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

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

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

01:50 Chris: Around.

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

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

02:02 Cindy: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07:15 Cindy: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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