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

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01:17 Chris: Okay, you ready?

01:18 Bryan Roth: I am ready.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

06:26 Chris: Nope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22:30 BR: I know it’s a good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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