BirchSnooper

Pole Position, I hope you post a copy of your letter as I think FlyBob is right -- getting ahead of public perception by promoting the positive aspects of geocaching/CITO is a good thing. In fact, I think knowschad's suggestion of hosting a CITO event would be a good complement to the letter. This is something I'm considering in my community but I don't feel I know enough yet to ensure I'd have a successful event (e.g Would anyone show up?) What I'm doing in the meantime, is creating little CITO packets using a ziplock sandwich bag, a disposable glove, a trashbag and a CITO sticker. I plan to leave these in both caches I find and caches I hide. Hopefully, it will encourage more trash cleanup. Not only has geocaching got me out of my little hiking box but it has encouraged me to pack out more trash. Good luck!

I'm glad to see the responses in this thread. As an old Boy Scout, I was always taught to police my area and leave a location better than I found it. I think this is a great philosophy and one that has a net positive effect for all concerned. I'm also a cyclist and a motorcyclist and I've seen the results when repetitive "bad" behavior has resulted in the restrictions on our access to roads, parks and trails. GeoCaching seems to be another activity that people could shut down if enough people felt we were not, on net, a positive influence on the environments we enter. I think it takes very little extra effort to grab a plastic bag and pick up some trash along the way. Also, while I have your attention, are there any CITO events planned in association with Coastal Cleanup Day on Sept 19, 2009? Cheers.

I just wanted to clarify that I was never suggesting searching for one's "contact details" without their permission. Additionally, I don't think the laws necessarily need to "mention social networking" explicitly as we're talking about a collection of behaviors that have evolved over time which we now call social networking and technically, this forum could be considered a social-networking site. Additionally, on any thread, I can go up to "Options", click on "Mail this thread" and enter any email address to send this thread to any email address I know. Why shouldn't we be able to do that with a friend request? Regards, BirchSnooper

Todd, thanks for posting the link to that thread. I just wanted to re-iterate my thoughts that this idea is an excellent idea and it would be made better if we had better tools for inviting, engaging with and managing our friends. Cheers! BirchSnooper

One of my examples was simply me being able to send an invitation to join GeoCaching.com to some friends. That certainly would not be an issue. As it is with GeoCaching, I get to set up watches on caches, bugs and a geographical radius and get notified when various people find a cache. I'm already being notified when people, I don't know are doing things in my area. I don't see how allowing me to narrow that scope down to a set of people who are my friends is a more permissive use of the data. I also don't see how being allowed to find someone by their email address, if I already know their email address, is a violation of trust but that can be managed by setting an attribute that effectively says "allow people to find me by my email if they know it". I would certainly enable that. I realize some people are already deep in the GC community and have lots of offline friends with which to share geocaching. I, on the other hand, am coming from outside and am looking to make (relatively) local friends in the community as well as encourage more of my friends to get involved -- so far, I've recruited 9! As it is, I find GC.com very limited in providing me tools to knit this community together and invite others to join us. If I could just send a "friend request" to my friend's known email addresses, that would be a nice start. Another issue that just came up today was the upcoming California Coastal Cleanup Day on Sept 19 which seemed like a good day to do a CITO event. I started another thread about it but an ability to post an event/topic for a regional population (beyond what is available in the forums) would be nice. If I'm missing an existing feature, please let me know. All I could do was search Google and search the forums but a search of "Coastal Cleanup" didn't return anything useful in the forums. I love the idea of being able to do a Pocket Query for caches that have not been found by any in a selected set of friends. Anyway, as I pointed out earlier in this message, it's my perception that this site has already migrated toward some elements of social networking and it seems that some stronger and more flexible friend management features would be good for the community. Thanks for listening and participating in this thread. Cheers, BirchSnooper

I think this is an excellent example and fits very much into what I had in mind.

Saturday, Sept 19, is the 25th Annual Coastal Cleanup Day: My question: Is anybody planning any CITO events related to this? Seems like a natural fit. BTW, it's also International Talk Like a Pirate Day for those who want to add a little more spice to their adventure! BirchSnooper

Hmmm, interesting responses. Allow me to add some more fuel to the discussion. While geocaching can be something one does as a solitary pursuit, I find that our experiences are something many of us like to share. I have several friends who are interested but haven't taken that first step to register at GeoCaching.com. I wish I could invite them to join via an email message. I can certainly hand-craft one of those but it would be a nice feature to have it built in. I actually have 7 friends who are starting caching with our own little travel-bug race and the only way to connect with one another is to wait until someone signs up and then ask them what their username is and then initiate an invite. Seems cumbersome. While many people geocache all over the world, there is definitely a center of gravity around one's home. When I find a really interesting or fun cache, I wish I could share it with my friends as a suggestion of one to visit and vice-versa. I do get the regularly updates, based on my geography when some random person finds a cache in my vicinity but sometimes I'm more interested in what my friends are doing (or have recently done), especially locally. The other notifications are interesting not because of the people but for the caches themselves. BTW, this is not about event caching -- that is something entirely different. BirchSnooper

I have yet to release a coin though I'm considering it. I am concerned about them going missing and I assume at some point they will which is a sad commentary, I guess. I have this idea that it would be nice if all GeoCoins came in matched pairs: one to keep as a souvenir and one to release into the wild. It seems that if anyone wanted to trade a coin from such a set, that real collectors would only buy the matched pair and anyone trying to sell the traveling coin from the pair would be considered "suspicious". It would also hurt less should the traveling coin go AWOL since one would still have the master coin. (BTW, there could be a viable market in the trading of "master" coins since they never circulated in caches.) If anyone ever implemented this model, I would be more inclined to release the traveling coins; however, I wonder what the net impact on coin theft would be. Just a thought.

A small group of friends are getting into geocaching and as someone who uses several other social media sites, I'm surprised it isn't easier to connect with other people. Here are some examples that I basically expected to be there: 1) Search for a friend on GC.com via their email address. 2) Invite a friend to join GC.com via email. 3) Search for other users near me. The flip side is that I think it would be nice if we could have some children's accounts as sub-accounts under their parents with some parental controls until they are old enough to be on their own. Just a thought. Thanks for the site, the database, the interfaces and this forum. Love the iPhone app! BirchSnooper

While I realize that there are FTF Hounds, I like the idea of leaving something special. In particular, I'm hoping to encourage more kids to try geocaching so I love the idea of FTF coins but I've only found a two versions. So, I'm curious, are there any nice FTF coins available or are they just not that commonly used? We are having pathtags made, so we can always leave one of them in any caches we hide. BirchSnooper

I realize this is a very old thread but I thought I'd share that I've just created a small Google email list for any Geocachers in Sonoma Valley. I'm a mentor to a 10 year old boy and am hoping that geocaching might be something we can do together and encourage others to do, too. You can find our group at: http://groups.google.com/group/sonoma-valley-geocachers Cheers!