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IndiGo-Geo

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You asked for it, you got it! Surveys and discussions over the past few months have revealed the need to have a functioning geocaching group in Indiana. Many of you voiced concern that events are few and far between and often too far away to attend. IndiGo has been formed to meet those needs.

 

What is IndiGo ? IndiGo stands for Indiana Geocaching Organization. It will serve Indiana's south and central caching community. Does this mean if you live outside of this area you can't attend IndiGo events? Absolutely not, everyone is welcome. This just means that IndiGo events will be held from the Indianapolis area south. In fact, we challenge cachers located north of Indianapolis to form a sister group to cover the northern part of the state.

 

So, how do you become a member of IndiGo? Easy, just attend an IndiGo event.

 

Official IndGo Web Site

 

Feel free to post here on this forums any comments and suggestions.

 

Thanks,

IndiGO Steering Committee.

 

Daggy, Indy Diver, and Prairiepartners

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How come it's just south and central Indiana--what about the north if this is to be an umbrella organization?  :)

IndiGo will serve Indiana's south and central caching community. In-Geo will remain as Indiana's northern geocaching group.

 

What does this mean for you? Anyone can join IndiGo or In-Geo, no matter where you live and you can attend events for both. However, IndiGo will only host events from Indianapolis south and In-Go will host events north of Indianapolis.

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For people who missed the announcement in the "regional organizations" thread, one of the new "social" organizations springing from this reorganization of the Indiana geocachers is CINCO -- www.cincogeo.com -- which is serving the region around Kokomo, Lebanon, Lafayette, Monticello, and Logansport. If and when InGeo gets re-vitalized then we will be part of that umbrella group.

 

CINCO is having their first event on Saturday Nov. 12th on the east side of Lafayette. We get together to eat and talk and then, if the weather is nice, do some geocaching. I am sure one of the topics will be InGeo since Team Shydog went to the recent Pokagan event and talked with people from Ft. Wayne and other areas about caching in the northern part of the state.

 

With the formation of IndiGo and the possibility of a re-energized InGeo plus all of the regional "social" groups forming it is indeed an exciting time for Indiana geocaching.

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Hello Cachers! As you can see we have been brainstorming IndiGo for some time and are still in the development stage. I will be working out the bugs in the website asap. Had to leave for Philly for a business conference but wanted to get the main components up for your review when the cache pages started rolling out. I will work on the links over the next few days. Once I've got those fixed you guys can proof it for me as you roam the site and let me know what else needs to be fixed.

 

We definately need reporters, article writers and cachers to feed us information from all the different areas. Let us know what you want to see on the site. Plans are that the website will be the information hub for our cachers and caching areas. More discussion to come at the event meetings!

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Does this mean someone will be heading up the IN-GEO site? I requested membership about a month or two ago and I got an email stating my membership had been automatically rejected because the owner/moderator had failed to take action for 14 (or so) days.

We are hoping that someone will step up to the plate to take over the InGeo portion (north of Indianapolis). Daggy ,Indy Diver and I are working on the IndiGo (Indianapolis to the south) . We believe Indiana is just too large for one group to effectively handle the whole state.

Feel free to voice concerns on here and join us at our events.

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We are hoping that someone will step up to the plate to take over the InGeo portion  ...

 

Or at least kill it off and start something new. :D

 

Everyone will have a different opinion on what is happening to Indiana Geocaching. Here is mine:

 

InGeo has been around for some time now but has always been a very weak organization. Oh, there have been the Spring and Fall picnics but, in practice these have either been run by individuals in the north ("spring") or by a dedicated "picnic planning team" in the south ("fall".) There really have not been any InGeo meetings since IndyDiver formed InGeo way back when. Of course there is the web site but even that is now deader than a doornail. Few people post, news is out-of-date, and evidently people can not even get accounts. I should point out that I am not trying to blame anyone for the lack of a strong InGeo but rather I am just stating what is evident -- InGeo is not an vibrant organization. All that exists is the web page and, frankly, that is no good at all. We could disband InGeo without a tear shed.

 

Meanwhile, during InGeo's malaise, a couple of local more "social" groups have sprung up, notably InKy near Louisville and NEIgeo near Ft. Wayne. Additionally there has been pressure from other regions (Bloomington, Lafayette and elsewhere) to have more active geocaching organization(s). If you think about it, a smaller organization is more handy for social gatherings since it is much easier to attract people to and find volunteers for a local weekday event than it is to host a bigger weekend event. It is also easier to associate with and get club officers from people in your nearby area. If you look at InKy's web site (www.members.tripod.com/inkygeo) you can see what a vibrant organization looks like. However at the same time having a state-wide organization can be helpful in order to present a united front to the government, to host state-wide picnics, and so forth.

 

After this year's Fall picnic the people in the south (Daggy, IndyDiver, and Prairepartners, among others) decided that it would be a good idea to form a bunch of local social groups and put them together under the "IndiGo" umbrella. The north/south mid point of Indiana (both in population and in geography) is slightly north of Indianapolis, thus it was decided the the Indy area would be part of IndiGo. Since Team SouthFace, a northener, (note, Southface has not cached since April '05 -- I am not sure how active they are any more) created the InGeo web site the southern people (who have been more or less running InGeo) offered the InGeo name to northern part of the state. Freed from the constraint of working under InGeo we in the northwest-central part of the state (Lebanon, Kokomo, Lafayette, Monticello, Logansport) decided that the idea of local social organization was a good one and so we formed CINCO (www.cincogeo.com) however we declined the offer of taking over InGeo especially since we could not speak for the rest of the northern part of Indiana. Since the CINCO formation Chris from Team Shydog has gone to the Pokagan event in order to talk with people there about what to do about forming a northern umbrella organization. I haven't heard back from him but I expect that he will post on this topic when he gets a chance.

 

So ... what does this mean for InGeo? As I said at the start of my message InGeo may just get a stake through its heart. Or the north may decide to revive it. Unfortunately, in my mind, the InGeo name has a bad stigma attached to it as a "do nothing" organization. Of course that stigma can be erased by a enthusastic rebirth of the organization. We shall see what happens. In any case it is an exciting time for Indiana geocaching organizations. I expect a lot of local social organizations to pop up and host a variety of meetings. IndiGo may prove to be a strong force in the south. The northern groups may band together to form an organization (InGeo or other) or may keep our current loose "no organization" form.

 

I notice that I used a lot of "southern" and "northern" groupings in the above paragraphs. This could be misinterpreted as "us versus them" type of description. That is not my intent. Ultimately we are all geocachers -- a strange breed indeed. And ultimately we are all MidWesterners (I wish to include the geocachers from the states surrounding Indiana) -- also a strange breed of people who refuse to give up the heartland for the sunny western shores or the golden Rocky mountains. As the IndiGo, CINCO, and other charters state anyone is welcome to any meeting. We are not trying to draw boundries nor force people into one group. We all play together.

 

However as might be expected with with change afoot and new lines of communications being formed perceived conflicts can inadvertently occur. The inaugural CINCO event is being held Sat. Nov. 12th. Today we found out that the inaugural IndiGo-Indy and IndiGo-Bloomington events are also being held be on that day; the IndiGo people and ourselves never discussed the coincidence in the date. Is this a conflict that should divide organizations? One could consider it that light. Or one could -- like WCNUT & TATER are doing -- consider it a "triple play" challenge. Breakfast in Bloomington at 9, lunch in Lafayette at 12:30 (with, weather permitting, caching afterwards) and then dinner in Indy at 5. Personally I am going to try for the "double play" -- a CINCO lunch in Lafayette and IndiGo-Indy dinner. It should be fun!

Edited by RPW
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LOOOOOOOOOOOOOKS Good to me. Sign us up. I might get back into the swing of things if I can get Donna and Microcacher out a bit more. In the mean time keep up the good work.

 

If the new organization works out half as well as your fall picnic events it will be a giant success! All who venture into the realm of Indigo will surely benefit from it's existence.

 

You guys are a well-organized and dedicated bunch. You always pour your hearts and souls into this thing we call Geocaching. Thanks for taking on this huge task. We all love the chance to, get together, talk about, and participate in our favorite pastime. It looks like this new organization will give us many more opportunities to do just that.

 

Thanks again,

Team D & D and Microcacher, Greensburg, IN

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Don't forget event time is Evansville time, be sure to check so you're don't miss event.

 

Indeed! Although if you are not on the correct time you will most likely be an hour early which is not too bad. The most it does is cut into your caching time.

 

At the CINCO event this past weekend we had some people from Illinois. Naturally they were operating on CST instead our EST and forgot that when they "fell back" from CDT to CST we just stayed where we are. Thus they were an hour and 15 minutes late to the event. (An hour for the time change, 15 minutes because they were out caching.) We still had a good time but I wish I had that extra time to chat with them.

 

BTW: Sorry I didn't make it down to IndiGo-Indy. I was hoping to grab a ride with other people after the CINCO event but it turned out that everybody else had other plans. The CINCO event itself was nice. A lot of old and new faces. We followed up the lunch with caching at a local county park.

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If those of us in the East-Central Indy area would like to form a website to keep up with "local" things, social events, fun stuff, Cachegurl says that she will make the website. She already has two of her own. We could have a FREE website, however that has lots of pop-ups, or we could have one for $8.95 a month with no ads and our own domain name. Anyone interested? Any comment or thoughts? Respond back and tell us what you think! ;)

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Excuse me, but many more TB/Coin drops in the indiGO Evansville event and I may have to get another monitor just to view the caches...    :anitongue:

Thought Groundspeak fixed that problem, all I see is stacks of coins, not individual coins.

The coins and TBs on the main GC page are stacked liked their suppose to be but if you do an "identify caches" on the cache mapping page they are not. No big deal, just a bit of an annoyance if the event happens to be listed on the identify caches page. It's not IndiGO's problem anyway.... ;)

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Anyone with any suggestions on the 2006 IndiGo (Indiana) Geocoin please feel free to post here or email me.

 

I really want to get this going so we can have these early in 2006.

 

Let's get this rolling!!! Come artistic people out there!

 

I've already sent some artwork to coin company to get things started.

Edited by Prairiepartners
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Since it is the first coin and the organization is new---How about the map of the counties that are served by IndiGO---or better yet, the Cache 911 map.

 

That way we would be advertising the 911 system for cache rescues, AND showing the areas served by the organization---and it would have a little color, but not be overwhelming.

 

Or were you hoping to get by without color on the back side?

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