/ Janelle

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 1): Nate Irish on the Geocaching apps and Geocaching.com

NateAndChris
NateAndChris

Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. It is Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast, welcome to it. Very happy to have you tune in. I am Chris Ronan. I am the public relations manager at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My job is to talk about geocaching, which is a pretty awesome job. I have been at HQ for two years. I’ve been a geocacher for just over five years and I love talking about geocaching and that’s why I’m so excited about this podcast. I hope you enjoy it. I hope we can bring some new information to you. This is our very first episode. In the future we will give you a chance to ask the questions, but for this first one we reached out to the many awesome geocaching podcasters and bloggers and vloggers out there and gave them the chance to ask the questions because they’re the pros and they came through just as we knew they would. They asked some great stuff, and I’m gonna start with Darryl Wattenberg of the GeoGearHeads podcast because Darryl I think asked a good question to start with, so here he is.

Darryl Wattenberg: This is darrylw4 of the GeoGearHeads podcast and welcome geocaching.com to the podcasting space. My first question that I really wanted to know is, why did you decide to do a podcast? Why now? What are we looking for from this new show?

CR: Thank you very much, Darryl. Hey, we just thought this would be another great way to connect with the community. We’ve got the blog, we’ve got the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all that stuff, but being able to talk about things is sometimes better than just writing about it. Lackeys often get a chance to appear on podcast such as GeoGearHeads, but there are times between those appearances when we’ve got stuff to announce or things to explain or just stuff to talk about and we’re hoping this will be a good avenue for doing that. Darryl, I’m hoping you and I can do some geocaching together in Michigan there sometime where you are based. I have yet to find a cache in Michigan. I’ve got a few on my list so hopefully we can make that happen. Not during the winter, mind you. Not during Michigan winter because I want nothing to do with that, but maybe spring or summer next year we can make that occur.

CR: Okay, so episode one, topic number one, the geocaching app. We will have a conversation with Nate Irish who leads the product teams here at Geocaching HQ. He had some interesting things to say about the app. We also talked about the website, so hopefully that all sounds good for our first episode. We’re gonna go ahead and get started. Me and Nate Irish and a lot of questions from podcasters, bloggers and vlogger. So, here we go.

[music]

CR: Let’s go back to when you first started. Obviously, your brother Jeremy starts the company. How did it come about that you ended up joining him here?

Nate Irish: Yeah, well, it was great for me. I was in Colorado going to junior college and driving a taxicab. [chuckle] I have been geocaching with Jeremy. He took me out to find my first geocache in the Rose Garden in Portland on a visit. So I was living in Colorado, going to school, driving a cab, geocaching had started to get big, and he couldn’t keep up with the emails anymore and he had about 600 unanswered emails in the support queue. Well, he knew I was a decent writer ’cause I had done some traveling and I would send back story-like dispatches from the road. And so he knew I was a good writer, he asked me if I would just log on and answer some emails and he would hire me as an employee. I thought that sounded great and so for the first six months or so, I would just roll out of bed in my pajamas in the morning and start answering some emails.

NI: After about six months of that, cleared out the queue, of course, and he said, “Well, if you move out to Seattle there’s a lot more that you can do.” And it was exciting. So I did the QA for a while and then my title shifted to product planner, which was a made-up title and it was really just, “Nate knows the product really well and he has some really good ideas about features that we should implement, so let’s put him in a position to direct how our resources get used.” And over time it grew into me having a team of product minded folks who can help us figure out what are the problems that the community is facing and what are some solutions that we could implement to solve them. And I’d glassed over completely here, hence, the emergence of the iPhone as a tool.

CR: A little bit of a thing.

NI: A little bit, yeah.

[laughter]

NI: It shifted our focus a little bit and expanded the audience greatly. Not everybody could afford or desire to have a $100 plus device just for geocaching or for hiking. And so, that opened up all kinds of new possibilities for us in terms of the audience that we could reach with geocaching. There are good things and there are bad things that came along with that. Of course, as you make geocaching more accessible then you have to also make sure that you’re careful about how you’re introducing them to the game of geocaching. We have a very jargony game, a game that has a lot of unwritten community rules, ethical rules about how you interact with caches, what kind of a responsibility it is to place a geocache and make sure it’s maintained, and all that stuff needs to be explained.

NI: In most cases, I think that geocachers hear those things from other geocachers and that’s great for us that whenever somebody’s introduced to the game from an existing geocacher, we know that they’re gonna get an education right off the bat. We don’t have to do too much to bring those people into the fold. But there’s still many more people who just see in the app store, they go to the navigation category and they see what’s this geocaching at number one? What is that even about? Download it and then they don’t have somebody there to hold their hand, so we have to be thoughtful about how we onboard those people into the game. And it requires a little extra work, and sometimes it means we can’t do other things.

CR: Fast forwarding to today from 13 or so years ago, what is your title now and what are your responsibilities encompass today?

NI: Well, I’m product team manager. Basically I have a team of product managers who… They’re assigned to development teams, so they manage the back log from four to five software engineers and front-end developers, and they work really closely with our user experience designers to research problems, to do customer interviews, to learn more about where those problems come from, and how might we solve those problems, and they are presenting solutions for us to build. One of the things that we try to be good at is really having an end in mind when we build something and knowing what it is that we’re hoping to accomplish by building that thing. That’s something that we’ve matured into over the years, because I think in the past, if we just had an idea we would run with it, and we wouldn’t think too much about how do we know we’re done? What does done look like? What does success look like? We try to be a little bit more methodical and thoughtful about that stuff.

NI: So yeah, I have a great team. We consider ourselves to be servant leaders at HQ. We’re a support team. We exist so that other people can do their job most effectively. And that’s a position I like to be in. I don’t necessarily like to do podcasts or be out in front, to be the guy on stage. I’d rather be in the background supporting people who do like to be up front, supporting people who have really incredible talents in building software and designing great experiences.

NI: And that extends out to the community too. I love the fact that what I do supports millions of people having adventures and experiences outdoors. That makes me excited to come to work everyday, because when I think about play, the concept of play, I think that a lot of people overlook what that means to the world and to the growth and development of a person. I think play is sacred. We get to spend time with each other when we play. It’s fulfilling. It’s wholesome. It’s healing. The stories that I get to hear sometimes of a father connecting with his son, his teenage son that they don’t have anything else in common, the teenage son doesn’t wanna be seen with the guy. It’s a story as old as time. But here’s something geocaching that they can go out and do together, and they connect on that level. And that’s play, but that’s so meaningful. I think that play matters.

CR: Okay, so let’s get into some questions for Nate, and again these are coming from bloggers and podcasters and vloggers from around the world. And let’s hear again from Darryl Wattenberg of GeoGearHeads.

DW: One of the questions we keep getting over and over again is what is the target for the official geocaching app, the one formally known as the intro app and is now just the everything app? It does seem like it’s working its way up from the more basic user, but it doesn’t seem to be an app designed for the serious, more experienced user. So, is there a target for that? And how is it determined as to what that target is?

NI: Is there a target? Yeah, I would say in the beginning, it shifted over time. In the beginning it was the completely new user. The app that we have today, the foundation of that app was as an introduction app to geocaching. So I can say 100% that a few years ago that app was developed with just the new user in mind. However, we are a small company and it is difficult to manage and maintain and build six or seven apps, and we’ve been in that situation in the past where we had multiple apps on Android, multiple apps on iOS, we had Windows Phone 7 apps. And that it’s just unmanageable for a team our size, and so we made a decision to invest all of our resources in that free app so that it would serve the new users, as well as the advanced users.

NI: We’re not there yet, obviously. We have a long way to go still. We’re taking steps in that direction to make sure that it adapts to the level of the user. As a starting point, we’ll always need to make sure that we pay attention to that new user. There’s really no getting around that. I think if you look at other apps, they have the advantage of being able to build strictly for that advanced user, most likely a lot of the listeners of this podcast. And I’m certain of the GeoGearHead podcast as well. And so that means that they don’t have to really think about things like tutorials when we create a new feature, which surprisingly takes a fair amount of time to get right because it’s really easy to make a bad tutorial that no one will ever use or pay attention to. It means that we have to be really careful about things like accessibility. We’re concerned about people with color blindness or that have vision impairments. These are concerns that as a company with such a large audience, we have to make sure that we attend to the needs of a variety of different players and play styles.

NI: So we definitely are trying to move that app into a more advanced territory. A lot of the features that we’re planning on releasing soon are meant to target that user of our old paid app, which there’s still quite a few features that we hear people asking for. Offline maps is one of the big ones and that’s something that we’re gonna be addressing really soon here. Another one, well, there are many smaller features like personal cache notes, the ability to seek caches with corrected coordinates at their location on the map. We can talk about souvenirs, is another big feature. So we’ve catalogued all of those features that people are asking for and are putting in place plans to actually add them to the app.

CR: Alright, so next up was the Geocaching Vlogger, Joshua, and here is his question.

Joshua: Hello Geocaching HQ. It is Joshua, the Geocaching Vlogger, and I just wanted to first say congratulations on episode one of geocaching.com’s podcast. I think it is so awesome that you guys have decided to start this. What a great way to stay in connection with the geocaching community. I wanna thank you for reaching out to me and asking if I had any questions for episode one so I decided to go to my viewers of my geocaching videos and asked them what they wanted answered from Geocaching HQ. And I had a ton of answers. People were very curious about several things, but there were two topics that people were most passionate about, or two themes that came forward. The first one was around innovation. What innovations does geocaching.com see themselves bringing forth in the near future? And especially around the idea of cache types?

Joshua: There were many people that were like,”Oh, my gosh, wouldn’t it be great if geocaching.com would create a new cache type?” Some people wanted to have a history cache. Other people wanted some sort of virtual cache to come forward. With Pokemon Go coming out, there’s so many amazing things now that the phone could do. Is there anything that could be done regarding the technology of smartphones that geocaching could use? So that was the first question, “What is in the future as far as it comes to cache types and technology? That would be great to hear from your side of that. Also, many people were curious about the geocaching app. Many people wanted some of the features that they got from the classic app that they just haven’t got yet. So what are you working on right now as it goes with the geocaching app? And what is down the line for that? So guys, thank you so much for asking me to submit some questions and thank you for all the work you do to keep this amazing hobby going all over the world. Alright, thanks guys. Bye.

CR: Well, Joshua, thank you very much for the kind words and also for the questions. Nate, let’s focus on the question about innovation because we’ve talked about the apps a little bit and we’ll talk about them a little bit more later. But let’s talk about his question about innovation.

NI: Yeah, we’re really excited to innovate on the game of geocaching. One of the things when it comes to innovation that we like to consider is taking our cues from the community and what they’re already doing to innovate because I think that makes us all more successful in the end. Something that we see happen a lot with geocachers is goal setting and keeping the game fresh whether you have a 100 geocachers or a 1,000 or 10,000, being able to set a personal goal for yourself and go out and achieve that goal is something that keeps people geocaching and that’s something that we wanna tap into. And I think that there are aspects of the app and the website and the game of geocaching in general that we can expand to include that kind of activity.

CR: Okay, so LANMonkey from the Caching in the Northwest podcast, he asks, “We’ve heard rumors about the future of pocket queries and the advent of lists. Could you please provide us a bit of the roadmap of geocaching.com’s plans with respect to these two important and much used features of the website?”

NI: Yeah, they are very important and much used, you’re right about that. Pocket queries is interesting. We love pocket queries. That was our first biggest premium member feature and I think it was introduced way back in 2003 I wanna say, so right as I was starting with the company. It’s been used in a lot of different ways, pocket queries have. Some people use them just to filter a set of caches down to just the caches they wanna see. And in those cases, frequently they won’t even download the pocket query, they’re just using it as a way to filter.

NI: Another big way obviously is downloading and putting it on the internal memory of your GPS, your handheld GPS. Still a further way is using a third party tool to update a database so that you can slice and dice a large data set of geocaches. So pocket queries are interesting in that they’ve been used in so many different ways. I’ll tell you one of the downsides, one of the major downsides of pocket queries is that they don’t communicate with any other types of lists on the website. We have a number of different ways of creating a list of caches; pocket queries is one, watch list is another one, ignore list is another one, your notifications is also in that category. All of those different features do not talk to each other and you cannot move one list to another list. You can’t make a pocket query of your watch list and why not? It’s just a list of caches. If I have a list of caches, I should be able to do everything there is to do with a list of caches to that list. And so that’s the spirit behind investing in the lists feature, to try and address the things that pocket queries were doing, but do them in a more scalable extensible way.

CR: Alright, so Sydney from the Dutch magazine Live Geocaching, which is a fairly new magazine. You can find them at Facebook.com/livegeocaching. Asking, “We are excited to see which new features will be available in the Geocaching app. We are also curious about the new functions on the website. Are there, for example, plans to make the watch lists on cache pages publicly viewable?

NI: Going back to my last answer, the watch list is just another kind of list. I think the closest thing that we’d like to grow lists into is the bookmark lists. Bookmark lists are shareable. I think at some point in the future I’d like to merge watch list into the list paradigm and therefore, as a list it will be shareable.

CR: Cool. Alright, so Benny from Der Geocaching Blog over in Germany, you can find it at mudmen-ger.de. The perceived difficulty I think in the community of taking all of the features from the classic app and putting them into the new app, and I think I would wonder this too if I didn’t work here, essentially why can’t you just do a copy/paste of what’s in that old app and put it into the new one? It’s obviously more complicated than that.

NI: Yeah, it is more complicated. I think it goes back to one of my earlier answers just around trying to serve different experience levels with the same app. We wanna look at some of these features that maybe are a little bit more confusing to new users and try and reimagine how can we implement those in a way that is accessible to them as well as meets the needs of hard core geocachers. That is a really tricky balance to strike and it takes a lot of research, a lot of customer interviews, a lot of design iterations. We do a lot of usability testing with both geocachers and non-geocachers. And it teaches us a lot about the best way to implement that feature and it expands the time frame for development.

CR: Going back to Darryl from GeoGearHeads, he has a question about new Garmin products. And that’s a really exciting thing actually, is the partnership between HQ and Garmin right now. So here’s his question.

DW: I’m very intrigued with the Oregon 750 series, I happened to get one myself. I like the idea of being able to talk between the smartphone and the GPSr. But at this point it doesn’t really work for me. The whole thing that I’d really love to be able to do is use a smartphone for just about everything and send just the wavepoints to the app. Is there any plan to have the app talk with devices like the Oregon 750 in the future? Or is it always gonna be just the GPS talking with the smartphone as a dumb conduit to get the caches?

NI: I would say everything’s on the table. I mean, the technology that Garmin’s coming out with right now is incredibly impressive. We don’t have any current, solid plans to do that but I wouldn’t write it off.

CR: And you’ve been around obviously since almost the beginning. It’s been really interesting and really exciting to see the relationship between Geocaching HQ and Garmin really become a lot closer over the last year or so and we’re seeing that with the advent of this Oregon 700 series and I know that you know that there’s more stuff coming down the pike.

NI: There is more stuff and we were fortunate to get a sneak preview not too long ago. I’m extremely excited about the relationship that geocaching is having with Garmin right now. We look in the data and we see that most geocachers use Garmin devices. I was previewing the questions and I saw there was another one asking what kind of GPS I use. And when I go out usually I use my smartphone because I have a four-year-old and she won’t hike into the back country with me.

[chuckle]

NI: But if I’m hiking in the back country, I still use my old Garmin Colorado. I think Garmin is their own worst enemy there because they build such quality gear that it just continues to last. But in terms of the connected devices that they’re creating now, that opens up so many interesting possibilities for us in the future and it’s really cool to have close relationship with them so that we can take advantage of all that.

CR: And we got a couple questions you mentioned one just now from Sarah who writes the Geocaching Junkie blog over in Ireland. And she asked about the GPS but she also asked. “What is the single most important feature on the app to you as a geocacher?”

NI: Well, yeah, that is a tough one. The single most important feature. Honestly, it hasn’t been released yet but it’s about to be. Offline map capability is the most exciting feature. I cannot tell you… Well, I don’t have to tell you how frustrating it is to leave your house thinking everything’s cool and then you get within a quarter mile of the geocache and you lose network coverage. In the past, I would prepare for that situation and just make sure that I download a large area of geocaches in advance. I wanna dog food our product, so I use our free app all the time. And that’s bitten me several times already in that free app is to get to the location and then lose connection and not be able to find the cache. And I’m so excited that that’s something that we’re gonna be able to solve here very, very soon.

CR: Well, I think Sarah’s last question is a great one to wrap-up on and that is, “What is your favorite thing about working at HQ?”

NI: Oh, man. I think I said it earlier that play matters to me and it matters to the world. I have no delusions of grandeur about my position. I’m a lowly product guy. [laughter] And we’re not saving the world, we’re not feeding the world or clothing the world, but I think what we bring to the world is important too. It’s levity, and fun, and togetherness. And so I think that my favorite thing about working here is just having a piece of that, of just playing a part in delivering that level of play to millions of people. Just to say that is crazy to me, to have that kind of an impact on that many people for something that I feel is so valuable. That’s my favorite thing.

CR: So there you go. Nate Irish with some good information there, and we still have one more question. It is last but certainly not least from our friends down California way.

[music]

Sonny: Hey, I’m Sonny.

Sandy: And I’m Sandy.

Sonny: From PodCacher.

Sandy: The podcast all about geocaching.

Sonny: And you can find out more about us at podcacher.com. And over at PodCacher, one of the things we love to hear are geocaching stories that come from all around the world.

Sandy: And working at headquarters, I’m sure you guys hear lots and lots of stories. So our question for you is, can you share one of your favorite stories that you’ve heard this year?

Sonny: Alright. Hey, and thanks a lot. Looking forward to hearing that story, and keep on caching.

[music]

CR: Thank you Sonny and Sandy. We really do hear a lot of great stories about geocaching here at HQ. In fact, there’s something that we do here every month that I would like to tell you about. We have an all-company meeting, and one of the items on the meeting agenda every month is the community story. It might be something hilarious, it might be something heartwarming, it might be both. But whatever the tone of the community story, it’s always a really great example of how awesome the people are who play this game. And here is a really good example of it, a story that a lot of you have probably already heard about. But if you haven’t, you really should. It’s about something that happened near Benton City, Washington on October 30th, four people were out geocaching in a rural area when they saw an SUV at the bottom of a ravine. It was about 100 feet down a steep embankment.

CR: So these geocachers made their way down to the vehicle. They discovered that the driver was still inside the car. She had been trapped there for 14 hours. So the cachers called 911, help arrived, and the sheriff’s office has credited those geocachers with saving the woman’s life. That is an amazing story, and that’s a great way to end our first episode of Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast. We hope you liked it. We haven’t decided exactly how often we’ll be doing this. We’re gonna aim for monthly to start with and then maybe hopefully it’ll become more often. So we’d love to hear your feedback. You can email us at podcast@geocaching.com. That’s podcast@geocaching.com. Tell us what you’d like to hear about, we’ve got some ideas for upcoming episodes but this is your show, we wanna know what you would like for us to cover. And once we’ve got our next topic teed up, we will let you know about it on Facebook and Twitter, and in our online forums and we’ll give you a chance to ask the questions for that episode. In the meantime, thank you for joining us, happy caching.

/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 7): Introducing Virtual Rewards

Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome. It is Inside Geocaching HQ, this is our podcast, I’m Chris Ronan aka Rock Chalk. This is a special edition of the podcast, we have some big news to share today. News we hope will make you happy, news that may leave you with a few questions. We are going to try to anticipate those questions and answer a few of them in this episode. But first, the big news, and joining me for that is Cindy Potter, you may know her as Frau Potter, the Director of Community here at Geocaching HQ. She’s a return guest to the podcast, welcome Cindy.

Cindy Potter: Thank you.

[chuckle]

CR: So let’s get right to it. What is Geocaching HQ announcing today?

CP: Okay. Well, I am very, very excited to finally announce what we have to say today. It’s been secret for a while and it’s hard to keep a secret when you have a lot of visitors stopping by HQ. Today we’re launching something called Virtual Rewards. Has the word, virtual in it. Drum roll. Okay, we are launching 4,000 Virtual Rewards. These are unpublished virtual caches given as a thank you or a reward for two special groups of cachers. You can think of it as a limited release of virtual caches. So these two groups are top quality hiders. So we’re actually looking at the top 1% of quality hiders in up to 53 countries or so. And then the other group that we wanted to give a big thank you to, was the group of community volunteers. So the people that give back to the game so much, and that’s gonna be your community volunteer reviewers, the moderators for the forums, and the translators who translate the website, the apps, and the newsletter.

CP: So we really wanted a way to say thank you to… There’s so many people that give to this game obviously, and we couldn’t include all of them in this launch but we’ve been thinking for a while of how can we reward top hiders and how can we define that, which is something we’ll talk about later. But we wanted to especially reward those that put a lot of creative energy into their hides and we wanted to be able to launch some virtual caches.

CR: So for people that maybe don’t know what a virtual cache is, let’s start there, maybe you’re new to the game. Let’s talk about virtual caches, what are they exactly?

CP: Okay. So virtual caches are a cache type that do not have a physical box. So you don’t have to find a container. So you go to a location and often, you have to answer a question, or take a photo, or do a task while you’re there. It offers an opportunity, for example, for a place where you wouldn’t normally be able to put a cache. So perhaps the summit of a really cool mountain that’s got a lot of snow on it in the winter or something, so that it would be too difficult to put a physical there because it’s just gonna get too damaged but it’d be an awesome adventure to share with the community.

CR: This is a beloved cache type for a lot of people and some folks are gonna hear the headline about virtual caches and say, “Great, they’re back!”, but that’s not exactly the case, right?

CP: Right, no. Yeah, we don’t feel that we can open the flood gates for virtual caches. What we’re doing is doing a limited release of up to 4,000. And they’re still a grandfathered cache type, so you will not be able to open up the geocaching.com website right now and go to “Create a cache” and you will not see the icon there for you to choose a virtual cache. We chose these groups of people using an algorithm and only those people have the unpublished cache on their profile. So maybe you wanna take a pause and go look at your profile on the website right now to see if you’re one of those lucky people.

CR: So the community volunteers, that’s easy, we know who they are. But how did HQ decide who the top 1% of cache hiders are?

CP: Yeah, okay. So that’s gonna be a question a lot of people are gonna ask and I’ll say up-front, there’s no way to make a perfect algorithm. There are so many people that make great hides, we are not gonna be able to catch everybody in this algorithm, and we want to be able to thank all great cache hiders and we will look to future projects to be able to do that. In this particular release, we wanted to limit it to a 1% number. So we had to create something that was gonna really narrow it down, and we don’t wanna share exactly what that algorithm is because we don’t need people to try to game the system for the future, but we will say that it very heavily weights towards quality over quantity. So we’re looking mostly at the types of hiders when they put out each of their hides, they put some energy into each of them.

CR: So this is an algorithm that determines these people, there was not human involvement from opinions about whether or not somebody should get one. This was the algorithm determining it, the reviewers aren’t involved, people at HQ aren’t involved, we’re looking at a straight calculation here.

CP: That’s right, it’s a formula. So we used math and various criteria to determine who would fit into that and it’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s our attempt at coming up with the top 1%. And it’s top 1% for each of those countries, so you didn’t have to be compared against somebody from another country.

CR: Looking at virtual caches today, there are something around 4,600, almost 4,600 around the world, but they’re pretty heavily weighted in just a couple of areas and I think one of the neat things about this project is that it opens up that experience of virtual caches to other places around the world.

CP: That’s right. When we were thinking about this idea, I did a search of today’s virtual caches. And you can see, they’re very heavily concentrated in the United States and a few other countries. So it’s no wonder that for 12 years we’ve been hearing from people, “Why can’t we hide virtual caches?” “I wanna find more of these.” “It seems like a great opportunity.” We get those emails, we get those conversations in the HQ, visitors center when people come to see us. And we’ve always said, “Sorry, we can’t do that.” So this is just a limited way to return to that, but also to make it more fairly distributed worldwide and not just concentrated in a couple of countries.

CR: So the virtual cache type is beloved among many people because it is fairly rare now. There are only I think like we said, around 4600 in the whole world. But it is still a grandfathered cache type even with this new release. And I think people that have come into the game since 2005 which is when they were grandfathered, haven’t maybe heard the whole story about why that happened and then why we think this limited release will help avoid some of the problems that led to the grandfathering. So let’s just start by maybe just talking about why were they grandfathered in the first place back in 2005.

CP: Right. Okay. Well first I’ll start by saying that some of the caches people see today, they’re seeing the best examples of virtual caches. They’re seeing the ones that did get published, they’re not seeing the ones that didn’t get published. So it’s hard to judge what the challenges were, but the history from what I understand, is that at the beginning, there weren’t a lot of controls over what people could submit as a virtual cache because of course, they could be almost anywhere. So they were submitting things that were really not high quality, shall we say. The carcass in the woods is the legend I’ve heard. And then there were tennis shoes in the woods as well and every single roadside sign along a highway.

CP: So what happened then later was the “wow” factor was introduced. That the reviewers needed to review based on a very subjective criteria of whether or not this was something that the community would like. And some reviewers maybe were more lenient than others, it caused strife in the forums where people would say, “Well gosh, my reviewer wouldn’t publish my fabulous idea.” And someone else might say, “Oh, well I submitted a similar idea in this state or this country, and my reviewer published it within two seconds.” So that’s not a very healthy community when we have reviewers having to make subjective decisions and then people second-guessing their decisions. So that quickly spiraled out of control.

CP: And we didn’t see… There weren’t any easy solutions to that. However, we do feel that virtuals just like the community, we love virtuals. We love good virtuals. We thought this would be a nice opportunity to say, “Here’s some chosen people in the community. If we just narrow it down and have a limited release and everybody only gets one, then maybe they would spend that energy doing something much more interesting.” Showing people something that’s a hidden gem in their city or perhaps a cool mountain hike or a mountain vista or something that they would like to show people, instead of what would happen if we let them hide hundreds of them.

CR: So assuming that this goes well and we won’t know for a while, but assuming that this goes well, are there plans for more projects like Virtual Rewards?

CP: Oh, great question. Right now, we have no plans at all. We’ve never done anything quite like this before. So it really depends on how the community responds, what the cache owners do with this opportunity, whether or not the algorithm causes more strife in the community than we anticipated. But if things go well, maybe we’ll consider something similar in the future. But it won’t be exactly the same as this.

CR: Okay. So what happens now? How soon before we start seeing new virtual caches out in the world?

CP: Right. So Virtual Rewards were released today as unpublished caches to these 4,000 accounts. We don’t know exactly when they’re gonna get published. They could be published in a few hours. They could be published within a year. So they are being told that they have one full year to submit their cache for review. There’s no guarantee that all of these caches are gonna be published. They have to meet the guidelines. And some people frankly might not choose to not participate. They might feel that they don’t wanna have to monitor a virtual rewards page. But for those that are published, you can set up instant notifications if you’re a premium member. It’s a really helpful tool to find out when these are being published in your area. Or you can use the world wide search tool on the website and just go every few days to see if something new has shown up in your area. And so, you can be one of the first to go out there and experience these new virtual caches.

CR: Well, it’s a very exciting project. And I know you’ve been heavily involved with it and it’s been hard to keep it under lock and key for a couple of months now. But it’s very exciting and I know all of us at HQ are looking forward to seeing how the community reacts and hopefully they have a lot of fun with these.

CP: Yeah, I’m very very excited. I think that it was an interesting project to work on because we know it’s something people have wanted for so long. And we tried to find a creative solution to help fill that need but really the bigger goal was to reward those people that are the top quality hiders and also the community volunteers that give back so much to the the game.

CR: If you would like to learn more about Virtual Rewards you can check out the Geocaching blog. That is at blog.geocaching.com. We answer some more questions there and we will update the blog as more questions come in. So thanks for joining us. Happy caching!

/ Delanie

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 6): New Dashboard, Project-GC and Mary Hyde

[music]

Chris Ronan: Ahoy mateys! And that is the last you will hear of my pirate voice. This is Inside Geocaching HQ. Welcome. I’m Chris Ronan, your host for the podcast. We are busy with the Lost Treasure of Mary Hyde. Hope you have been enjoying the challenges this summer. Later in the show we will hear from Audrey Kettler from the marketing department at Geocaching HQ, who will tell us how the Mary Hyde story came about. Also in this episode, Magnus from project-gc.com, a very popular geocaching website. One of our great API partners. Someday we’ll do a show where we just talk about the API program, but for now, we will chat with Magnus, who is the founder of Project GC. But first, Jayme Hewitt. Jayme works on the product team at Geocaching HQ. Right now she is working on a very visible project, the updated dashboard. That is where you see a list of your recently viewed caches, your latest logs, you link off to your souvenirs, all sorts of important stuff. And they are approaching this project in a new way, so we thought it would be interesting to have Jayme tell us all about that. Here is me and Jayme talking about the dashboard and other fun stuff.

[music]

CR: Okay, so Jayme, you’ve been here for how many years at HQ?

Jayme Hewitt: Four.

CR: And how did you start here in the first place?

JH: I started on the community and volunteer side of things and was hired as a community manager. Half that, half volunteer team. I supported the worldwide crew of community volunteers while answering some tickets in a queue, and I moved from there over to the product side of things.

CR: And you were a geocacher before you came here?

JH: I was. I started caching with my husband Ben in 2008.

CR: You started here on the community team and you’ve done a few things over the years, right? Until you are where you are now, so what kind of work have you done leading into this role that you are currently inhabitating?

JH: Yeah, so on the community side of things I answered questions from people writing in. Concerns, reported bugs, took feature requests, etcetera, etcetera from people writing in. I worked in the forums for a while. I worked with the volunteers and helped triage problems that they were having working with a volunteer team. I became User Insights Analyst when I moved over to the product team. That was a move that… It started in my head when I was on the community team, because I really wanted to report these bugs and these feature requests and these things I was hearing to people and at that point in time, we didn’t really have a great feedback loop setup.

JH: And so, I didn’t really know where to give these things to to people, and I felt horrible saying like, “Yeah, great, I’ll report your stuff.” And there was nobody to take it. I, at that point in time, said, “Hey, can we start a feedback loop? I would love to be the person to do it.” I was given the role of User Insight Analyst and my charge was to get feedback from the general community and bring it into product development meetings. That was my start on the product team. After that, I transitioned into the role of Product Manager.

CR: And so, yeah, it’s been a natural progression, I guess, to where you are now. And so what is your title now? And what is your job description? What’s your general day-to-day duties are like?

JH: My title is Product Manager. I work on the product team, but then I also work with a delivery team. A team of engineers and a UX designer to make the stuff that the product team prioritizes and says, “These are the things that we should be working on.” My two separate teams are… The product team is a team of product managers, that also have delivery teams of their own. It’s like Ben, that you’ve heard from before in this podcast, is a product manager for the mobile team. I’m a web team product manager. My delivery team works on website features and stories. That’s kind of what I do. So as a product manager we are taking bugs and feature requests and business needs and we are prioritizing them as to what the community is looking for, based on what the business needs, based on the development resources that we have available at the time, and we’re taking all those thoughts and smushing them together and saying, “Okay, what’s the highest impact thing that we should be working on right now? What’s gonna make the most impact for the users and for Geocaching HQ?” And that’s how we decide the work to do as a product team, and then that goes to each of the web delivery teams. We have three separate web delivery teams. Each of them are working on separate features, separate bugs, from each other and that’s how we make the work happen.

CR: We’ve had Nadja on the podcast, we’ve had Ben, so they are both working on different delivery teams, correct?

JH: Completely different. Yep, yep, yep. And I’m working on different delivery team than Nadia. Her team is focused on very specific different features and our team has been focused on the dashboard.

CR: Which is a great segue into why I thought it would be really interesting to have you on the podcast is that each team does things a little bit differently in terms of how you decide how to attack these different projects, and your team has, as you said, has been working on the dashboard project. Could you talk about how you guys decided to do the dashboard the way that you have? Because it has been different and it’s, I think at times, been scary for some of the community. It’s been exciting for some. And I think if people understand a little bit more behind how you all decided to do it this way, and what the benefits have been, and what maybe you’ve learned during the process, I think that’d be really helpful for folks.

JH: Yeah, sure. It started pretty organically. My dev lead that I work with, Dave, he said, “Hey. Can we try something different this time with this big project?” And I said, “Okay. What are you thinking?”

CR: And different from what? The traditional way of doing it?

JH: Correct. Different from the way we have developed things in the past which is, we’ve researched big huge chunk of research before we started a project. And then we think we know all the answers from our research, so we create it in the way that we think will help serve the general community, and then we release it. Done. Usually a few follow ups in the end. Dave wanted to try something different. He said, “Hey. Can we release something that’s kinda bare bones, and get it in people hands first to see how they use it, and listen to feedback, and what they want to do with it, and then iterate really fast.” Listen to their feedback, do a release. Listen to their feedback, do a release. We have actually been doing releases almost every day, every other day, based on feedback that we hear from people in the forums, people on our feedback tool called Hot Jar. That’s kind of a different plan than typically what we’ve been doing at HQ.

JH: At first, we were a little bit worried with releasing something really bare bones to the community, thinking like, “They’re gonna think that we released this thing and we’re done.” Because that’s what we usually do, and we were worried about that at first. And so we wanted to be really proactive in the forums and say like, “Woah, woah, woah. We’re not done. We promise you, we’re gonna listen to you. We’re gonna listen to your feedback. We’re gonna be looking at data. We’re gonna be looking at quantitative results, and qualitative results to see what people are needing, what people are missing. We’re gonna be watching how people use this.” And we truly have tried to respect the feedback and listen to the feedback and see what problems people are having so we can help try and solve those problems on the go. Not having a fully released product, but keep adding value to it as the summer goes on.

CR: What are some examples of, maybe things that people have noticed of the ways that you’ve changed or made tweaks and additions based on that feedback?

JH: Yeah. The first one was a super, super big deal within the first couple weeks we released it. But we initially elected to remove email functionality from the profile and have everything go through message center. And we found out really quickly that didn’t work for a lot of people. We have changed our minds on that and brought back email functionality for everybody through the profile and said, “Okay. That’s fine. We won’t do that.” [chuckle]

JH: Another change that we switched out after listening to feedback was the about tab on the profile. People have statistics that they really love to display there. One of our concerns initially was that not everybody has that filled out, and so it was a confusing experience for people who didn’t have anything there. And we heard really strong opinions from people who did have stuff there, that they’re really proud of their stats and, “Please. Please. Make that the default landing page for the profile,” so we did switch that back eventually too.

CR: I know somebody’s probably out there right now, they’re listening and they’re saying, “But I still want them to change this, or this, or this. And they haven’t changed it yet.” Two questions, one… The first question, if somebody sees… They still see things that they feel really need to be changed. First question, how can they make their feelings known? Second question, does there come a time when it’s done? Or how long does this process go on for?

JH: Yeah, yeah. We do have bookends. We have planned bookends in our head and on our team. We’re aware of all the changes we want to make on the page before it’s done. We’ve kind of defined what our bookends are for completion, and we’ll let everybody know when we’re finished. [chuckle] We’re not gonna stop talking in the forums. The other question was… Oh, if people have changes they still… Continue to leave feedback for us on that little green widget guy down in your… I think it’s now on the center side of that page. We read all that. We’re paying attention to if you’re loving it or hating it. We also respond in the forums. If you go to the forums, every single release, Chris writes user release notes for the forums, for the release. We follow those and we pay attention to those and we’re listening to feedback. One thing that we have been hearing that we haven’t addressed yet, is the map link. We hear a lot of that on Hot Jar, so I can address that if you want me to now.

CR: Sure.

JH: When we first began this project, there was initially supposed to be some changes in the header to bring more visibility to the map link and the search link on the play drop down of the header, which is visible on every single page of the website. One of our reasonings for removing it from the dashboard was that it felt redundant if that was in the play drop down menu. Although at that point in time, it wasn’t super easy to see ’cause the text was… It wasn’t very clear. What we’ve done is we’ve made some changes, or we will be making some changes, to the header very soon that will make it incredibly clear, and the play drop down menu map will be the very first thing you see when you do that. Search will be the very next thing you see.

JH: There’s gonna be little icons next to each of them, so they’re gonna be very clear to say like, “Oh, this is the map. I can get to the map from any page on the site. I don’t have to click to my dashboard to go to the map.” We wanted to make it even easier than taking you to your dashboard to take you to the map. We wanted you to access the map from anywhere. That change was supposed to happen at the same time or before the dashboard ever got released. We ran into a few problems where we had some shortages in developers in the company and that project fell behind. We’re almost done with it though, so you’ll be noticing some changes in the header soon that should hopefully make it easier for you to access the map.

CR: And so with the project like the dashboard you can still use the old…

JH: You can.

CR: Way of doing it for the time being?

JH: It’s opt in. Yep.

CR: And at some point. But you can switch back and forth, right? If you decide… I’ve seen some people who are worried that if they switch over, they can’t go back and it’s an easy thing to go back and forth and check it out and see how things are changing over time.

JH: Yep, yeah. Please go check it out if you haven’t seen it from May, when we first released it. There’s a lot of changes that have happened since then. We’ve reduced the white space, which was another feedback complaint we had from people.

CR: We could do a whole episode on white space, you know?

[laughter]

JH: White space. Yeah, yeah. Definitely.

[chuckle]

CR: The pros and cons of white space. Yes, we could do that.

JH: Yeah, yeah. No, we’ve tried to reduce some of that because we know that scrolling is a pain in the butt for a lot people. And we have pretty big screens here, so it’s easy for us to see a lot on our screens which we need to remember to test it out on smaller screens, and check and make sure that we don’t require too much scrolling for everybody. We’re trying to ease that a little bit.

CR: Well, I’ll let you get back to making iterations.

JH: Thanks Chris.

[laughter]

CR: Thank you.

[music]

CR: That was Jayme Hewitt from the product team at Geocaching HQ. Hope you enjoyed our talk. Earlier this year, I spent a lovely week in Sweden and Denmark, and on one of those days, I had the great pleasure of geocaching with Magnus, the founder of Project GC. He showed me around some of the great caches in his city, and we took the opportunity to record a short conversation about his website. I did not have any of our usual equipment with me, so this was recorded on my phone, in Magnus’s cache-mobile, but it was a very interesting talk. Hope you enjoy.

[music]

JH: Magnus, maybe we could start, for people that don’t understand what Project GC is, could you just talk about what it is? What the website does?

Magnus: Absolutely. It’s actually several things today but from beginning it was all about statistics more or less. It started for me as a hobby project, more or less for my own purposes, but from that it has expanded, and over the years it has built into a successful site that is used by quite a lot of geocachers. The focus from beginning was, as I mentioned, statistics, and we tried to show in geocaching in numbers, in many different ways. Who has found the most caches? Who has found the most large caches? Who has logged caches most days in a row? And stuff like that. It would build a lot on let people have goals and wants to do something else but just finding caches. Trying to, yeah, have their own goals, push them a bit. Pretty much what it started like.

CR: What was the impetus in the beginning? What made you say, “I’m gonna start with this”? Was there something in particular that brought this to life to begin with?

Magnus: Yeah. Actually, it was a request from another geocacher, which is quite fun. We wanted to know who has logged the most caches, how Sweden was doing compared to other countries and so on. And not that it’s about the numbers, not really, but some people it drives. It drives me a bit. And not typical having those finds, but I like logging different details, for example. Or I want to know how many earth caches have I logged compared to someone else, and stuff like that. It was someone else’s idea from the start and I thought it was fun. I had some spare time. I was quite interested. I started building on this. Well, today it’s really not only about statistics but on Project GC, you can find almost any statistics you want, and they are dynamically created, so you can filter them on many, many attributes.

CR: I think a lot of people hear about Project GC because they do something with challenge caches, and they see checkers out there. How did the checker idea first come about?

Magnus: Yeah. You could call it one of the latest big things at Project GC. The thing was that I saw personally so many challenges that was so hard to figure out if you could log or not. And in some cases, the description was very hard to understand but once you understood that, it was fairly easy. But in other cases, it was very hard to look at your data to know, “Have I logged a GC code that starts with six and have I logged a mystery that hadn’t been logged for years before that,” and things like that. Actually, this started as something I needed myself as well. I am very into challenge caches myself. I’ve logged quite a lot. I’m up in a four digit number. And a lot of those has required me to build small programs, to actually produce some output of proof of how I fulfill it.

Magnus: And I felt like others will need these as well, obviously. From that it scaled to that I started building some form of framework where others, other users at Project GC, could create checkers. And from this it went into a moratorium, which you probably know, where Geocaching HQ didn’t allow anymore challenges to be published for about a year. And during this year we had some discussions between Project GC and geocaching.com and it ended up with the decision to require challenge checkers in a cooperation between the two companies. And since then we have improved it a bit, opened up, and today all new challenges that are published requires a challenge checker at Project GC. And it’s an excellent thing. It’s pretty much a click or two to know if you’re qualified or not.

CR: And for people who maybe know Project GC mostly because of challenge checkers, is there anything that you would like people to know about that they can do on your website that maybe they might not know about? Any features that you think people would enjoy trying out?

Magnus: For my own purposes, or my own favorite thing, is that I use it as a planning tool. When I started geocaching seven years ago, I pretty much was aiming to cache them all. I guess it’s quite typical, but suddenly you see that there are so many geocaches and I started traveling more, which meant that I was covering grounds of 100,000 geocaches. For me it wasn’t reasonable to log them all anymore. Especially since there are quite a few published everyday. Which is fun, but what I wanted to do was I wanted to be selective. I wanted to, as I mentioned, to log different details for example.

Magnus: When I was away to New Zealand, I wanted to find all the large caches, so Project GC created a tool that we call the Virtual GPS. We like to compare it to a shopping cart, more or less. While browsing Project GC, you can go through different top lists or can compare your finds with someone else, see caches and maps. Meanwhile, every time you see a cache, you can add it into this Virtual GPS. Pretty much like you add a T-shirt into shopping cart on another site. And once you feel that you’re done, you can export that Virtual GPS into GPX file and import into your geocaching program or Garmin GPS and that is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful tools at Project GC.

[music]

CR: If you haven’t already, head over to Project GC to check out those tools that Magnus talked about. That is project-gc.com. Okay, the Lost Treasure of Mary Hyde. We are into week three of the summer geocaching promotion. I thought it’d be nice to sit down with Audrey, from HQ’s marketing team, and hear more about how we came to know of the Lost Treasure of Mary Hyde. Here we go.

[music]

CR: We welcome Audrey to the Inside Geocaching HQ podcast. Audrey, is this your first podcast ever, anywhere?

Audrey Kettler: First podcast ever.

CR: In your whole life?

AK: Anywhere in my whole life.

CR: This is a world debut.

AK: Yeah, this is a big moment for me.

CR: This is huge. Wow. I had no idea that there was that kind of a…

AK: Yeah, the pressure is on.

CR: This is great.

AK: I can’t wait.

CR: Okay, so I have a lot of questions I didn’t tell you I was gonna ask you. A lot of crazy, controversial stuff that we’re gonna be talking about.

AK: Let’s just dive in.

CR: Let’s just get into it, right? First, before we get to the controversial issues, let’s talk about what you do at Geocaching HQ. You’re on the marketing team. What kind of stuff keeps you busy everyday?

AK: Yeah, so essentially I am on the marketing team and I’ve been with HQ for about two years. Our team really likes to say that we guide and form and inspire our community.

CR: This summer we have this Mary Hyde pirates promotion. In general, the summer promotions now has been going on, I think we counted, that this is the fifth year that we’ve been having these. How far in advance does the marketing team start thinking about what a summer promotion might look like?

AK: We typically like to think about it a few months before we would announce a summer promotion, so mid-March we like to have an idea of what goes on because there is a lot of planning that goes into the process. Whether it’s from the creative team, or the developers, the assets that we need, or just some data requests that go into it. There’s a lot that goes into any souvenir moment that we have at Geocaching.

CR: These promotions, there are people from all over the company that are involved in something like this. It’s not just marketing. It’s not just another department. It really does cross throughout people all throughout the company.

AK: Yeah, absolutely. Just to even start with an idea like this we usually sit as a marketing team, we start thinking of ideas, and kind of what we want to achieve. And typically that’s just creating something fun for the community to really just get outside and go geocaching and whatever that means. We usually start by thinking of an idea, and this year for our pirate promotion, we actually thought of the idea randomly in a meeting back in December. And once we thought about it, we’re like, “We know we wanna do pirates.” And really we wanted to do it because it brings geocaching back to the basics. And geocaching in itself is the world’s largest treasure hunt, so we knew what fits that theme better than pirates? And it seems like it’s really stuck so far and people seem to like it.

AK: But when we start with an idea, we bring it together, and then right after that we usually bring it to our creative studio. These are the people who are gonna be making all of the art for a promotion like this. And right now, we have a team of two, Roxxy Goetz and Nathan Cavanagh, and we brought this idea to them, and they just ate it up. And usually when they love it, their artwork is inspired and it just really transforms and takes off. They actually thought of the whole narrative. Roxxy, our designer, actually had a pirate themed wedding, so she has just been… She’s so knowledgeable in all the pirate facts and just different terms, so she’s been a huge part of this promotion. But beyond that, we work with our developer teams, and sometimes for some of our promotions we have features that are either on geocaching.com or sometimes could be integrated with our mobile app, so we had a lot of work with some of our development teams to make sure that we had use of the Friend League, specifically for this pirate promotion.

CR: One thing I didn’t mention before we started this was that we were going to conduct the rest of the segment in our pirate voices. That won’t be a problem, will it?

AK: No.

[laughter]

CR: Are you serious? Was that really your pirate voice?

AK: Argh!

CR: Oh my gosh!

[laughter]

CR: Yeah, we’re not gonna do that.

AK: Yeah, that’s bad.

CR: For people who aren’t familiar with this summer’s promotion, it is the Lost Treasure of Mary Hyde, and what all does it entail?

AK: Yeah, so this is a four week long promotion with new challenges each week. Each week there will be a new souvenir up for grabs. Using the Friend League, you’ll see what points you need to earn, whether that’s a team challenge or an individual challenge, and once you earn the points, you will be awarded that week’s souvenir, which will be a map piece. Once you earn all four map pieces, then you will earn the coveted Mary Hyde’s Lost Treasure.

CR: You mentioned Friend League, which is one of our newer features on the website, and it’s getting a test run with this Mary Hyde promotion. What is Friend League all about?

AK: Yeah, so the Friend League is essentially a leader board that shows you and your friend’s geocaching activity. If you log a cache, attend an event, you can collect points in the form of gold coins. This new feature, like you said, is being tested through this promotion. It was created by one of our developers, Heather Wallachi, and so once we saw this new feature that she was working on, we knew it had to be integrated into our promotion and we knew the community would really love it.

CR: You have the narrative, you have this tool, Friend League, and then the team has to come up with these challenges, right? The various ways that each week people will earn points, and I would think that there’s a challenge, no pun intended, with trying to come up with something that is yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s also achievable, right? We want people to have the opportunity to earn these souvenirs.

AK: Totally. It can be really difficult for us to create a challenge that is accessible to everybody because we really want it to be easy enough so a new player learning about the game and excited about it can join in and have fun, but we also want it to be fun and engaging for our users who geocache all the time. With the leader board, a lot of the challenges, you work together as a team, but we know there’s a lot of people out there who like to geocache alone, so we definitely wanna accommodate that through this promotion. We made sure to make every challenge easy enough so you could do alone if you didn’t want to work with others, but then also easy enough if you wanted to work as a team, you could easily earn the souvenir.

CR: One of the things that’s been fun for me, and for a lot of us here at the office, is seeing how excited everybody here gets about the summer promotions, because each year we actually have a promotion internally where we divide up into teams and try to achieve these various challenges together. It’s been really cool to see that just here in the office every day.

AK: Yeah, definitely. We’ve actually split up into teams of five or six around the office, and people are just having the best time.

CR: Are you bringing your team up or down? What’s the…

AK: Oh, way up.

CR: Way up?

AK: Our average is way up. I know…

CR: That’s very specific. I like that. Just way up.

[chuckle]

AK: The good thing about being on the marketing team is that I know the point values coming up, and so the other people in the office don’t exactly know what actions are gonna be the highest point value, so I have that insider knowledge and I have been sharing it with my team, which could be seen as unfair.

CR: That seems like something a pirate would do actually.

AK: Yeah. [laughter] My name is Arr-dry.

CR: Oh my gosh! I can’t believe you didn’t bring that out earlier. That’s hilarious. No, we’re not cutting that out. That’s totally staying. [laughter] Well, I think… Is there anything else that we didn’t cover about the… This week and next week, right?

AK: Yeah, this week and next week. Hopefully everyone’s still trying to earn all four pieces of the treasure map because there will be a fun surprise if you earn them at a souvenir, so just stay tuned for that.

CR: Well, I think we’ve pretty well covered everything, and we’ve used up all of our silly pirate voices and puns and whatever else. [chuckle] Do you feel good about it?

AK: Yeah, feel as good as I can.

[chuckle]

CR: Okay. Well, Audrey thank you. Or I should say Arr-dry, thank you very much.

AK: Yeah, thank you. And we hope everyone earns those souvenirs.

[music]

CR: Have you gotten your fill of pirate voices? I know I have. Thanks to Audrey, to Magnus of Project GC, and to Jayme Hewitt from HQ’s product team for being a part of this episode. Do you have questions for us? We would love to answer them on Inside Geocaching HQ. Just email us at podcast at geocaching.com. Once again, that’s podcast at geocaching.com. We will see if we can answer your questions on the show. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Until then, happy caching.

/ Martin Kerstein

Geysir (powerful hot spring) – Geocache of the Week

EarthCache
GC1G4XZ
by Biggi_H
Difficulty:
2
Terrain:
1.5
Location:
Iceland
N 64° 18.746′ W 020° 18.042′

Iceland has set itself apart as a highly sought-after destination for EarthCache connoisseurs. One might say the overall beauty of the island, with its many geological marvels, makes it one big EarthCache. The most favorited EarthCache in Iceland makes for a spectacular sight, being an explosive choice for Geocache of the Week.

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