MnGCA

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

Based on a friendly off-forum exchange with ice tres, I’ve decided to move ahead with my promise of keeping the Membership updated with the dealings of the Board by posting a monthly article about what we are doing with our donated time. There will be no set date for this article to be printed and it will likely depend on the timeline of our work in various arenas.

I’m going to leave this particular thread open to comment and see how it goes. I am interested in feedback but I’m not about to tolerate the usual grief and aggravation that comes with topics that may be discussed here. If all goes well, it’s likely that future posts of this nature will remain open, and out of that I expect that some constructive and interesting comments will eventually build into some concrete and worthwhile motions. That said:

Up until this point, the Board has been active in many facets of typical and mundane tasks of starting a new session. I’m not about to bore you with the everyday business details but I will say that we’re continuing our work to make this association run better in the future and envision smooth changeovers lead by detailed documentation and prior knowledge. These smooth handoffs will enable future MnGCA Board iterations the ability to hit the ground running and not have to worry too much about how, where, and why.

We have begun work on new and exciting things to make good on my promise to continue to have this association lead all others in the nation and by the finest example of a strong local caching community. Some of the things we have done so far:

1. Due to the nature of our activity and the in and out nature of our players, we discussed and implemented changes to purge our voter roles of those that might have become uninterested in continued participation. This will remain an automated yearly process beginning this May.

2. Based on some previous discussion and the positive response that other geocaching organizations have received, we went about creating a system to receive and process calendar image submissions which will eventually become the 2006 MnGCA Calendar available on Cafepress to anyone. Submissions for this close on 11/9 and voting on the individual images to be used should begin shortly after that. These should be ready for 2005 Holiday ordering!

3. Because of our desire to offer local park districts the most updated and informative data we could have available to us, we enlisted the assistance of rickrich, EarlyStarts, and proton to supply us with state-wide GPXs going back as far as we could which include all logs. By utilizing rickrich’s time-saving scripts we were provided with the specific numbers we needed. We thank all those that were involved for their help. The data will be crucial to our growing efforts in our park district negotiations.

4. Looking to prepare for our future DNR discussions and planning, soon after taking office, I contacted Marlene at the Three Rivers Parks District with an offer to revise their current policy and make it more cacher and park district friendly. We have already provided them with a proposed policy very similar to that of our own Duluth policy and will be presenting it to them in mid-November.

5. We’ve been brainstorming ideas on how we should approach the DNR and what our proposed policy should be like. Obviously, it’s likely that our direction and ideas will change based upon the lessons learned from the final outcome of our Three Rivers talks.

6. Based on the success of the Geocoin Committee and my commitment to the association to have more committee based participation in the organization, we came up with and posted a call for the creation of a Spring Event committee to prepare, plan, and carry out the Spring Event in 2006. Sadly, as of yet, not a single person has stepped forward to join the committee.

With that, I open this thread to comments on the above. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to voice them below.

Happy cachin’,

Silent Bob
MnGCA President

edit to remove sticky
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Sad state of affairs.

ice tres · Geocacher Joined: 16 Aug 2005 Posts: 97

Let us know if you need "warm bodies" for any of your presentations. Cool

Moe the Sleaze · Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 1:09 pm Post subject:

Could you clarify #3? I assume that means you are collecting data on the number of visits each cache sees in order to give park authorities some feeling for the amount of traffic caches will draw. Is that correct?
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