[Az-Geocaching] Re: Suggestions for Statistics

[Scott Sparks]

I really think the best approach to this problem is to get 
www.geocaching.com's approval and even their blessing.   To do that we, 
as a community, need to open a dialog with someone at www.geocaching.com 
who can make decisions and convince them that it is to their benefit to 
allow azgeocaching.com to access their data.  I can think of a few ways 
to do this. 1) We could delegate an individual (or team of individuals) 
to champion this cause.  2.) Circulate a petition signed by everyone in 
the AZ geocaching community and send it to someone in charge. 3) Mount a 
campaign of letters in which we all send individual letters (or perhaps 
a copy of the same letter.) An occasional e-mail from Snaptek won't 
carry much weight.  4) A combination of all of the above.

But, before we can attempt any of this, we need to first discover for 
ourselves what the benefit to www.geocaching.com is.  I don't think it's 
been clearly defined, yet.  There's been lots of talk about how _we_ 
need our stats and what a great job the Snaptek guys do (which they do) 
but we need to ask ourselves what the benefit to geocaching.com will be 
if Snaptek has access to their data.  Until that determination is made, 
we don't have a snowball's chance in Phoenix.

Here's what I think _won't_ work:  1) Boycotting.  Remember, there are 
50 states and umpteen countries that support www.geocaching.com and 
Arizona is only one of them.  Of the percentage of geocachers who are 
Arizonans, only a certain percentage of them have Charter Memberships. 
 Of that number who have memberships, only a percentage will participate 
in a boycott.  The number of memberships that www.geocaching.com loses 
due to this issue won't even be noticeable.  Boycotts, whether its 
gasoline, tea, imported goods or electronic data, are only effective 
when they are executed on a large scale and with a strong show of 
solidarity.
2) Continued discussion, locally, of how much _we_ need the data.  Like 
I said before, we need to be talking about how www.geocaching.com can 
see it as beneficial and we need to take our case to them.

-- Sprocket