[Az-Geocaching] Re: Suggestions for Statistics

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