/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 4): Logging Changes, Send to Garmin

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Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast, welcome. We are happy to have you. I am Chris Ronan, your host. It has been a busy time at HQ since our last episode, lots happening around here. There are now 3 million active geocaches in the world, huge milestone. Hopefully, you went out and you found the cache to get the souvenir that marked that occasion. We also had another souvenir opportunity with Cache In, Trash Out week, and another souvenir on Big Blue Switch Day, that is May 2nd, when we, essentially, celebrate the day that geocaching became possible back in the year 2000. Today, we are talking about some of the new features and changes to the Geocaching website and to our app. I will talk with Ben Hewitt about the “Send to Garmin” feature. That’s a cool new toy for those of us who cache with our Garmin GPS devices. First though, I have a chat about logging changes with three folks at HQ who have been very involved in updating the way that we will all log geocaches via the app and the website. The changes will be noticeable, but they are necessary, and I personally think that they will make logging a lot more efficient. So here is me and a few of my fellow HQers, Nadja, Becca and Stuart, talking logging.

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Chris: Okay. So today we’re talking about the logging process on Geocaching.com and the Geocaching app, and we have Stuart, Nadja and Becca who are all very involved in working on logging in at HQ, in addition to lots of other stuff that they do, so maybe first we’ll hear about what they do. So Stuart, how long have you been at HQ? What is the overview of what you do at the office everyday?

Stuart Schwartz: Well, alright. Howdy. My name is Stuart Schwartz, and I am a lead developer on one of the delivery teams here at Geocaching HQ. I’ve been at the company near six years. As a lead, I effectively direct the technology as it’s being built by this team. I am one of three components to how that’s directed. There’s a technology side, a product side, and a UX side.

Nadja Conklin: Hi, I’m Nadja. I’ve been at HQ for a little over two years. I’m a product manager at HQ and I work on the web team, specifically with a core team of people including Stuart, Becca and myself, and a couple other very dedicated engineers. And yeah, as a product manager, what I do is I spend most of my time doing research and planning for projects and then helping make sure that projects and features get out the door smoothly and efficiently and in a great way that helps our users.

Becca Olson: Hi, I’m Becca. I’m a UX designer at Geocaching HQ, and I’ve been here for about four years. I work with Stuart and Nadja along with the rest of the team to make sure that the things that we’re designing work well for people. So I test them with people and work with Nadja to do research beforehand and also do the visual design.

Chris: So before we get into some of the stuff that’s gonna be changing here in the coming weeks with regards to logging your geocaches, Stuart, can we talk just first about, I think it’s just such an interesting process, just think about the fact that you have tens of millions of logs every year on ocaching.com and through the app. I think last year there was something like 80 million found logs, and I would assume there are some challenges and some… Some interesting things that you have to work through to make sure, from an engineering standpoint, all of that stuff happens the way that it should happen.

Stuart: Indeed, that’s true. First and foremost, I think the biggest challenge is not losing data or corrupting data from the past. So this game has been around for quite a while, near 15 some odd years, almost 16, I believe we just had 16. We’ve ended up with nearly one billion logs. We’re somewhere around 800 million at the moment, this is geocache and trackable logs. So the sheer volume is pretty intense and when we look at it as a whole, it’s a little overwhelming, but one piece at a time, it’s manageable.

Nadja: Okay. So we’ve talked about the enormity of the whole thing and now we have some… People are gonna start noticing some changes here in the next few weeks, next month or so. Nadja, can we talk first about why before we get into what the changes are, why are these changes going to be happening?

Nadja: Sure. Well, like Stuart was mentioning, the game has been around for about 16 years and there’s been a lot of change at HQ recently. So we’re addressing some growing pains along the way. And on the website, that’s namely… It’s around old code. Our existing logging page is in old code. And what that means is it limits the ability to work on logging and logging-related projects, namely drafts and syncing up with mobile and allowing some fun features like photos of favorite points in drafts. Without a new logging page, we wouldn’t be able to do things like that. Also old code dependencies can slow down development process, anyone that has worked in engineering, I’m sure, is familiar with that, which means that we can’t respond to customer problems as quickly as we would like to. And also the existing logging page, it’s not localized or mobile responsive. So, by working on a new logging page, we can address all of those things and also make some improvements along the way, including UX improvements and tackling some things with time zones and other exciting things.

Chris: Okay. So, there’s some interesting challenges there that need to be met and a lot of research I’m sure has gone into figuring out how to address those challenges. So, Becca, can you talk about that a little bit. What kind of research do we do, as a company, to figure out how to address these issues?

Becca: Yeah. We did a lot of research coming into this project about how people log geocaches, how people log maintenance and needs archived logs, things like that. And we do a lot of talking to users all over the world. We’ll do phone interviews and ask and we also watch them go through the current logging flow and see where they run into problems and pain points, and then we’ll take the information from all of that and start to recognize where we can improve and how we could make changes. And then once we have the product designed and developed, we’ll release it slowly to beta testers and to play testers, and ask them questions, ask for feedback along the way, and we can make changes before doing a full release to everyone.

Chris: And there are changes that are made along the way to, aren’t there? I think that there’s a thought among some people, not just with geocaching products, but any product, they think, “Oh, they’re just gonna give us what they want to give us and that’s just it.” But as beta testers know, you guys make a lot of little adjustments along the way based on the feedback that you get.

Becca: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we wanna release to small groups at a time, and so we can gather that feedback and make quick changes before we release to everyone. And then even after we release to everyone, we’ll continue to gather feedback and make sure that we’re making changes that make it the best workflow possible.

Chris: So, as your team was doing research, Becca, was there anything that came as a surprise to you, that caught you off guard?

Becca: Yeah. With the report a problem, research, specifically, we went into that with the hypothesis that people were not logging needs maintenance, or needs archived logs because they were afraid of offending the cache owner. And as we talked to people and watched the way people did that workflow, we learned that that is partially the case, but it was also largely that people didn’t understand the difference between needs maintenance and needs archived. They maybe didn’t understand what the output of that was, who was being notified once they submitted one of those, where that log was gonna be posted. And then also people weren’t a fan of writing two separate logs, so if they’re already writing a found it log, having to go back through that process and writing a second one for needs maintenance, or needs archived. And so collecting that data was a little bit different than what we expected, and we used that to design the new workflow.

Chris: Okay. So, Nadja, what kind of things are people going to start noticing as they’re logging caches here in the next several weeks?

Nadja: Well, aside from a brand spanking new logging page that is mobile-responsive and localized and looks pretty great. One of the most exciting things is the way that Becca was referring to, how players report a problem. In the research that Becca was referring to, we learned a lot about how users do or don’t report a problem, and we noticed that there was some confusion that players were having with reporting, “It needs maintenance,” or “It needs archived.” Not knowing where that information was sent to or what benefits it has for the game. So what we wanted to do was really empower users to report problems, and in an easy way, that didn’t require them to write two different logs because we know how important it is for the community, not only with letting cache owners know when there’s something wrong with their cache, but also improving cache quality in general.

Nadja: So, something that players will see is a little flag on the bottom of… Below the log text box that allows a user to report a problem right in the context. And it’ll allow to select from some of the most commonly reported problems with caches like a wet log book or something like that. And that will be appended directly to the log text, and then on the other side, when it is on the cache details page, you’ll see not only your original log text but a separate log that shows the needs maintenance, or the needs archived log. Another great win is that players can now attach photos while they’re logging rather than waiting until after they’ve logged a geocache, which I think is a pretty big win. And we’ve also aligned a lot of things with mobile and how favorite points are awarded, things like that. So, overall, I think it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Chris: And there are some rule changes too with logging, correct? And we’ve announced a little bit of that before, but maybe we could just… People that haven’t heard, some of the changes that will be coming in that regard too.

Nadja: Yeah, exactly. So there will be some log type changes, things that we’ve wanted to do as a company for a really long time and things that our community has asked for. So, those include duplicate logs. So, for example, once you’ve found a log you won’t be able to log that find again and that would go the same for events, attending, and will attend, and webcam photo taken. And then also for cache owners, we’re making some changes there that align with the vision of the game. Cache owners will no longer be able to find DNF or needs maintenance their own caches.

Chris: Of course, change is always hard for anybody and it’s especially difficult when you’ve been logging a certain way for so long. I’m sure that there’s going to be educational opportunities here, via help center, and stuff like that. And then also a chance for people to give feedback. Correct?

Nadja: That’s absolutely correct. Throughout… When you’re using the new logging page, we’ll have an area for users to give feedback via a survey and also a link to the blog post with a lot more information on how to use the page and also connecting with any forum notes about the project as well.

Chris: So then, Stuart, getting back to the engineering side of things, we make these changes and how logging is handled, that sound pretty significant compared to what is… The way it’s been done for a long time, how does that change things on the engineering side?

Stuart: That’s a great question. Nadja mentioned earlier that we had some older code in place and that was preventing us from moving quickly, that’s pretty true. Part of the problem is that our technology, our code stack from previous years is deprecated technology, so it’s difficult to find pre-built assemblies and libraries that work with it and it’s difficult to find programmers who can work with it as well. So in today’s era, we’ve been moving to newer technologies and while moving to a newer technology, we had to make a decision, do we just port over what’s existing or we do freshen it up and give users what we believe we will converge on as a better experience? We went with the latter. The technology we chose is MVC with a single page app running on top of it, I won’t go into too many details, but it leverages an API that feeds the front end with data rather than being tightly coupled through post-backs as older web forms technology used to rely on.

Chris: And so there’s a few people out there nodding their heads and saying, “That sounds amazing,” but just, in general, it sounds like it’ll make things a lot smoother for the engineers here and enable us to move more quickly in the future, right?

Stuart: Indeed, it will allow us to move more quickly and it will allow us more flexibility in our UI, our user interface. The user interface maybe will be able to leverage functionality, the same functionality on multiple locations on our site in the future. That’s pretty exciting for an agility point of view as we want to roll out features in new areas, leveraging existing functions.

Chris: One thing we haven’t hit on yet is time zones and that is something that a lot of people may not even think about, it may not have ever affected them, but there are certain parts of the world where we hear about it quite a bit, about how the website or the app handles time zones, Nadja, how are things gonna change in that regard?

Nadja: Things are gonna change for the better. We’ve been making a lot of steps to get to a good place with time zones. For anyone that’s worked with time zones or even just done a brief Google search on time zones will know that it’s very complicated and especially with our game, it’s really important that we have time zones correct. So that doesn’t just mean for people living in Seattle, it means for people living all over the world. So what we’re doing is moving towards having time zones in the time zone of the cache. So that means that everywhere on our site in all the cache details pages, all the logs will be in the time zone of the cache which has taken a lot of work to get us here. We are very nearly done with that, it should be all in place across web and mobile in the next few weeks.

Chris: And so how does that differ for people that aren’t aware, who haven’t been affected, how does that differ from how it’s been up until this point?

Nadja: Right. So up until this point, if you were perhaps traveling to another country and you came back to your home country and were logging a cache, you might see that your date was off by a day, maybe ahead or behind. This will erase that confusion and prevent logs from being out of order, it will prevent maybe a published listing happening after some geocache logs were made. It will really just align all of those logs that come through and make sure that they’re in the correct order and in the time zone of the cache.

Stuart: So to speak to the technical side of time zones, again, this company is been around for quite a while and the code base has been around for quite a while and these features, they didn’t all start at the same time, they were tacked on at some point or another. So, in the beginning, there was just a website and the website you were allowed to put in whatever date you wanted, and it didn’t really matter what time zone or what time was specified with your find. That was… It was easy and cool and everything was just in Seattle, but as the game became more popular around the world, moved across continents, we ended up finding that people were entering the date where they think they found it, which is in their own time zone, which is where the cache is generally. So we ended up with this heterogeneous collection of time zones with the dates associated with each visit, and it’s a little confusing especially if you’re not in the same time zone as the geocache.

Stuart: But as long as everything’s listed out on the site exactly how it went in, everything kind of works out. What ended up getting really confusing was later, sometime later, we introduced mobile applications. And the mobile applications all uploaded their time zones in pacific time, no matter where you were, which would render out to the website in pacific time. So if a person had logged a find in the time zone of the cache where they thought they were and then their friend had logged it via the app at the same time in the same location, they would show up possibly as two different dates if they’re on different sides of the planet.

Stuart: So normally, these would be simple fixes, but as I mentioned earlier, ultimate goal is not to lose data so this data has come into our system with these assertions of time that aren’t necessarily correct, but they are what people have come to rely on as truth of what they’ve done. So while fixing time zones, we’ve worked really hard to coalesce everything into a similar paradigm while not losing past data. And we think we’ve done it by pushing everything into the time zone of the cache, all logs coming in through uploading field modes, through mobile apps, through our APIs, and through the web, will all come in and be stored in the timezone of the cache and displayed in the timezone of the cache. So, we believe that will create a nice, unified experience.

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Chris: There’s only one person I know who can make time zones sound cool, and that is Stuart. Great talk there with Nadja, Becca, and Stuart. If you have questions about the logging changes as they are happening, please read the geocaching blog. There is a lot of great information there. So if you go to blog.geocaching.com www.geocaching.com/blog, you can read all about the logging changes, and of course, lots of other geocaching-related stuff. Also the geocaching help center will have information about the logging changes there as well. Okay, next up, “Send to Garmin.” Those of us who like to cache with a GPS device know the workflow for getting caches onto the device can be fairly involved. That is why we were very excited to release the new “Send to Garmin” feature on the website. Ben Hewitt was the point person on that project and we talked all about it.

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Chris: So we released “Send to Garmin” and it’s a great feature for those of us that own Garmin devices and Ben worked on this project with the folks at Garmin and with several folks here at HQ. I wonder if we could go back to when this project was first beginning. What precipitated it? What were the things that made HQ and Garmin say, this would be a nice feature and this is something that we should start working on?

Ben Hewitt: Absolutely. Anybody who’s been around Geocaching.com long enough knows that we have a “Send to GPS” feature on cache details pages and on the little map previews on our browsing map. And anybody who’s used those long enough also knows that those have been breaking more and more over time. It’s a really handy feature if you’re able to use that. It just pops the file for the cache right on your device without having to do anything else and you can unplug and go geocaching. And we know that people love that. We’d heard a lot of support inquiries and foreign posts, and we’d seen just a lot of feedback about, “Hey, this used to work, it’s not working anymore, and it was really important to me.”

Ben: So we heard that message loud and clear. And so a while ago, I went to Bryan (Roth) and I said, “Hey Bryan, you need to set me up with a contact at Garmin so we can talk about how to fix this.” Unfortunately, it’s not something that either Garmin or us could fix with the existing “Send to GPS” functionality because the reason that doesn’t work anymore is that modern browsers don’t support that technology anymore. If you really want to do some research, you can go Googling around about this. If you check out Garmin’s communicator plugin page, they have a link to a blog from Google that explains why that technology is no longer supported, and it’s for your benefit and my benefit, and everybody’s benefit because it’s more secure. So good thing for your computer security, bad thing for “Send to GPS” technology.

Ben: So we knew we needed to do something different and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to do that by ourselves. I started working with some folks at Garmin a while ago, and I said, “Hey, how can we do this differently? We can’t do ‘Send to GPS’ anymore, you know that, we know that. What can we do differently?” They spent a little time thinking about options and they came back to us and said, “We think we could do this kind of functionality with our Garmin Express software.” If you have a Garmin device, you may already be familiar with that software. It’s really useful for keeping your device’s firmware updated. You can load new maps with it. It’s a good device management tool for your Garmin GPSs and watches, and other gizmos, if you have those. Garmin said they would build some new functionality into Garmin Express for us and for other partners that they have, but we became the guinea pig for Garmin to try something new out.

Ben: And so, it took quite a bit of back and forth. They would build something into Garmin Express, we built some new services on our end, and then they would send us a beta-build of the software and we would test. And we’d give them feedback, and they would give us feedback on our end. So there was a long period of back and forth where we were really trying to get it right, trying to set this up to be the best experience we can have it be for our mutual customers, for people who are geocachers and Garmin GPS users. That led us to the point that we got to this week, which is releasing our first version of “Send to Garmin” functionality that uses Garmin Express, and we added that on the new lists page where you can… Using Garmin Express, you can now, with a click of a button, send an entire list of geocaches to your Garmin device using Garmin Express.

Chris: So let’s talk about how it works then… You need a Garmin device, obviously. You need Garmin Express software. So somebody who’s new to this, what are the steps? I want to start using “Send to Garmin.” How do I go about it?

Ben: So there’s lots of ways that you could go through it. My personal favorite is to go to the homepage, the search page, run a search, find the caches that I’m interested in. Maybe it’s just everything in a big region or maybe it’s some specific things that I’m interested in, for the geocaching I’m doing today. Check the boxes along the side. I add them to a list, and then I go to the list page, and over on the right of each list, there’s a little dot dot dot menu, a little circle with three dots in it. If you click that, you’ll see the Send to Garmin button in there. Like you said, Chris, you have to have Garmin Express installed for this to work. You have to have your device added in Garmin Express.

Ben: Both Garmin and we, did quite a bit of work trying to onboard people to this flow, and so if you don’t have those things ready to go when you go try this, we’ve got some, but we hope our helpful pop-ups that coach you through the process of, “Here’s a link to go get Garmin Express.” Garmin has good instructions about how to set Garmin Express up. And then we have, on the lists page, some instructions about where to find it. So then, of course, though, you can create a list in lots of ways. You can add caches to a list from the map, you can add from cache details, you can add it through partner apps, and other mobile applications and desktop applications. So any way you can create a list is great, and then once you have that list, then you go back to the lists page and send it to Garmin from there.

Chris: It’s interesting when you… And I know you’ve talked to a lot of people about this too, how many different ways people have to get geocaches onto their device. And I know for me, personally, the way I would get my list onto my Garmin is, “Okay, you run a pocket query and then you gotta download the file, and then you gotta find the file and put it on to your… ” This is a… For me, personally, it’s a great streamline thing, but of course, there are other ways that… A lot of people just like being able to send that one cache onto their device. And I would imagine there’s a lot of different ways then that this functionality can find its way through the website. Maybe you could speak to at least just the possibilities of that, although we can’t say for certain exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day.

Ben: For sure, so we wanted to try something new out, that’s what this is. We know it’s brand new, we know it’s gonna take a little bit of learning for people to get used to it. And we thought that, given all we’ve done with lists over the past few years, that this was a really good first place to try it. What we released this week is not meant as a replacement for anything just yet, it’s meant as a cool new toy for people who find that workflow useful. That said, we’re also… We put in… We’re monitoring usage of this feature, we’re listening to feedback, we wanna know how it works for people and if this is a good tool for them. And if it is, then we’re absolutely… We’d love to add it to some other places, including, potentially, replacing the existing Send to GPS which still works, but you have to jump through some pretty serious hoops to get it to work. So this is a start, what we did this week, it’s not the end game, it’s a start of trying something new, it’s a start of trying a different collaboration with Garmin. I’m pretty excited about what we have to offer today, but we also know that there’s more work to do.

Chris: So there are some parameters with using this software and this new functionality, of course, you need to have a device that is supported by Garmin Express, and in our testing, I know we found that that can go back many years. There are some very old devices that do work, but there are some that don’t and that’s an unfortunate reality, right?

Ben: That’s the long and short of it. I know that Garmin has worked hard to make Garmin Express support as many of their devices as possible, but like a lot of software, and like a lot of device life spans, there are things that are no longer supported. So I feel the pain of people whose device may not be supported by Garmin Express. I’ve had some trusty old GPSs that I’ve beaten into the ground until the buttons were falling off. So I know that feeling of the beloved partner. But we are doing our best and I know Garmin is doing their best to support a wide variety of products, but the truth is that not all of them are supported by Garmin Express.

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Chris: So there’s some background on the Send to Garmin functionality. Thanks to Ben for his time. Thanks again to Nadja, Becca, and Stuart for chatting about the logging changes. Good episode, hope you enjoyed it, we would love to hear what you would like us to cover on this podcast. Please drop us a line. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast at Geocaching.com. A few of you have written in with ideas, we’re gonna try to cover those in the coming weeks but keep those ideas coming, podcast at Geocaching.com. Thanks for stopping by, we will talk again soon. In the meantime, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

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/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 9): GIFF

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Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Guten tag, bonjour, hola. Thanks for joining us on Inside Geocaching HQ, I am Chris Ronan, username Rock Chalk, one of the staff here at HQ. On this episode we are talking about GIFF, the Geocaching International Film Festival with Erin Thompson who is the point person on GIFF for HQ. I learned some interesting things during this chat, sadly there were some terrible puns that reared their head at the end of the talk. It wasn’t a good moment, It wasn’t a good time, but we made it through, just some puns that make you groan. So if you wanna fast forward when you get to that part, I wouldn’t blame you, but up until that point it was a great talk. So without further ado, here is me and Erin chatting about GIFF.

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CR: Okay. So Erin, before we get in to what you do now, let’s start with what you started doing here at HQ, you’re… ’cause a lot of people will recognize you from having visited Geocaching HQ.

Erin Thompson: Yeah, so two years ago when I started here I began in the Visitor Center. I was the Guest Experience Coordinator, and it was a super fun job. I love meeting geocachers, so all the geocachers who would come into visit headquarters, I would greet them, support them, they’d get to have a good time in the Visitor Center here at HQ. We’d talk about all the things they could do around the neighborhood, the GeoTour, all of this stuff, so it was really great to greet visitors from all over the world. And then, four months ago now, I moved over to the Community Volunteer Support Team and working specifically with translators and supporting the volunteer translators.

CR: And you’ve become a pretty hardcore cacher? But were you before? Before you…

ET: Well, compared to you…

CR: Well, but I’m just saying compared to [chuckle] rational people.

ET: Compared to rational people…

CR: Let’s not include me. [chuckle] I’m not rational. So let’s… Compared to rational people you’re pretty hardcore Geocacher. I mean you’re really into the game and…

ET: I am, yeah. I started in 2011, a friend introduced me, and very very quickly I fell in love. But originally I did often when I was traveling, I would look up neat caches in the spots where I was going. And I really didn’t have a super deep understanding of some of the different unique cache types, but I was pretty involved and I had found quite a few caches and I would consider myself very committed when I started working here. And then it just went bonkers, and I loved it, and I go geocaching all the time now. I don’t think I’m as hardcore as some but it is definitely a part of my life, yeah.

CR: Yeah, it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle, right?

ET: Yes. Oh yeah. Yup.

[laughter]

CR: Okay, so today though, we’re talking about GIFF, Geocaching International Film Festival and your involvement with GIFF which… That began last year or was it even the year before at all?

ET: Even the year before, right after the 2015 film festival happened in November. I was asked if I wanted to help support the project going into 2016. And I said “yes, it’s such a fun promotion, I really love GIFF.” And I was very excited to be asked to help with it and it was an exciting project to take on while I was still in the Guest Experience Coordinator role and… Because I was already hearing so many stories from geocachers and thinking about the ways that those could be represented on film was really exciting and seeing the enthusiasm around the film festival really caught my attention so I started… Well now it’s almost two years being somewhat attached to the film festival. And this year I got to really step up and be the lead, before it had been coordinated by two people, generally and then this year I got to step up and lead it, so that’s been really fun.

CR: So for people who aren’t familiar with GIFF let’s give them the rundown of what exactly it is.

ET: Yeah, at Block Party in 2013 was the first… Yeah, that was the very first time the film festival happened, and it was part of Block Party here at Geocaching Headquarters. There was a call for films made by geocachers. A finalist selection of, I think of 16 films were selected and they were shown at a venue here near Geocaching HQ. And so people who came to Block Party may remember that event and attended and got to see these really fun, heartwarming videos made by geocachers. And that happened again at the Block Party in 2014. And then in 2015 it was slated to happen as part of Block Party but it rained out. The venue was outdoor, it was raining, it was very, very windy and so they had to cancel it. And I think somewhat to the benefit of geocachers around the world, a new plan was hatched to take the film reel that had already been selected for 2015 and share that globally with geocachers who wanted to create events all across the globe. And it was a huge success. From one event at headquarters with Block Party then went to event host, 400-500 event host around the world hosting this film festival weekend and getting to share those videos, the finalist videos, with thousands… Tens of thousands of geocachers around the world, and that’s where it’s come to today. We are quickly approaching the GIFF weekend of 2017. We have 17 finalists this year and so yeah… We’re really looking forward to that.

CR: Yeah, I think it’s fun to think back to 2015 and Block Party and that rain now, and how disappointed everybody was. But like you said, it really is to the benefit of the international community that we hadn’t thought before about what it’s now become. It’s kind of a happy accident that it’s become what it is now.

ET: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s really fun to see it where it is.

CR: So the people that are the finalists now, how did this process start? How many… How does a person get to that point where they are one of the finalist for this GIFF weekend?

ET: Yeah, the… GIFF is actually kind of a year-round promotion even though… I guess from the standpoint of what I’m doing here at headquarters to support that, because it’s pretty elaborate. The call for submissions for videos for filmmakers to submit their geocaching videos really goes out in early spring. And so before that, we are putting all of the new information up on the website. There’s an official Geocaching Film Festival website, and this year and the last year, we got to create a fun little video to promote submissions. Then so early spring, we are announcing this and pushing out to the social channels that it’s time to start making your videos. So that happens in early spring, but I’ll tell you that people have already told me that they are thinking about the films they wanna make for the future. So I think for filmmakers, this process is kind of year-round and it’s become something really fun to think about what they might submit for the next year. But that’s generally the schedule is in spring we put out the information, the call, we’ll often pick a theme. This year, the theme is the ‘Art of Geocaching.’ And that’s to be loosely interpreted. Geocaching can be an art in many different ways.

ET: So then we started receiving videos from filmmakers. They have to be under three minutes long. And we started accepting them through August 1st of this year, was the cut off for those films to be in. We received 50 films this year, submissions. And then here at HQ, we put together a panel of judges who are all HQ staff and we have a judging selection process during the month of August where we come down to the finalists. This year, it was 17. In the past, it’s been 16. It’s kinda fun that it’s 2017 and there are 17 finalists. It wasn’t intended, but we look for 60 minutes of content for a film reel. And we picked those final 17 in August, and then we announced that to the winners, the finalists, and also to the geocaching community in early September. And then that brought us into… Beginning of September is when event hosts… No, beginning of August event hosts could start submitting videos for November weekend of the film festival. So it kinda just rolls through the whole year, and yeah.

CR: Okay. So as the films are being judged here at HQ and are being whittled down to the finalists, what are some of the characteristics that make for a film that ends up among the finalists?

ET: Great question. So we actually have four official criteria for GIFF films that we present to filmmakers to help them think about what they might do for a film. So production quality is important. The way it looks on the screen, the quality of the video. Although we do have several finalists this year that submit and film their videos on iPhones or other mobile phone devices. So…

CR: I think I actually saw a feature film… Or I’ve seen maybe a couple of ’em that they’ve talked about how they’re filming on iPhones now. It’s the kind of thing that’s almost becoming a little more… Not necessarily common place, but certainly it’s not as much of an audity as maybe it used to be in the past.

ET: A barrier to entry, or a stretch…

CR: Right. Right.

ET: To be able to film something that would meet the quality standards that we are hoping for to show the international community. To be able to film that on something that at least a lot of people have access to. So production quality, content is really important. Is it family-friendly? Is it informative, inspiring, how…

CR: We’ve seen some really hilarious… [laughter] You kinda skip past family-friendly. [laughter] I just have to step in for a second and say we’ve seen some pretty hilarious stuff that didn’t quite unfortunately meet that one…

ET: That standard. Yeah.

CR: But it’s an important standard for our community and for our game. [chuckle]

ET: Yeah I mean, the hope is that the film festival is an event that a family could attend. I see many photos with kids attending these events, and so that’s something we do watch for, and is important in the overall game. Creativity is important. So is it a new theme that we haven’t seen before? Is it something represented in a new way that we haven’t seen? And then contribution to the global community would be the fourth one. Is it going to be relevant to a global audience? Is it something that geocachers around the globe can relate to, if that’s an emotion or a feeling or… Whatever it might be, these themes that we see in geocaching that people can relate to across the globe is something we definitely look for. Now I would say there are themes that we see a lot, that because we see them so often, they have to be done very very well in order to meet the bar. So I would say that first-to-find hunts or cache, just cache compilations of people out on a day of caching often do have… Because there are so many of them that get submitted that are that story because we love them. That is a normal day in the life geocacher activity that we all can relate to, I think most of us can. That we see that theme a lot and so the bar for that story or that storyline is often much more difficult and that’s where the creativity piece comes in. A story… A new perspective we may not have seen before often will rank a little bit higher.

CR: And so then you get to the point where you’ve got the reel and also you’re starting to look at GIFF events and that whole process. So what goes into a GIFF event? Because you also are, I think maybe you’re the decider…

[chuckle]

CR: On making sure that a GIFF event, that a submission fulfills all the various criteria. So what does that entail?

ET: Yeah. So it entails a few things, one is that, events are reviewed like, any other event would be reviewed on geocaching.com. It’s seen by a reviewer, they review it for all of the normal criteria. Now, after that there’s another step that GIFF does have as a layer, which is, event hosts have to submit a form to us and that is the form that we are reviewing. Now, it is not that difficult if the event is actually a GIFF event where the film will be shown. That’s one of the biggest pieces, is this event actually to show the finalist film videos. That should be the focus of the event, to get people together to celebrate this really fun, finalist video moment.

ET: So that’s what we’re primarily looking for when those event hosts send that form over to us. Those will get accepted if the event is on the right day. GIFF weekend is November 2nd through November 6th. So if a form comes in and there’s an event that’s outside of that window, unfortunately we won’t send them the film because then the people attending won’t get the souvenir for GIFF weekend.

ET: And so there’s just a couple things we screen for in that event process. We have 581 events currently vetted, which is the exact same number as last year, so that’s fine. And we expect a couple more stragglers might roll in over the next week. Other than that we’re looking at… There’s a few other pieces that go into it, so we’re looking at merchandise. We have some fun GIFF merchandise. That’s a project we get to work on with our creative team, getting the fun gnome stuff this year. GIFF has always been a really whimsical, fun, creative project. And so it’s fun to see the merchandise represent that. But I am most impressed by event hosts. I am seeing all of these images from all over the globe.

ET: We have events in over 50 countries this year and they’re already sending me pictures of the log books they’ve made or the voting sheets they’re gonna use and I’m just overwhelmed by how creative the geocaching community is for GIFF. I mean in general but especially for GIFF. They’re really going above and beyond, so that’s really fun to see right now.

CR: Yeah. Wasn’t there one that was like a black tie event?

ET: Yeah, I heard about one that’s a black tie event, there’s several that do all kinds of different voting. Last year there was a 3D event. So all of the geocachers brought homemade 3D glasses. They were just silly and fun to the event and so everybody had on their fun 3D glasses. Yeah, all kinds of fun ideas.

CR: Yeah, it’s always remarkable when you give an idea to the community, where they go with it is always a blast to see.

ET: Yeah, absolutely.

CR: If we go back to the films, one of the things that you and I had talked about before was the translation that goes into this right? Could you talk a little bit about that whole process with getting… Obviously these films come in different languages and then getting them translated into other languages.

ET: Yes, so one of the requirements of the submission process is that the film can be in any language but if it’s in a different language than English we do request subtitle files in English for that so that we are able to create a whole subtitle file in English. But from that point we actually transcribe all of those videos and get those uploaded so that our volunteer translators can then help to translate those into… I think we have 20 languages available this year for subtitle files for GIFF, so that those local communities all over the globe… I mean, we have Korean and Hebrew and many of the European languages available this year, which is so fun to see it. So thanks to the translators who have translated these files, it will now be available across the globe.

CR: When you talked about events, another thing I’ve seen is some of the cool voting that they do at individual events. Now HQ doesn’t have a community-wide vote on these things but we’ve seen times when individual events will vote and then even send awards to the filmmakers in other parts of the world, which is really cool.

ET: Yeah, it’s so fun. I’ve already seen several ballots that people are making for their local events. Many events I think will vote amongst the local event to pick who they think the overall audience winner should be or some events even create criteria so they might pick one… They might have three winners, one that is the overall winner or one that is the most heart felt or like the comedy award, it’s up to event hosts to decide what they want to do. The only piece that we support at Geocaching HQ I guess technically is we do a reviewer award. It’s called the ‘Signal Award’, and so we send the file of finalists out to reviewers and they get to pick their favorites and we compile those votes and then we will announce that on Tuesday, November 7th after the GIFF event.

ET: So now we do that on purpose because we don’t want to influence the local event hosts and the local communities from picking what they think will be their favorite in it. It’s amazing to see the diversity because we all… Different communities think in different ways about geocaching. So it’s fun to see them pick their video that they think is the best because it represents, I think the really wide range of styles of geocaching and what community is like. And then yes they create their own awards I’ve seen gnome trophies being sent [chuckle] to the winners. I’ve already seen a few of the awards that are ready for this year’s, that event host will be sending, so it is really fun to see how well received the videos are and also how much fun it is for the filmmakers to receive the praise from the community.

CR: Did we cover it all?

ET: I think so.

CR: I think we did, the more I think about it I think we probably should’ve filmed this, it’s about GIFF, we should have created a film reel of this interview.

ET: Yeah, it’s one of the things we like to say about GIFF around here is, it’s a little GIFFerent.

[chuckle]

CR: Oh my God! Has anybody ever said that until just now?

ET: Always.

CR: Really? I’ve never heard that.

ET: Alex and I always say that. And the winners, the filmmakers who are finalists get a free year of premium membership and we also mail them a coin, one of the GIFF coins and we like to call those ‘GIFFts’ with two Fs.

CR: Oh my gosh! Well I knew Alex was… And we should give a shout out real quick Alex and Reid…

ET: Yeah.

CR: For the work that they’ve done over the past few years, and Reid especially, it was kind of her brainchild, wasn’t it the whole GIFF thing?

ET: Yeah, and making the films, and Reid has continued to help create the trailer video for the GIFF weekends, helped create the call for submissions video, this year and last year, has done a lot of work to support it. And also I think some of the creativity and just lightheartedness of GIFF really comes from the support from Reid and Alex over the years yeah…

CR: And I knew Alex was into puns but I had no idea, the GIFFts?

ET: Yeah.

CR: GIFFerent?

ET: It’s perfect.

CR: Oh my gosh!

ET: Yeah.

CR: Oh, well that’s a good way to end this I think.

[chuckle]

CR: It can’t…

ET: Well one more, well thanks a GIFFilion.

CR: Oh my gosh! Yeah.

[chuckle]

[music]

CR: See, I warned you about those puns, it got a little rough there, didn’t it, there at the end? But we got through it. So what would you like to hear about on Inside Geocaching HQ? There is one way to let us know, email us at podcast@geocaching.com that is the address podcast@geocaching.com. Tell us what you would like us to cover, we will see if we can incorporate your ideas into an upcoming episode, we will not be doing any episodes about puns, this was the only one and it was just one of those deals where Erin slipped it in there at the end, but if I know it’s coming we don’t allow it. Alright? Sounds good? Okay I’m gonna go somewhere and try to get these puns out of my head, in the meantime from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 3): Geocaching® app & retirement of Classic app

Ben and Bryan
Ben and Bryan

[music]

CHRIS RONAN: Hello, everybody. This is Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast. Welcome to it. I’m Chris Ronan, the PR manager here at HQ. I’m your host for the podcast. We’ve got what I think is a very interesting show today. We are talking about the retirement of the Geocaching Classic app, and the continuing advancement of the free Geocaching® app. But before we get to that, be sure to watch the geocaching blog this week, where we will announce the community’s decision on the future of the Mission 9: Tunnel of Light APE cache. So depending on when you listen to this podcast, the news may already be out, or you may need to anxiously anticipate it for just a little bit longer. Also on the blog, we’ve got details about the recently announced Dönerstag souvenir. Attend a geocaching event on April 13th of this year, and you will earn the Dönerstag souvenir, so put that on your calendar.

Okay, on to the business at hand. The Geocaching Classic app will be retired March 23, 2017. That is less than two weeks from now. Many of you have asked questions about the app retirement. We have tried to answer as many of those questions as we can on the blog, but we thought it would be nice to chat about it here on the podcast. So today we have Bryan Roth, Geocaching HQ’s president and one of its co-founders, and we have Ben Hewitt, HQ’s product manager for mobile apps. I’m asking them the questions that you, the community, has been asking about the retirement of the Classic app.

Bryan, obviously, has a wealth of knowledge about the geocaching apps, since he has been here since the beginning. Ben is not only intimately involved with the apps, since he works with the mobile team, but he’s also a very dedicated cacher. He has more than 10,000 finds with his wife, Jayme, who also works here at Geocaching HQ. So, here we go.

[music]

CR: Okay, so we’re talking about the geocaching apps. Plural, right now, but soon will not be. We have the Classic app that will be retiring on March the 23rd, and then going forward, we will have just the Geocaching® app, which formerly known as the intro app, and the free app, however you want to call it. But before we get into talking about what happens on March 23rd, I thought it would be interesting, Bryan, since you’re the elder statesman in the room… I don’t know how you feel about that term, but we’ll use it.

BRYAN ROTH: I’m not sure how I feel about the elder part.

CR: Well, you’re a statesman, I guess, then.

BR: Alright, I’ll take statesman.

CR: Since you’re the statesman in the room, and you were around back when the currently Classic app, as we call it, was introduced back in 2008. It’s been almost nine years ago now, right?

BR: Wow, it has been nine years. That’s true. Well, back in 2007, when Apple came out with the original iPhone, we were really focused on the website, focused on building the Geocaching community, and trying to provide the right guidance to ultimately have it continue to grow. And people said to us, “Oh, are you gonna make an iPhone app?” And I don’t think anybody at the time, aside from maybe Steve Jobs, knew just how powerful the iPhone and smartphone platforms would become, and at the time we said, “This is not something we wanna focus on now. Let’s keep focusing on the website and supporting geocachers who were using their Garmins and Magellans and DeLormes and Lowrances, etc.”

And at one point, we noticed that there was a gentleman named Brian McLaughlin who was out in Oregon, I believe, and he had built a basic geocaching app that was… It was scraping the website, and he wrote to us, and he asked for permission, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got this app. I wonder if you guys would be willing to help support it.” We didn’t have an API at the time, but we looked at it and we said, “Oh, this is interesting.” People who own these iPhones, which were relatively few and far between at the time, they could go geocaching with the iPhone. And it was a relatively rudimentary app, and we said… Internally, we said, “Wow, this is kind of interesting.” We weren’t really planning on doing it anytime soon, but maybe we should talk about working with Brian more directly.

And shortcut to a few months later, and we basically said to Brian, “Look, we would like to buy what you have built so far, to give us a head start, on delivering something to the geocaching community.” And as part of the agreement, some of you old-timers may remember that in the early days of the Classic app, in the help screen, we always had a special thanks to Brian McLaughlin for giving us the opportunity to really roll out an initial iPhone app. That was in 2008, and we built on that original code base for many years after that, and we did a lot of refactoring, and rebuilt the app time and again. But the early days of that app was actually not built by us, and it was built by a geocacher who was an external, one of the early mobile app developers.

CR: And then, many years later, came what was originally known as the intro app, and is now, going forward, going to be the Geocaching® app, which is built on different technology, correct? And at the time, when it first started… I think this is important too. At the time it had a different goal than the Classic app had. And it’s been built up over the course of years and now it’s a much different app than it used to be. But I think it’s important for a lot of people who don’t realize, it’s a different technology than the Classic app is.

BR: Absolutely, and that was part of the impetus for creating the free app. Historically what we found was that because that original code base had been developed and added to, and some refactoring over time, it got to the point that our mobile engineering team was really concerned about making any changes to that Classic app because the code was… It was such that it was difficult to do. And things took two or three times as long as they would had that app been built in the modern day code base. And of course the code base had changed over time, the technologies had changed over time. That was one challenge.

The second challenge was that we realized having a $10 app created a significant barrier for new users. They would come to the app store, they would go get their iPhone, they would say, “Oh, I’m a geocacher. I wonder if there’s something… If there’s an app for geocaching.” And they would go and they would say, “Oh, it’s $10.” Well, most people were paying a dollar for an app or $2 or $3, and $10 felt like a lot of money. And so a lot of people just wouldn’t download the application. They didn’t wanna pay for it. And so we felt like we were missing out on an opportunity to educated new geocachers and to bring them into the game at no cost. And ideally get them to become geocachers. Get them to enjoy the game so that they would realize that, “Okay.” A premium membership was a natural addition to the way they played.

It wasn’t a tremendous amount of money, and they would help to support the site, help to support the ongoing development and ultimately unlock all of the features we were providing on the web and in this intro app. So we set about building an intro app using new technology and putting the Classic app, not on hold, because we would do fixes from time to time. But the primary focus of our engineering team became building this new intro app as a free-mium way to get people into the mobile app, get them to learn about geocaching and then get them to become actual players.

BEN HEWITT: In terms of thinking about the technology that supports the Classic app, like Bryan said, the app itself has become really dated and the code base of the app is really tough for us to maintain. But keep in mind too that when you’re looking at that app, when you’re using that app, you’re just seeing a tip of the iceberg of what it takes to support that app. In addition to the app itself getting harder and harder to maintain, the API that supports that app is the same, the services that support that API, all the way down to our data. In a lot of ways we’ve had to make upgrades from the ground up and supporting that app is not just keeping that app itself out in the wild, but keeping all the systems that support it up and running in addition to supporting it when questions come in.

CR: And so sometime around a year ago, officially, it was announced that going forward, at some point, the Classic app would be retired. And the free app would become the app going forward. Some people have wondered why was the decision made to move forward with the free app rather than the Classic app? I think you’ve already answered it, but maybe just reiterate it a little bit. There is a lot more potential for the free app going forward than there ever would have been for the Classic.

BR: Sure, there were actually a number of reasons. And I mentioned maybe one or two earlier. But another one of the reasons… There are a couple of reasons. So one of the complaints that we were getting over time was premium members, the folks that were paying to support the website were basically saying to us, “Hey, I’m paying $30 a year,” which incidentally has been the price since we launched premium membership 14 or 15 years ago. “Hey, I’m paying this $30 a year, and now I have to go pay for an additional app in order to play the game. That doesn’t seem fair.” And one of the things that we wanted to do, is we wanted to… If you’re a premium member, we really… Our goal is to make sure that you have the most accessible, most robust geocaching ecosystem at your fingertips. We want you to have access to all of the web-based functionalities. We wanna unlock all of the mobile functionalities.

Ultimately we’ve moved into an API program where we’re allowing third-party developers to build applications, services, websites royalty free so they don’t have to pay us, but the primary goal is for them to provide additional services to premium members. Another one of the challenges that we had, was the Classic app was a $10 one time purchase. And what we started to see, was somebody who would buy that Classic app for $10 when they had their iPhone 3; Well, when they were on their iPhone 7S or 7 Plus, they paid $10 nine years ago and there was really no incentive for them to continue to support the site on an ongoing basis. In the Classic app, basically almost everything was unlocked with the exception of pocket queries and what we said is that, as a business, as a company that’s employing 75 people full-time in Seattle, which is a challenging business market in a number of ways, we said, “Hey, our goal is, we wanna make geocaching accessible not just to ourselves and even our children, but to our children’s children and our grandchildren. How can this… I guess, our children’s children are our grandchildren.

[laughter]

BR: Maybe their grandchildren. So the question is how do we create a sustainable business model that will allow us to continue to support the game? This one time $10 fee unfortunately was not sustainable long-term. Not if we want to continue growing as a company, providing a better feature set, expanding the definition of what the game is, and what’s available to players worldwide. And so what we said is, if we can build an app on a new code base that would allow us to move beyond the challenges of this old code base, if we could make that application free so that new people could sign up and check it out and get a taste of what geocaching is, and then if we could also unlock all of the features of that application in conjunction with the premium membership which unlocks everything else that we provide, that felt like a really solid solution.

And what I’ll say at this point is we’re not done. We hear what the community is saying, we know that we have talked about retiring the Classic app and we will be retiring the Classic app full-time. We pulled it from the market a little over a year ago but it’s going to allow us to focus completely on these new applications and providing the best service not just to premium members but to all members, to people who are coming to geocaching for the first time. We wanna do a better job with education of new users. We wanna do a better job with the features and functionality in the app. And quite honestly we feel like $30 is a reasonable price to ask people, especially since it’s been the same price for so many years to help support the company, help support the website, and get access to all these features.

Now, we will be the first to admit that this is not perfect. We are not done. We have some challenges and there are things that people want that are not in this new app. We plan to either put them in the new app or enable this third-party ecosystem of API developers to provide those to the members who are really active geocachers. I guess it’s important to say that we’ve changed some things at Geocaching HQ, and our goal is to deliver the best products and services for geocachers worldwide. We’re not done. In many ways we feel like we’re just getting started and our expectation is that the changes that we make going forward are gonna be the changes that ultimately delight the users. We realize that everything that we do is… Anytime we make a change, there’s always gonna be people that are upset with us. Our goal is to make geocaching sustainable in the long-term while at the same time delivering the best products and services to the geocaching community and there are more great things to come on the horizon. And if you were here at Geocaching HQ, you would see a lot of people who are really excited for us to move forward.

CR: Okay, so March 23rd comes, what will happen? What will people who currently own the Classic app, what happens to them that day?

BH: That’s a great question and we know there’ve been a lot of questions in the community about that and we’ve been really mindful here at HQ of making sure that we get that right. The most important thing to know is that for anybody who’s out geocaching everyday, the Classic app won’t be a usable geocaching app for much longer after March 23rd. It will no longer communicate with our API. You won’t be able to run searches, you won’t be able to submit logs, any of that kind of stuff. So you’re really not gonna be able to go geocaching with it after March 23rd. That said, we know that a lot of people have a lot of data in the Classic app that’s really important to them. They’ve made offline lists over the years that are important to them. They’ve saved waypoints that are important to them. And this is one of the main reasons that we needed to move on from the Classic app is unfortunately, the Classic app doesn’t handle all that data in the best way. It’s all stored on your device. So we’re working actively to make sure, number one, that people will continue to be able to access that data on their device after March 23rd. And number two, we’re investigating ways to help people get that data off their device after March 23rd. So the upshot of all that is you won’t be able to use it to go geocaching but you should still be able to access it to get that data that you have in the Classic app and make sure you still have access to it.

CR: And what features will people see between now and then, ’cause there’s been a lot of questions about that too and there are a couple of key things coming, right? Between now and March 23rd in the new, in the Geocaching® app.

BH: Absolutely. The number one that we hear from everybody is, “I need to do field notes like I had in the Classic app.” We’ve done a lot of research on this. We really wanted to get behind the motivations. We know that it was a big request from the community, but before we just repeated exactly what was in the Classic app, we wanted to make sure that we understood what people were trying to accomplish. We feel like we’ve got a lot of good information on that, both from what you all have told us in the forums, what you’ve told us on the blog, what you tell us on social media, and in addition to the research that we did one-on-one with a lot of different users. So basically what you’re gonna see, honestly in the next week, hopefully by the time you hear this, this will already be on your phone. We’re upgrading the field notes that you’ve known for years and loved, we’re now gonna be calling them drafts in the app and on the website.

Everything that you’ve liked about field notes will continue to work just as you’ve loved it. You’ll be able to start a log in the app and then finish it up on the website. But we’ve also made a lot of changes behind the scenes to make that much more robust. You’ll be able to finish your drafts in the app. You were never able to do that before with field notes in the Classic app. You’ll be able to… After a little more time, you’ll be able to add a favorite point or a photo to a draft, and you were never able to do that with field notes before. So we really listened to a lot of what was working about field notes and also listened to a lot of things that people said that they wished field notes would do more. And the new app will have all that goodness plus some more.

CR: Okay, and then so after March 23rd, obviously things don’t just stop. What is on the horizon? What are things that your team is focused on right now for the app after March 23rd?

BH: Sure. There’s a lot of next tier features that we know we haven’t done yet, too. People are interested in things like personal cache notes. People are interested in a photo gallery like the Classic app had. And we’re not necessarily gonna to recreate everything exactly like the Classic app did, but we’re absolutely listening to the things that the community is asking for. We also know that given the history of the free app, like you guys have already mentioned, it started its life as the intro app. And there’s some things about this app that we haven’t had a chance to revisit since its inception. It used to have a different purpose. It was for a smaller audience of people that was just getting to know geocaching.

And there are some ways that this app works that we’d like to revisit and broaden that audience. Make it work better for a broader group of people. We hear you when you say that, “Hey, I’m not a newbie and I don’t want this app to treat me like a newbie.” So we’re gonna be revisiting a lot of the core experience in the app, and trying to make sure that it works for people who are brand new to the game. That’s still incredibly important to us because we want to make great geocachers through this app, but we also want it to be a really solid everyday experience for a lot of geocachers.

CR: One question we hear a lot is, “How do you guys decide what you’re going to do next?” Or, “What the features are going to be?” Because there are so many different possibilities about what you could do, not just on the app, but on the website. I hear this question about all of our products so maybe talk a little bit about, how does your team decide, and how do you gather data and research, and how do you go about trying to figure out what’s gonna be next, and what’s gonna be next after that?

BH: As you might imagine that’s a big challenge. It’s a fun challenge and one that I am lucky to be working on everyday. We hear feedback from more places than you can possibly imagine. We meet geocachers in person all the time. Everybody at HQ does. We hear feedback from all of our coworkers about what they hear from geocachers. We run surveys. We do in person research and user testing. And all of these things stack up to a list of challenges basically. We’ve been trying to be very thoughtful in the last few years. Not necessarily about just implementing features, but about really understanding what’s the task you’re trying to accomplish as a geocacher? What’s holding you back from just getting out there and having fun and finding geocaches? In a perfect world, the app and the website shouldn’t be something that you have to think about. It should just be your tool that engages you and lets you get out and do the stuff you want to do.

So our goal is to understand what are the top problems that we can solve for geocachers. What are the things that they’re not able to do now? And how can we do that? Sometimes that just means bringing over features that already exist. Sometimes it’s a solved problem then we just need to implement something that already exists. And sometimes there’s good reason to revisit what we’ve done before and say, “Is that still the best way to solve this problem, or can we do something better?” And that’s the drafts feature that I just talked about, is a really good example of that. Where we tried to bring along a lot of the really good stuff that existed before, but also build something more useful and more robust than anything we’ve done in the past.

CR: Okay, so Bryan, in the Classic app, if you’re a basic member, you can see all caches of every DT as long as they’re not premium member only caches. So one of the big differences in the free app is that unless you have premium membership you can’t see caches that are above 1.5/1.5 DT, and so people have had questions about that in the community. And it’s a difficult subject. It’s a complicated subject, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit to how we got to where we are now and the fact that it’s always a conversation, and it’s always something that we are looking at as a company.

BR: Sure. I think if we go back to the beginning of how we got to a DT limitation. I think where we started was we had two challenges that we were trying to address. The first challenge is as a application that was focused on on-boarding new users. We had a concern about a new user going out and for their first cache trying a 3/3, or a 4/4, or worse, a 5/5, and having a really bad experience. So one of things that we wanted to do, was we wanted to create a model where their first experience would be a positive one. Ideally find a large cached container that’s easy to find, and it has trinkets and toys, and if they’re with kids everybody has a good time and then they say, “Oh, I’m interested. I like this. I wanna do more.” And a big concern was, well what if they find a 3/3, or worse yet, don’t find a 3/3, or a 2/2, and they have this bad experience and give up on geocaching because they feel like it’s out of their league, or just too hard, or too complicated. So we wanted to solve that. At the same time, the other challenge we had was, we needed to be able to generate revenue to pay for the operational costs of building the app, and keeping the lights on at the company, and things like that.

And so as I said earlier, we realize that $10 one time forever was not an ongoing sustainable model. We said, “Okay, we wanted to solve the premium membership, they should get a free app if you’re a premium member.” So we said, “Okay, what if we combine these two things,” and we say, “Okay, if you’re a new member or a basic member we’re gonna give you access to caches that we believe you’re more likely to find.” And then premium members are more likely engaged users who have played the game before they decide to spend $30 a year or whatever we charge a quarter or a month. So the thought was if we combine these two things maybe we can solve both of those problems at the same time. Now, I don’t think we’ve done a very good job with that. And I think that if you were to talk to the people who work here and our mobile application developers, I think we realized that by conflating those two challenges and coming up with the solution, we didn’t get where we needed to be.

We certainly solve some of it. We’re getting people to subscribe and become premium members and that allows us to hire more engineers and focus on building a better app, and a better website, and the better foundational technology that supports all of this. But at the same time we get people who are coming to the app, and they’re saying, “Oh, I’m in a neighborhood where all there is, is 2.5/2.5’s, and I can’t see any caches, and we’re having other people have an experience where they live in an area where everything’s relatively easy to find and they see everything. And so we haven’t done a good job of solving that challenge.

At the same time, we’ve pissed off a lot of people and they’re frustrated. And so for us as a company, we believe that we can do better. We have some initiatives here that will be directly looking at those problems and saying, “How can we do a better job?” This is not something that we’re gonna solve overnight, as easy as it sounds to like, “Hey, just open everything up.” It’s like, if we said “Alright, everything in the app is unlocked for all members.” Well, that’s great. We would make people pretty happy, but we might not have anybody helping to support the website. And then what happens to the company? That’s a challenge. So one of the luxuries that we have as a business is that we’re a bootstrap company. Jeremy, Elias, and I started this over 16 years ago. To date we have never taken any outside investment and that means that we don’t have somebody coming to us and saying, “Hey, you need to make more money. Charge everybody for geocaching.” Or, “Start raising your prices or do things like that.” We don’t have people that can tell us what to do.

And between the three of us, our interest is in creating a business that is sustainable, absolutely, because we believe that’s important to keep this game going. But it’s also more importantly, we wanna make geocaching awesome. We want people to be happy. We want more players having more fun getting outside. Our mission as a company is to inspire and enable discovery, exploration, and adventure. And in order to do that, we need to have employees here building features and functionality that are gonna help to get people outside. But we also want people who are happy enough about this game to go tell their friends, “Look at how cool this is. Let’s get outside.” So our goal is to take a really hard look at where that paywall is. What is it that we’re going to charge for? What is it that we’re going to make for free? And at the same time maintain another model that allows us to have this ecosystem of third party API developers who are able to create things that may be more appealing to certain type of users or users who want a very specific piece of functionality that we don’t plan on building in the near term. Those are all options.

So for us what I can tell you is going forward we are absolutely taking a look at this. We don’t feel like it’s in the right place now. And we do have intentions of improving it, knowing that we’re doing that. Knowing that we are intending to make this more of a win-win for the community and this company is something that has a lot of people here at HQ really excited, myself included because we wanna do better. We know that we can make this game better. We know that we can make the geocaching platform that we provide and that we power through the API, we know that we can make it better. And so maybe you’re hearing this for the first time, but I’m telling you that in the coming months and in the coming years, this company is dedicated to making the best products and services, getting more people outside, and really delighting the global geocaching community. And that’s going to happen. We’ve been doing this for 16 and a half years. We have 75 full-time employees here who are dedicated to doing this work and to getting more people outside playing this game.

And the truth is, we’ve actually done a lot. And we’re really proud of what we’ve done. We have built a website that is robust. We have built multiple applications and services to support this game. And at the end of the day, we have got millions of people outside doing something fun. We have delivered adventure all over the world. We have helped to create a system that allows people to create, share, and play experiences and adventures around the world. And we’re actually really proud of that. And I think that it’s important to note that we’re proud of what we’ve done so far, but we know that we can do more and our goal is to do more and we’re going to do more.

BH: I completely echo what Bryan has said. I started this game as a player first. I’ve been playing since 2008. I used the first version of that Classic app and every version up till now and loved it to death. And I completely understand why it’s really hard for a lot of folks to say goodbye to a beloved old friend. That app has served us well for a long time. And like Bryan said, I wanna echo, that I feel really lucky and fortunate to be working on the successor to that app. To spend time thinking about how can we do it even better. How can we live up to what that app did so well for people, and how can we make it even better than it was before?

[music]

CR: So there you go, Hopefully you enjoyed and/or learned something from the discussion. Thanks to Bryan and Ben for taking the time. Check out the geocaching blog for much more about the Geocaching Classic app retirement, and new features in the free Geocaching® app. And what would you like to hear about on Inside Geocaching HQ? Send us an email: Podcast at geocaching dot com is the address. Drop us a line. We would love to hear from you, and we would love to know what you want to hear about in future episodes. Until we chat again, from me and from everybody here at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 8): What’s it like to be a reviewer?

[music]

Chris Ronan: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, my username is Rock Chalk, I am one of the folks who works here at Geocaching HQ. And on today’s episode we have Cathy Hornback, she is an HQ staffer who is also a volunteer Geocaching reviewer. So Cathy brings some very interesting insights to her job here at HQ because she is also a reviewer. And we’ve had some folks write in to us and by the way, you can write in to us, just email podcast@geocaching.com and let us know what you’d like to hear about on our podcast. We’ve had some folks write in and say they would like to hear about geocache reviewing, and since Cathy is also a reviewer in addition to working here we thought she would be a great person to ask some questions of. So here is me and Cathy, talking about reviewing geocaches.

[music]

CR: Well, Cathy let’s just start with what do you do with Geocaching HQ? What keeps you busy everyday?

Cathy Hornback: Well, I’m part of the Community Volunteer Support team and together, we support about 400… Actually 426 at the moment, volunteers from all over the world and these would be reviewers, moderators, and translators. We also curate the guidelines and the Help Center. Personally, I spend most of my time working with the voluntary viewers and cache owners and guidelines and the EarthCaching.

CR: So you’ve been involved with Geocaching much longer than you have been a reviewer or you’ve been at HQ. So let’s start with that, how did you get involved with the game in the first place?

CH: Oh, okay. So back in 2003, I needed to get a birthday gift for my husband and I didn’t know what to get him and I remembered reading about Geocaching in the newspaper months before and thought, “Oh, you know that would be a good thing to get him for his birthday then maybe we could have fun on the occasional sunny weekend?” [laughter] But I was so freaking wrong about that. I got addicted as soon as I found my first cache and then I learned how to use the unit myself and took off on my days off when he was at work and I’ve been going ever since, and I love it just as much now as I did back in the beginning.

CR: And you two still cache together quite a bit.

CH: Yeah, on Saturdays we definitely do cache together. I’m lucky to work for a company where I can sneak out at lunch and get away with caching [chuckle] as long as I’m back reasonably fast.

CR: So we have a couple of Geocaching username personalities we’re dealing with here. Your player name?

CH: My player name’s Prying Pandora.

CR: And that is from where?

CH: That’s from the Phantom of the Opera. It comes from when Christine pulls his mask off and he’s furious and he calls her a prying Pandora. [chuckle]

CR: And then your reviewer name?

CH: My reviewer name is Rock Rabbit, which is another word for pikas and when I’m hiking in the mountains I love seeing pikas and listening to them squeak, they’re so cute.

CR: Okay, so you started playing in 2003 and when did the reviewer thing first come around?

CH: That happened in 2009. I got an email from one of the Washington state reviewers and just asked me about this and I’d just about spit my drink all over the keyboard. It’s [chuckle] usually a surprise, nobody really expects to be asked to do this. So ever since I’ve been working really hard to be worthy of that honor because it is a huge honor to be able to help the community in that way.

CR: So when they first approached you about being a reviewer, did they say, “Here’s why we’d decided to ask you about this.”?

CH: It happened because Moun10Bike retired and they needed another person to fill his shoes, not that anyone ever could, and so they came to me. I apparently was the only person on all of the list from all of reviewers in the state, so they asked me.

CR: And so for people that might… I don’t think there are many but people that might not know Moun10Bike, he is the father of the geocoin and he is a Geocaching HQ staffer, so one of our co-workers here at the office. Okay so 2003, you start playing the game. 2009, you start reviewing and then how many years until you start working here at HQ?

CH: I started working at HQ in 2010, so it was about a year and a half after I started reviewing. I had the very good fortune to be the only reviewer that worked within driving distance of headquarters [chuckle] so that was great. And headquarters works very closely with the reviewers so they knew already from my work that I could explain things to people and had a thick skin and a long fuse, all of those things are really important if you’re gonna review.

CR: Yeah, so let’s talk about that when people talk to you about reviewing, maybe people in the community, what kind of things do you tell them are important for people that might think that this is something that if the opportunity came up they might be interested in in the future? What do you look at as those qualities that are important to be a volunteer reviewer?

CH: Oh, to be a reviewer? I think important thing with the reviewer is that you need to be patient. You need to have a thick skin. You need to be able to be firm but soothing as well, and ethical. You can’t never mess with your ethics. You have to be a good teacher. You need to show that you’re active in the community because if you don’t have time for that then you’re not gonna have time to review. It takes time, it takes a fair bit of time that we tell people that it takes as much time as you give it, but once you’re doing it, you feel like you have a responsibility and it ends up being a little more time consuming.

[laughter]

CR: So if you’re talking to the version of you from 2009, are there things that you would tell that person, things that you know now that you wish you would have known then about reviewing?

CH: Not really. I loved it from the very beginning, I really wanted to be able to give back to the game that has brought so much to me personally with adventure, and fun and friends, and more than I can even say. And I think every reviewer goes into this, “Wow, this is so cool phase,” after they get their feet under ’em and then they wanna review every minute, and they will. I’ve seen this in every reviewer that we’ve brought on since me, that once they figure out what they’re doing, they go crazy and then you can take a few weeks off because they want to review everything that comes in the kill. [laughter] And then they settle down a little bit. [laughter] It’s back to work for everybody.

CR: And so in some areas, and Washington state is one of them, there are multiple people that are reviewing, it’s more of a team situation, so how does that work? Do you all split the amount of caches? Are there certain… Does one person focus on certain kinds? How do you guys decide which caches each of you will review?

CH: Well, each team in different places comes up with their own way of sharing the work. Washington, what we do is we have a long queue that we go through and as soon as someone touches a cache in the queue, it belongs to them until they give it away. And so that way, if you see someone else is already working on something, you don’t step on their toes, you don’t mess with it. And if you, for some reason, can’t finish or you’re having trouble then you can give it to one of the other reviewers and they can take over for you.

CR: And what about working together on things? I would assume that there’s a certain amount of, maybe a few aren’t quite sure about a cache, maybe you can touch base with your fellow people on the team about that?

CH: Absolutely. We all use Gmail, which has a great chat function, and yeah, that’s actually something you oughta know. If you think you’re gonna try and pull something over on your reviewer, they talk to each other, so don’t play mom against dad.

[laughter]

CR: And not just within your state right? Reviewers from around the world will often look for guidance and look for help if they’re not sure of the answer on something.

CH: Absolutely. I think even though we’re from different countries, and our cultures are different, geocachers are a lot the same, and the reviewers all seem to come up with same problems, and work with each other on how to deal with those problems, and help people. It’s never so much dealing with it as, I didn’t get my message across to this person, how can I help them better? Or how can I not get sucked into this or something? There’s always stuff with… We’re working with the public even though geocachers are the coolest people in the world, there is all different kinds. [chuckle]

CR: Sure. So is there advice that you give to cache hiders for how they can make the process go as smoothly as possible when they’re submitting the new cache?

CH: Oh, yeah. I’d love to do that. [laughter] It saves everybody work. The most important thing is to read those guidelines. We have just made them more simple and easier to do but a lot of people check that box on the cache submission form and think it’s a software agreement. And they don’t read ’em. And then they submit their cache, they buy a later bunch of guidelines, and it gets immediately kicked back. So you save time by going through those guidelines, make sure you understand them, they are much easier now, we have shortened them considerably, and each guideline links to a page in the help center that can give you more detailed information, if you don’t see what you need in the guidelines. So I would suggest going through the guidelines first with your placement, and then after you’re done before you submit it, go through ’em again and look at them against your cache, if your cache meets all of those guidelines and then go ahead and submit it.

CH: I think the other thing I wish I could get to people and catch them from is, if they’re going to do something that takes a huge amount of effort, or work, or expense, it’s better to check and make sure the thing is okay with the reviewer before you go through the work. Like, if you’re gonna go through the mother of all hikes and camp three days before you can get to the place, and then find out it’s a wilderness area and they don’t allow geocaches, I’d much rather prevent you from having to go through that if you asked first, or if you’re going to make some kind of gadget or mount something in a way that you’re doing in cement and you can’t get it out. It’s really good to figure out if you can have that spot in the first place. So I’d suggest checking more carefully if you’re gonna do something that takes a lot of work.

CR: Are there common mistakes that you see over the course of time? Are there certain things that you often have to push back on with cache hiders?

CH: Well, being in the Seattle area, we have a lot of puzzle caches, and it’s pretty saturated. So most of the time, if a new cacher thinks a spot is available, it can be too good to be true. And I actually feel kind of bad ’cause somebody will not have solved a lot of puzzles ’cause they’re hard. We have a lot of engineers that live in Seattle, and they’ll put a cache out and I’ll tell ’em it’s too near a puzzle and then they’ll move it. And then it’ll be too near a different puzzle and after a few times they get really impatient and I don’t blame them, I really feel bad, but we have to go by where those containers are whether you know where they are or not, and I cannot tell you because it will spoil that person’s puzzle.

CR: Yeah, I know we’ve had people write in many times over the years and say, “Why can’t you just say where everything is on the map?” But if we do that then that makes it… Unfortunately people would “battleship” those puzzle and multi-caches and what have you, and unfortunately, I just don’t think that there’s a perfect way to make that system work better.

CH: No, not really. That can go into the lots of effort thing though. You can run some coordinates by your reviewer. The easiest way to do that is to make a cache page for them and put the coordinates in that so the reviewer can check them faster and they can tell you before you even put your container out whether that spot’s available.

CR: Okay, so in the unlikely event that you go through the cache submission process, it doesn’t work out for whatever reason. You and the reviewer says that your cache can’t be published for some reason, there is an appeals process where you can write to Geocaching HQ and appeal a decision. How does that process work for people that aren’t familiar with it?

CH: Well, the first thing you do is go to the help center and there’s a link called “Email Us” and you click on that and it actually has a really neat system, where it steers you toward the information that you need to put down for what is your problem. So, if you’re appealing a cache, there’s a path that goes to Cache Appeals, and then we tell you what we need to know from you, and you need to write that down in there, and then we get all of those appeals in the department… Oh, well all day long as the emails come in, and we get together every morning, and go through them, and decide on an answer so that we can all be on the same page, be consistent, and then we divvy ’em up.

CR: I’ve seen some people say, “Oh, you guys always side with the reviewers in those appeals,” but the reason for that is the reviewers know the guidelines pretty darn well.

CH: Yeah. Reviewers are smart and they know what they’re talking about. They know those guidelines like the back of their hand. And if… Once in a while we have to coach one of them that’s making a mistake, but most of the time your reviewer really is right. So that’s why we support them so often.

CR: Yeah, and oftentimes I’ve seen reviewers say or sometimes they might encourage a person to write to HQ because they’re not completely sure of what… Maybe it’s a novel idea or something they haven’t seen before, they wanna learn, they wanna do it right, and so they encourage that person to write in and get our thoughts on it.

CH: Oh, for sure. Anytime there’s a new idea, we try to train them not to make that decision ’cause there could be more going on with it than they see, and they will encourage you to take it to appeals so we can decide and then we can come up with a policy for that and then they know what to do. So sometimes it’s just because they’d like to do it, but they don’t have the authority to do it, so they kick you upstairs.

CR: And besides appeals, you’re very involved in EarthCaches as well.

CH: Yes.

CR: Maybe talk about how that came about for you and what all you do with working with the Geological Society of America?

CH: Well, that came upon me ’cause I’m a geek and I think geology is really cool. [laughter] So yeah, we partner with the Geological Society of America on that, and I had already created a… Actually I’m a Platinum EarthCache Master so I know a lot.

CR: That sounds very important.

CH: It sounds more important than it really is but… [chuckle] Anyway. So, we work with them, there’s probably… There’s less than a hundred EarthCache reviewers, but we do have reviewers dedicated to that because there are a more difficult and complicated cache type to review. They are educational and they take you to a geological feature and teach you what that is, how it happened or whatever about it. And the standards are high. That’s because it’s the educational department of the Geological Society that oversees this, so they want these to be a legitimate lesson and they want you to think when you’re there. So that’s why we do the, “No, don’t ask questions, so you can just look up on the Internet, you have to get stuff that’s from there, and learn something while you’re doing it.” It’s not just a tick off the answers and get my smiley.’ But EarthCaches have more favorite points than all the other cache types put together, and the reason for that is that quality, so it’s worth it.

CR: So, it’s been what? Eight years that you’ve been reviewing? Is that eight or nine years?

CH: 2009, eight years, yeah.

CR: Yeah, right about eight years. So what do you like most about being a reviewer?

CH: I really like helping people, and I get a great deal of satisfaction with that. I like taking the time to explain things so people understand. And so, when I get someone successfully to getting their cache published and they were frustrated before, but now I’ve smoothed the way, I love that. I love that. I love helping people.

CR: And what are the… Are there any pet peeves? Is there anything about it that is…

[laughter]

CH: Well, like I said before, I get really frustrated when people don’t read the guidelines ’cause that’s so basic. I think it’s variations on guidelines. Sometimes someone will feel really passionate about something and they want to use Geocaching to promote it, and it’s a horrible disease or something tragic and sad. And we feel terrible about that, both at headquarters and as reviewers ’cause we’re sympathetic nice people. But Geocaching is a way to get away from all of that and not have to bring all the really bad things in the world into the game, it’s an escape from it. And so having to tell people that they can’t share this important passionate thing that they want to do is really hard. So that’s… I cringe every time I see those, and I think every reviewer does, nobody likes that stuff. But we are very sympathetic, we just can’t do it.

CR: Yeah, that whole slippery slope thing, it’s very difficult. I would think that you have a very unique perspective and that obviously, you’ve been a player for a long time. But being a volunteer and also working at Geocaching HQ, what do you see as the benefits of having both of those roles and kind of being able to see both of those sides of things?

CH: It helps a lot. Since I support reviewers, I wouldn’t do as good a job if I didn’t know what they go through, and the frustrations they feel, and the tools they use, and the mixed messages that they might think they get. I know how frustrating it is. I also know how happy it makes you, I know all of those things. So I really can listen to them and understand what they’re saying right away and help them with that.

CR: So if somebody is interested in volunteering for Geocache and they think that reviewing is something that they would wanna do, we do have folks that write in and ask us about that sometimes, what do you tell people?

CH: I tell them that generally the reviewer’s identified by other reviewers ’cause they know the people in their community, they know what they act like when they’re frustrated, they know how they communicate, they know if they’re out supporting their local organization, helping the community, and that’s a way to get noticed in a big way. Putting your hand up really doesn’t help you. You need to be acting the way that is reviewer like when people are not watching, when you don’t think people are watching you. So you have to know the guidelines real well and active in the community. You have to be a good cacher and a good cache owner. You have to take care of your caches and be ethical, and kind, and patient in the way you write your logs and all of that. You have to have a good general reputation with the community and you have to be able to communicate really well.

CH: So if you’re good at explaining things, and not going on and on and on ’cause people don’t have patience for that. You also need to speak English really well because HQ is in Seattle, and we do have some really awesome German speakers working for the company now but most of us speak English so we need to be able to talk to you. And when I’m looking for someone I look for somebody who’s patient, has a thick skin, is a good teacher, active in the community. The ability… You have to able to say no, some people can’t do that and that does not make a good reviewer. You have to think… All reviewers have to think of more than just you and your cache, they’re actually curating the game and helping to keep it good. And even at headquarters we do that on a global scale. So something may seem okay to you where you live but we have to think of the whole world and it doesn’t always work for the whole world, and we want the game to be successful everywhere.

CR: Well, I think we covered it.

CH: Wooh!

CR: You feel good about it?

CH: Yeah.

CR: Alright. Thank you.

CH: Cool.

[music]

CR: So, there was Cathy Hornback a.k.a. Prying Pandora, a.k.a. Rock Rabbit. We hope you enjoyed that conversation. If there’s something that you would like to hear us cover on Inside Geocaching HQ, all you have to do is email us, the address is podcast@geocaching.com, that is podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear your ideas for the podcast and we will see if we can cover some of your questions on a future episode. Until then from all of us at Geocaching HQ, Happy Caching!

/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 2): Souvenirs, APE cache rediscovery

Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody, welcome to inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast. This is episode two. I’m Chris Ronan. I work at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I’m the PR manager here, also on the community volunteer support team. Thanks for listening. We hope you had a very happy new year and that you have been able to get out and do some caching in 2017, or maybe this is the time of year when you plan your upcoming geocaching for when the temperatures warm up and the snow melts away. And maybe you’re planning to collect a few new souvenirs in this new year. If so, you will enjoy this episode because we are talking souvenirs. This seemed to be a good time to do it since we released five new souvenirs at the end of last year. So, I chatted with Annika from HQ’s marketing team, as well as Nate and Roxxy from the creative team. We will have more on that in just a minute. Also on this episode, we have the man, the myth, the legend, the master of all he surveys, Jon Stanley, aka Moun10Bike. There is a good chance you have heard of Jon. He is the father of the geocoin after all. But, he has done even more in geocaching including owning one of the APE caches. The one that he owns, Mission 9: Tunnel of Light, located just east of Seattle, was rediscovered late last year after being muggled several years ago. We will talk with Jon about the rediscovery and what it was like to maintain one of those famous APE caches.

CR: So, we’ve got a lot of good stuff to cover. Let’s start with souvenirs. Annika Ledbetter is a member of the marketing team at Geocaching HQ. She is intimately involved with the souvenir process. So, here is me and Annika, talking souvenirs.

[music]

CR: Okay. So Annika, let’s first talk about how you ended up at HQ. You’ve been here a while and you’ve done a lot of cool things. So, where did it start for you?

Annika Ledbetter: It started in 2013 and it started with the community management team. I started with answering a lot of questions from the community, diving in deep from the get-go, which was great to get the start at HQ. And then I moved over to the volunteer support team and then found my niche there in supporting translators. And from there moved over to localization and that’s what I’m doing still today, just helping that the game is represented well in other countries that it’s played in all over the world. And then also, a big part of my job now is in marketing. It’s not a very traditional marketing role at HQ. It’s more about how do we get people excited to play the game. And one important way to do that is through the souvenirs that we have and I think… Now, I took it away. [chuckle]

CR: Now, you led us right into what we were gonna talk about. We…

AL: Yeah.

CR: We brought you here to talk about souvenirs. It’s a subject that people are always really interested in. It’s one of the really fun parts of the game. We hear a lot of questions. People don’t know as much about what goes into souvenirs and how do we decide which souvenirs will be out there. So maybe let’s just start with how souvenirs started at HQ? And how they came to be and how we got to where we are?

AL: And I had to do some research on that because I’m only here since 2013. But, souvenirs exist since July 2010 and they were basically created as an added incentive to visit a specific location. And so, I think the first one that came out was a visit Geocaching HQ and you log the cache there, you get a Geocaching HQ souvenir, kind of an “I was here,” extra little digital picture on your profile. And then the next one was the lost and found celebration. There was the 10-year anniversary of Geocaching and a few others. But, in the beginning, all the souvenirs were tied to just one specific cache like a special highlighted events or caches is on. I think the APE cache was one. I think you still get one if you visit the APE cache in Brazil?

CR: You do. Yes.

AL: You should know.

CR: I do know and I did get it.

[laughter]

AL: There you go. So, that’s how it started and then over time, more and more souvenirs were added for different things and we’re gonna talk about that. I think, a little bit?

CR: Sure. Let’s talk about that.

[laughter]

AL: Yeah. I think that’s interesting, too. I think somebody who’s in the game for a while has probably a pretty good handle on what type of souvenirs we have, but it’s maybe good still to mention. So we have country souvenirs and regional souvenirs. They’re also very well liked. We are covering about 44 countries, or so. The United States, there’s a souvenir for each state you visit. For other countries, we’ve just released the Russia souvenir. You will have a souvenir if you find a cache anywhere in Russia. Other types of souvenirs are for, as I mentioned before, visiting specific types of caches. HQ still gets a souvenir, the plaque near Portland, the original cache gets one. And then there’s some that you get if you participate in some of the HQ challenges that we bring out over the summer, mission GC for example, you find a specific cache during a specific time frame and that’s just to encourage people to broaden their knowledge of the game. Some people have never found a multi-cache and that kind of gets them out there and try it. And then we have lastly, souvenirs for attending mega and giga events, and with all those, if you count all the mega giga events and all the other events all over time, the time of souvenirs, we now have a staggering number of 564 souvenirs you can earn.

CR: I never knew that.

AL: I don’t think anybody has those. I also don’t think it is humanly possible, but that’s a good number. Also, one thing I found out today, which I found pretty remarkable, total awarded souvenirs are more than 20 million. So yeah, a lot of people have cached in different places on earth and participated in the challenges and attended events, so good signs.

CR: And so then the process of souvenirs, let’s talk about how it works. How does one earn a souvenir, and just… I mean there’s a lot that goes into the whole process.

AL: Yeah, no. For sure, I think it’s also a question we get sometimes is, “Why can’t I have a souvenir for this or that?” And it is a little bit based on how they technically work, to bore you a little bit with the technical details here, they are tied to logging. So we cannot de-couple them from an action taken by a player that is, “I go, I log a find. I go, I log attended on an event.” So these are the options we have, though we have many options within that where we can say a specific type of cache, a cache with so and so many favorite points, a cache during this time, an event during this time, a CITO event during in time. So we have ways to segment and highlight specific caches, or events, and also award specific behaviors, but they’re always tied to logging a cache.

CR: Okay. And so when we come out with new souvenirs, like at the end of 2016 when we had, let’s go through them. Russia, Romania, China, Puerto Rico…

AL: And Singapore.

CR: And Singapore. Those were the new souvenirs at the end of 2016. People, of course, naturally ask, “Why don’t you have X or Y or Z?” Or there’s any number, as you said other countries that still don’t have souvenirs, so let’s try to address that.

AL: Yeah, this is a question that I can remember getting a lot, too, when I was working as a community manager, working email tickets and so on. Yeah, people really like to be rewarded for going out of their way, finding a cache on their vacation, or far from home and so on, and I think it makes total sense to have those map pins basically on your profile. And we absolutely, that’s our goal as well. Why don’t we put more out each year? That is a more complicated answer. It’s partially the process that we do. We try to be very diligent and we try to be very careful. Specifically, we wanna have some beautiful artwork associated because that’s how we’ve done it with the other countries. We don’t want to just suddenly do something completely different. So we kind of wanna keep that path, and we have to make sure that anything we put on there is not offensive in any way, does appropriately represent a country. So we do check in with the local community, or local players and make sure that what we’re choosing aligns. So that takes time, that takes back and forth communication. The other thing we’re really making sure of, that if we are displaying some symbols if we’re displaying images, pictures, anything, do we own the right to these? Is it legally sound? These are all the things we have to check and make sure.

AL: Then another thing that we started doing is to really highlight each country, and what is special about it, and what are the best geocaches in those countries, which is an additional effort to it that we, though, find is important.

CR: Which is something that’s done in the blog, for instance.

AL: Yeah, exactly.

CR: Where each time Romania or all the other four that we went through, Singapore, Puerto Rico… Each time there was a blog post that talked about geocaching in that country and all of that. So, of course, a lot of research and time goes into writing those.

AL: Yeah.

CR: So now looking ahead in 2017, can we talk at all about what might be coming down the pike, here in the coming months?

AL: We kind of like the surprise element of souvenirs, for sure. We do not wanna leak too much. What I can say is there will be a few that you can expect from what we did in the previous years. We also started work on a pretty fun summer challenge, and I do not wanna say anything.

CR: Wow, that has piqued my interest. I may have to go snooping around and see what I can find out for myself.

AL: I’m really excited for it. I hope it will catch on. But yeah, I’m really quite, quite excited.

CR: And there’ve been really fun summer promotions over the last couple years, you mentioned Mission GC which was… Maybe talk about that a little bit, because that was very different than what had been done in previous years. People, I think, had gotten used to the 31 and 31, and the various things along those lines. But Mission GC was really different and a lot of people had a lot of fun with it.

AL: Yeah, we kind of just thought what is geocaching really about, and it always feels like you’re on a mission to find a cache a little bit, you’re doing it kind of in secret, you are a bit of a spy. So this whole theme seemed to fit the game so well. And we also didn’t just wanna repeat what we had done in the years before such as like, “Oh, find a cache here and there, just have it simple and straight forward,” we wanted to add this extra layer of mystery and involvement and really getting people to work together. I enjoyed so much reading all the comments on the blog where people helped each other find the solution for it, often without spoiling. Yeah, it just was a really great energy. It came out of the idea to do something we hadn’t done before and something a little different but within the framework that we had that our souvenirs awarded in a certain way.

CR: Alright. Well, we covered some pretty good stuff, I think.

AL: Yeah.

CR: You feel good about it?

AL: I do.

CR: Nothing else?

AL: 20 million awarded souvenirs. I find that number really cool.

CR: That is amazing.

AL: Yeah. Thank you.

[music]

CR: So Annika and the marketing team are very involved in souvenirs, but so is the creative team. And if you’ve ever earned a souvenir, then you have seen the work of Roxxy Goetz and Nate Cavanaugh. They are fantastically creative designers at Geocaching HQ. And I had the chance to talk with them about what goes into designing those cool souvenirs. Here we go. Okay. So we have Roxxy and Nate. And we’re gonna talk about souvenirs and the work that they do to create a souvenir artwork for the geocaching community. But before we do that, you guys have both been here a little while and you know the community really well. So Roxxy, maybe talk first about how long you’ve been here and what you just generally do at Geocaching HQ?

Roxxy Goetz: Alright, Chris. Well, I’ve been here as a member of the creative team since April 2010. So we’re gonna be coming up on my seventh year here at Geocaching HQ. Very excited about that. We mostly cover a lot of our illustration assets usually for a blog post and Facebook posts and t-shirts. Personally, I’m kind of our resident signal wrangler. So if you ever get a geocoin or a t-shirt or some kind of fun holiday post that we put up and it has a signal on it, it’s pretty likely that I had a hand in it.

Nate Cavanaugh: Yeah. I’ve been here almost six years in April. April, I guess, is kind of a popular hiring time here. So it’s a great place to work and we get to work on a lot of fun projects for various promotions and merchandise. We get to design t-shirts and geocoins, trackables. We get to design souvenirs, which we’re gonna talk about today.

CR: Okay. So with souvenirs, we talked with Annika from the marketing team about the process of deciding on souvenirs and getting the process going. And then eventually, they’d come to you guys and they say, “Hey, we’ve got this country that’s gonna get a souvenir,” or, “We have a new campaign. There’s gonna be a souvenir for doing something.” And it’s put in your laps. And then what do you guys do?

RG: Well, anytime that it’s part of one of our promotions or campaigns or something that were handling here and kind of hosting at Geocaching HQ creative studio. Nate and I usually in on the ground floor on that. And we help develop a lot of the visuals for the rest of the campaign, including any merchandise. So, geocoins, trackable tags, any website assets that we might need. If there’s going to be an easter egg somewhere in there, we determine it early on. We’ll bounce back to that later. Anytime that we do have one of those souvenirs, we kind of develop it along with all of the other assets for the promotion. That way we make sure that everything looks together and it’s nice and collected and cohesive and that way it looks real pretty when you get the whole set, arranged all at once on your site there.

NC: We try to add five or so new country souvenirs each year. And whenever I’m researching these locations, I always find that these are really beautiful places that I’ve not visited yet that I would like to go visit at some point. We work closely with the local reviewers or local geocaching associations there to get a good idea of what to cover in the souvenir for the region that we highlight. Also, things to include or not to include and a little bit of background about the culture there and we try to get a good essence of it, all encapsulated in one souvenir without going overboard and adding too many things. Yeah, with just a good feel for the country as a whole.

CR: You talked about not adding too many things. One thing that you guys have to think about is where are these going to be seen, for instance, on mobile devices.

NC: That’s right.

CR: And that you kinda have to keep it simple because that’s kinda small on a mobile device and that’s the kind of stuff you guys have to think about.

NC: That’s correct.

CR: There are folks out there, we hear from them all the time, that they’d really like to be helpful, they’d like to submit or help with artwork for these kinds of things. And that’s not something that we do. And I’d love to hear you guys… ‘Cause there’s really good reasons for it. I’d love to hear you guys talk a little bit about more of the history behind that.

NC: We have thought about that. We have looked into, “What if we allowed people to just create souvenirs?” We’d get a lot more souvenirs out there a lot faster but we’d like to have some consistency with the souvenirs. And also, there’s a lot of things that could be touchy subjects for countries or maybe not represent them properly. That’s one of the reasons why we work closely with the local reviewers and geocaching associations.

CR: Well, one of the fun things that you guys do with some of the campaigns that we have; Pi Day and so forth. Sometimes you’ll be sneaky. You’ll hide little fun Easter eggs in there. Tell us a little bit about that.

RG: The Easter egg started off there I think was it Pi Day? I think it might have been Pi Day where we hid a two-part special code in each of the two souvenirs. If you got those souvenirs, then you probably know it’s there and if you don’t, I’m just gonna tell you ’cause you’re not gonna get it again, we had it hidden in the tin of the pie tin. And once you went to a specific site and you put those numbers in, you got a banner, I believe, to be able to put on your personal profile page. I’m gonna say that five times fast later on and get totally tongue-tied. And that started off as just sort of a fun little thing because we know that all of you wonderful geocachers love your puzzles and decoding things and oh man, I do too. So anytime moving forward since then, one of the questions that we ask ourselves anytime we come up with a new promotion is, “Is there some cool, extra little thing that we can add in there just to give the community some kind of sneaky special extra achievement?” There’s actually an extra Easter egg in the blog and Facebook images for Mission GC since we weren’t able to sneak one into the souvenirs themselves and it’s hidden on the computer screen in that image. So if any of you missed that, I’m guessing a lot of you did. If you wanna go back and decode that, there’s a special little sneaky spy something that I hid in there just for you guys.

CR: And speaking of Mission GC, that one was one of our meta souvenir opportunities where you could earn kind of a bonus for finding all of the souvenirs in that promotion.

NC: I think it started back in 7 Souvenirs of August. We had a secret extra souvenir that you could earn if you earned all the other souvenirs and we kinda continued to do that each summer. So with the most recent promotion, Mission GC, if you earned the three souvenirs, you get a special meta souvenir which depicted a agent with the kind of MI6 or in this case, HQ47 lapel pen that he kind of earned his or her status as an agent.

CR: Well, it’s just awesome to hear about souvenir stuff. I know people are really interested in that and at some point, we’re gonna have to just get you guys in and just talk about geocoins and trackables in general, because you do so much cool stuff with that and people love that stuff, too, and I think you could probably talk for a while about it.

NC: Yeah for sure, that would be good.

RG: Absolutely.

CR: Alright, thanks, guys.

RG: Alright. Thanks, Chris.

NC: Thanks, Chris.

[music]

CR: Yeah, we can do a whole episode with them sometime. It is always so much fun to see the designs that they come up with for geocoins and t-shirts and all kinds of other stuff. Okay, shifting gears. You may have heard the news late last year that one of the long lost APE caches was found. Fourteen APE caches were placed around the world in 2001, in conjunction with 20th Century Fox, to support the movie Planet of the Apes, which I’ve still never seen. I’ve been to Brazil, I’ve found the last active APE cache down in Brazil, but I’ve still not seen that movie. So that’s kinda crazy. Anyway, the second to last active APE cache was Mission 9: Tunnel of Light located about 60 miles east of Seattle. It was placed by Jeremy Irish and by Jon Stanley aka Moun10Bike. The cache was found more than 3,000 times before it was muggled in June of 2001 and then it was archived. But there was long a feeling among some cachers that the APE container might still be near that cache location. That’s because it’s a heavy container. It was located nearly two miles from the nearest parking area.

CR: And so some people speculated that possibly the muggle simply discarded the container nearby rather than carrying it all the way back to where they parked. So last year, a group of Seattle area cachers took it upon themselves to attempt to find that container and they did find it. If you haven’t read the story, it’s on the geocaching blog. You’ll find it dated November 11th of last year. So after it was found, we surveyed the community looking for ideas on what to do with the rediscovered cache. And if you continue to watch the geocaching blog, you will soon have an opportunity to take part in the final vote on what will happen with that APE cache. In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to sit down with Jon and hear about his experience with the APE cache and what he thought when it was found. Now one thing I should point out is that we at the office like to give Jon proper credit for being a geocaching pioneer. He is, however, a reluctant celebrity which makes it all the more fun, of course, and you’ll see what I mean here in a second. Here we go. Well, I think any conversation with you Jon has to start with your celebrity as a geocacher, doesn’t it?

Jon Stanley: No.

[chuckle]

JS: Geez, Bryan (Roth) put you up to that.

CR: Bryan, no. He didn’t, but I knew he would want me to. Okay. So we won’t talk about your celebrity. We will talk just about the APE cache. And when you put Mission 9: Tunnel of Light out, that was July of 2001, long before you became an employee here at Geocaching HQ, but you were very involved in geocaching from the very beginning. So I wonder, what memories you have of being asked to be a part of this project?

JS: Well, I think it was my role in defending against the apes that led to my choice to hide that. I had risen through the ranks to general and where was there to go from there?

CR: Well, you have to hide a cache, obviously.

[laughter]

JS: Well, yeah, that’s a… Woo-hoo. The local communities were recruited to hide the caches in all cases, and generally, they were pulled from either reviewers or people who were extremely active in the area. For example, in the New York area, Cache Ninja was the person who hid the cache. He was actually a reviewer way back when. I think that he and I were tapped at the same time to be the first reviewers. So he was a natural choice in that area. Markwell was chosen in the Chicago area, and I was tapped here in Washington. Because I had developed a relationship with the founders already back then, it was natural for Jeremy to accompany me on various outings. He was there when I reached my 100th milestone cache, which was where I placed the first geocoin, and he joined on hiding this cache as well.

CR: Of course, when we look back at it now, it’s taken on this aura among the geocache community, because there is only one active one today, but you couldn’t have known that, right? Back then that that was gonna happen?

JS: No. Back then I thought the big appeal of it was just for the first finder, which was finding the prop from the movie. That’s what I thought would be the draw for people and then it would just kind of be a normal cache after that. So it was exciting, I thought, for that initial rush to find, but I had no idea that they would become as iconic as they did.

CR: So you owned a lot of caches before you put out the APE cache, and I’m curious… And then have owned many others. Is there anything different about being the owner of a cache like this that became so iconic as opposed to the other caches that you own?

JS: Well, it was much different in that it was owned by a sock puppet account for the first many years of its life. It was the Project APE account is owned it, and so no one knew really who had hidden it for many years. And in fact, I even joined a couple guys on a bike ride through the tunnel and logged it as a find back then, a year or two after having placed it because it was just… No one knew who had placed it and I was just along for the ride type thing. And it was only later on when it was decided that an account that could monitor it, what have you, should take over the ownership of it, that it was adopted over to me as the actually having been the original placer along with Jeremy. And it was only then that it was known that it was my cache. So I left my find on it even though I had been a placer. I know that some people frown on that but it was part of the story back then.

CR: And so hundreds of people over the years find the cache, but then, unfortunately, it goes missing, I think it was in 2011. And so the difficult decision comes to have to archive the cache. Maybe talk a little bit about how that came about.

JS: Initially the lid disappeared, so what we decided to do was secure the lid to the container by running a chain through it. And at the same time, we chained the… It just was natural to also chain the bulk of the container down as well and then connect everything to a… There were some heavy pieces of metal up there, remnants from the railroad that used to run along the trail, and that was all buried in the debris pile in which the cache was hidden. Before we knew it, someone had cut the cable, actually, it was a cable, and took another lid. And at that point, we increased the amount of security on the cache, a bigger cable and chain, secured a lid without putting… I don’t think on the last one we ended up putting riveting coins to it again.

JS: We thought that was just too much of a prize for someone. We didn’t know that they were targeting the cache actually at that point, we thought they were just wanting the coins on the lid. And then one day we got the word that the whole thing was missing, and it’s not the kind of cache you’d DNF. It was a big container in a very obvious spot and the fact that… As soon as someone DNF’d it we knew it was gone. And at that point, we knew we had a serial targeter, and he had been stealing a number of caches in that general area. So we knew it was someone trying to mess with our game. When word came that that cache was missing, because it had become so iconic and it was such a kind of a mecca for cachers around the world, not to mention just in the States, we sat down, we being Jeremy and Bryan and other higher-ups in the company and I sat down with them and we discussed what should be done. The decision, which was difficult, was that in the past when the container has gone missing, that’s the end of the APE cache. That’s the rule that had been enforced previously and we needed to be consistent and, in this case, archive the APE cache.

CR: And so now we fast forward five years or so and this group from Seattle, a number of local cashers, they mount this effort, they find the container… I think from what I understand, you knew that they were gonna be going out doing it? Did you think there was a possibility that they’d actually find anything?

JS: I really did not. I thought that it was one of those where maybe they had a 5% chance of finding some remnants of the cache, but certainly not the container. They use some search and rescue techniques that basically looks at the path of least resistance and so they focused on potential energy where something would likely end up and boom, there it was.

CR: When you saw the container, I think you were there when they brought it back and Bryan was out there in the visitor center here at HQ and you were there, too. What went through your mind and what your thoughts were about the whole thing?

JS: I think I was dumbstruck. I probably just looked like I was in a daze or something. I mean it’s only a container, a metal container, but I couldn’t believe it. And then the stickers that were on it that were the ones from the original container where people would sticker the inside of it, including some that were from the 10-year celebration. That made it pretty clear that was the original container. I couldn’t believe it and at that point I was regretting that I hadn’t joined them on the outing. They had invited me on the hunt, but I thought it was such a low chance. Plus, I had obligations on the other side of state that weekend. I had to turn it down but then I was like, “Oh man, I wish I could have been there and just seen it unfold.” Pretty cool.

CR: Yeah, very cool and it’s very cool to hear just you’re talking about the history and talking about your thoughts on it being found. I think people will enjoy hearing about it. Anything we didn’t cover?

JS: Well, our plan to put it up on the space station so that everyone can now enjoy it.

CR: Yeah. I don’t remember that being an option that we put out there but…

JS: I was pretty sure I kept voting that in.

CR:strong> [laughter] You’re so good at that, Jon. People are gonna think you’re serious.

[laughter]

CR: And knowing you, being the celebrity that you are, you might be able to make it happen. Is the scary thing.

JS: Stop it, Bryan.

CR: Alright, thanks, Jon.

JS: You bet.

[music]

CR: So, there you have it, episode two of Inside Geocaching HQ. Thanks again to Annika from the marketing team, to our awesome designers, Nate and Roxxy, and to the father of the geocoin APE Cache owner and all around famous geocacher, Jon Stanley, for being a part of this episode. If you’ve got thoughts on our podcast, if you’ve got ideas for upcoming episodes, stuff that you’d like to hear us talk about, you can drop us a line. The email address is podcast@geocaching.com, that’s podcast@geocaching.com. We would love to hear from you. Until then, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.