, so, answering your specific question, yes, there might be another round in the future, but the other question that is even the bigger million dollar question is, why don’t you just open it all up? Why have these rounds at all, right?

09:15 CR: That was gonna be my two million dollar question later, but yeah.

09:17 CP: The two million, that’s a lot of money.

09:19 CR: Sure, short-circuit to it, go for it.

09:22 CP: So it’s possible that we will have opportunities in the future that will be limited releases. I think it’s almost certainly not likely that we will ever release virtuals, the way they were before where it was just open season. And if you think about it today, that was 14 years ago when we grandfather them, we had far fewer cache hiders back then, today we have hundreds of thousands of them and so if we opened it up today, we would end up back where we were in the dark place where basically people were hiding very low quality Virtuals and there’s not proximity rules and it was hard for reviewers to assess. Is this a good quality, is that a bad quality? And we will also wanna be careful that we are sticking to the core of what geocaching is about, which is mostly about the container and being able to sign and trade swag and stuff like that. So if we open up Virtuals too much, it seems like it would potentially harm the rest of the game but we do think that this type of limited release and keeping an eye on the statistics and how the reviewers are feeling, it’s possible we could do something like this again.

10:46 CR: Well, for people like myself, I started geocaching long after Virtuals were grandfathered. And what I see tends to be fun experiences and I think, “Oh this is great. Why would they ever have grandfathered this?” And then after you learn a little more, and especially once you talk to some reviewers who are around back then, well, what’s left are the good experiences and most of the ones that caused the problems, and caused them to be grandfathered aren’t around anymore, so yeah.

11:17 CP: Right. Yes, I’ve heard some horror stories about the dead carcass in the woods.

11:22 CR: Yeah, right.

11:22 CP: The tennis shoes dangling from an electric power line and things like that. Yeah, the ones that are left are the ones that are quality, and the cache hiders are still in the game and probably put out something reasonable in the first place. But yeah, it’s really hard to judge quality. And the way we did the last release, the reviewers didn’t need to judge the quality.

11:46 CR: Another question I hear from people sometimes is, “Okay, you’ve done a limited release of Virtuals, what about other grandfather cache types like web cam?” That’s something that I hear a lot about.

11:58 CP: We have talks about web cam, some… They have a lot more challenges, I’d say than Virtuals do and it’s harder for us to say, that they’re part of the core of geocaching. Also with the privacy laws that have come in place in the last year, a couple of years. I’m not sure about the privacy issues of having increase number of web cams out there and encouraging people taking photos and doing videos of other people. And what are they gonna do with that? So we’re not quite as enthusiastic about bringing web cams back as we have been with Virtuals. So there’s your honest answer.

12:38 CR: Well, we are enthusiastic though about Virtual Rewards. So where can people get more information and what are some of the important dates that will be coming up here in the next several weeks?

12:49 CP: Right. May 14th is the day that the opt-in page goes live, we call it an opt-in page, but you can think of it like an application page. It’s very similar to what we did for Adventure Lab. So it’s gonna be on geocaching.com/play/request/virtuals2019 and that will be open for about two and a half weeks until June first. That day we’ll close the page, so you can still see the page, but you won’t be able to opt-in anymore. And then, on June fourth, we’ll do the random selection of up to 4000 users and they will then have one year to submit their virtual for publication.

13:32 CR: Well, this will be a fun thing to watch and see what people will come up with. It certainly has been fun. It was fun the first time around, wasn’t it? To see some of the new places that people sent their fellow cachers out to see.

13:46 CP: Yes, and some of them got published really fast. In that case, I think there were a few reviewers that knew it was coming and so on their player accounts, they already had a few things going. So we’ll see how quickly this happens. I suppose in a way, when you opt-it on May 14th, maybe some people already have something in mind, so it’ll be fun to see what it is.

[music]

14:10 CR: That was Cindy Potter, Geocaching HQ’s Director of Community. If you wanna learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0, there is a blog post all about it, just go to blog.geocaching.com. The blog includes a link to the opt-in page where you can find out if you qualify to apply for a Virtual Reward. May the odds be ever in your favor and from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Official Blog

Category: Podcast

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 30): GIFF

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 29): Lists

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 26): Mystery at the Museum, Virtual Rewards 2.0 update, 20th Anniversary Celebration, geocaching etiquette

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 25): Jeremy Irish

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 24) Virtual Rewards 2.0

Instagram