Geohashing Day 2011 Extravaganza

This page is the beginning of the planning for a Geohashing Day 2011 Extravaganza. This hopefully will be a massive meetup of geohashers from all around the globe, and also as a way to entice new people to become geohashers. Is there better time to start a tradition of huge global meetups than on the first Geohashing Day which also falls on Mouseover Day? We think not!

Origins

relet and aperfectring were talking one day in November 2010, and the topic of Journey to the End of the Night came up. That activity was started as a part of another internet game-type thing both of those users participate in, and has since become sort of an extravaganza which is held a couple of times a year in widely varied locations. Many people will travel from far and wide to go to this extravaganza, even people who don't normally participate in the activity in general. Relet thought it would be nice to have some kind of global geohashing extravaganza similar to that, and aperfectring suggested that a good time to start that up would be on Geohashing Day 2011.

Plans

The current plan is to create some sort of poll for where we plan to converge. We should probably nail down the general location (within maybe 1-2 graticule radius at least) by the end of January 2011, so that people can buy airline tickets while they are still cheap. After we have a general location, we will rename this to GHD 2011:Location. Once the coordinates for GHD 2011 are announced, or maybe beforehand, we will decide on the graticule which we will all visit. At that point, we should move this page to the expedition page, and begin the planning for the expedition itself in earnest. Discussion should take place below.

Proposed locations

Location	Pros	Cons
Berlin, Germany	Is a large city, so is easy for people to get to. Has the potential for getting a large number of people, since it is "in the middle" of a large concentration of active geohashers, and is easy to get to. Seems quite likely to produce an accessible geohash in the vicinity.	Likely to be a rather uninteresting hashpoint. Might not be enticing for new geohashers to join. Might not make the global meetup interesting enough to convince the geohashing community to hold another for some time.
Italian Alps	Almost assuredly an interesting hashpoint. Seems likely to convince new people to join, due to the sheer awesomeness. Seems likely to convince geohashing community to keep holding massive pre-organized global meetups, and doing so in interesting places.	Likely to produce unreachable hashpoints. Might convince many geohashers not to come, because of remoteness/difficulty. Might discourage drag-alongs from joining, thus reducing the overall effectiveness of the recruitment aspect.

Potential Participants

Person	Planning on coming?	Planning on bringing anyone?	Other comments
relet	Yes
APR	Yes	No	I suggest this happen in central mainland Europe, due to the high concentration of geohashers there, but am willing to go just about anywhere for it!

Discussion

This is the section for people to discuss about the timing, the merits of locations, and anything else related to this whole idea. We should keep the talk page clean for now, so that it is easier to move this page when that time comes. If this starts to become really large, we will move it to the talk page, but for now, discussing here should be fine.

I really want this to become a regular thing we do. Whether it be on geohashing day only, some other day of the year only, or even multiple times a year. I think it is a good way of keeping a geographically sparse community tight-knit. It could be bunches of fun, especially if we come up with some kind of tradition which we only do (or better yet, only CAN do) for this recurring meetup which gives us a story to talk about, and convince us to come time and again. The location should rotate to new parts of the world, and, once we get the tradition going, possibly even parts of the world near no currently active geohashers. --aperfectring 04:24, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

My reasoning behind waiting about 6 months to hold the first meetup:

Rather than picking an arbitrary (to geohashing) date to do this on, why not pick a holiday already recognized?
Gives people time to plan out vacation time, and travel, which should allow for more people to be able to attend.
Gives the people planning out the expedition time to make get things right, so that we have a good template for holding these things in the future.
Since the first one of these meetups is quite likely to be in the northern hemisphere (since that's where the majority of geohashers are), waiting until the springtime should provide better weather, and probably better attendance. --aperfectring 04:24, 24 November 2010 (UTC)