opencaching.com

nici-

Hi!

I think, we'd start to gather all those existing national/local groups and I would like to invite you to come here and tell a bit about your group.

To introduce me: I'm nici- from 'Vinnie-, nici- and Linus', living near Cologne, Germany. I'm webmaster of Geocaching.de and as such have a little insight into the german community. Or the german speaking communities, as we serve the swiss and the austians as well (both communities still small). I started Geocaching in 2001 and we build up the website in the same year.

The german community is NOT organized (with the swiss and austrians are even less so Wink

) The only organisation is perhaps the website, which serves as starting point (interactive Maps!) for a lot of cachers. 1/6 of the german cachers have shown up an registered a profile (see http://geocaching.homelinux.net/darkscout/index.php or map: http://geocaching.homelinux.net/darkscout/map.php ). The website itself is composed of services from different people and hosted on several servers. There are some local 'Stammtische' (meeting of regulars), I think about 2 or 3. People proof to be individualistic and they tend to be delicate about rules they don't like or see no need for. And they are sensible against censorship and attacks at their 'freedom' of playing the game as _they_ like. A lot of people moved (or is moving right now) their caches to navicache to protest against GC.com censorship and hindering our (_their_) site (throttling). Seems like these people are agile. And passionate. We've already built a team to start developing on opencaching.de!

Ok. So my first hearty thought about 'getting organized' was: No, let it be as it is. The community will manage it somehow with sanity and reason. But I see the problems, I see the need. I have no answers yet, but I know that Geocaching in Germany (at least) is different from that in the USA.

Let's have a look into the existing communities: Tell us more about you!

Greetings from Germany

nici-
_________________

Geocaching.de