MiGO (Michigan Geocaching Organization) was founded on April 11, 2002 as a Yahoo group. Initially it was intended only as a place for Michigan cachers to congregate online and to have a discussion forum where topics specific to Michigan caching could take place.

A short time later on April 27, 2002 we had our first event with the "MiGO" name on it, the "MiGO Picnic Cache".

About 25 people showed up, we were impressed. We played a few games, had some coffee and snacks, and got to know each other a little. At the event we discussed going forward with the organization and formalizing it. The general consensus seemed to be that people wouldn't be opposed to it, but didn't have the ability to commit time to setting it up.

Through email conversations and at that first event, Rusty Zuckerruebensirup and I got to know each other fairly well and we all seemed pretty like-minded as far as what we thought the group could and should be. So we agreed to form a "steering group" between ourselves and lead the group, at least for the time being.

As time went on, our little group of 25 or so grew and we built a new web site. Soon we had almost 300 people on our site going into the winter of 2003. The three of us wanted to open up the leadership a little so we held very loose elections to bring in two more people onto the steering group.

After the Winter Social, Sandrich and umc joined the steering group. The five of us began to discuss the future of the organization and what role we would take in the state. More and more parks systems were contacting us to ask about caching.

We formalized our plan to hold three official events per year. They are: the MiGO Winter Social, the MiGO Fall Fun Day and the MiGO Earth Day CITO (held in conjunction with the gc.com earth day events).

We formalized our relationship with several parks systems including the Ann Arbor Natural Areas Protection and began discussions with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in response to rumors that they may be banning caches.

As we did this, our numbers continued to grow and in Oct. 2003 we had over 100 people attend our third official event.

This Winter we have been working closely with Oakland county parks in Michigan to establish their geocaching process for their parks and have been presenting at monthly staff meetings to teach park managers about how geocaching can promote use of under-used areas of their parks and how they can use geocaching to open up a whole new and interesting way of generating interest in their parks and their programs.

As we head into 2004, the focus of the current steering group has become delegation. The organization has made wonderful progress over the last two years, but it's time to formalize our group further with bylaws and the appropriate nonprofit status. This will allow the five of us to pass the torch to a new group of leaders and, hopefully, will allow the group to sustain indefinitely.

We will be filing for our IRS 501©(7) status this month and have already obtained Michigan nonprofit corporation status. Our bylaws are complete and beginning on May 1, 2004 we will begin to transition to operate under the new bylaws. Membership data will be gathered until the end of June, and then we will be taking nominations for our new executive councilAfter one month of nominations we will open up voting by the voting membership for their new officers and we will be inducting the new officers at the Fall Fun Day in October of this year.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but the progress and response has been very positive. We have over 900 people registered on our website right now and we welcome anyone from anywhere in the world to join and participate in our forums and our events. At our last event, Winter Social 2004, we had 125 people attend the catered event. Ultimately, our organization is about the membership and community. If you ask me, the community in Michigan is our proudest achievement with MiGO. We all care about each other and caching. Ultimately, those are the two key ingredients for a successful organization.