OpenBenches Welcome!
openbenches.org

I hope a little bit of self-promotion is allowed?

My wife and I run “Open Benches” which is a crowdsourced collection of memorial benches. We’ve got about 25,000 in the UK!

If you’re out for a walk in the sunshine this weekend, please take a photo of any memorial benches you see. You’ll need to turn on location tagging on your phone’s camera - that way we can accurately place the benches on the map.

Enjoy!

  • Floppy@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    On a slightly similar though perhaps less useful note, a colleague of mine runs https://govbins.uk, collecting pictures of council bins, so maybe take a photo of your bins too while you’re out doing benches. I love British whimsy projects.

  • spicemouse@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I saw one somewhere that opened with, “Wet Paint!”, and then in smaller letters said who it was dedicated to.

    • edentOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Part of it is being an open data geek. And part of it is trying to understand the psychogeography of the world.

  • mykl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Hmm, a recent wander round Kew Gardens led me to suspect that it was bound to be a hotspot and indeed it was. Great site, thanks for sharing it!

  • TeaHands@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Well this is a lovely project! Apparently no benches recorded anywhere near me so will definitely start keeping an eye out 👍

  • Mortuum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Cheers for this, will keep an eye out! Sometimes it feels like there’s more benches than people here. I love it.

  • ydant@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Cool project. I appreciate these kind of passion projects.

    Your about page mentions that open street map doesn’t have a field for the message on the bench. So it sounds like you are keeping a secondary set of data, and this isn’t being incorporated in OSM?

    Have you tried to get that added in as a supported field? This feels like something that belongs in that dataset. I have no idea how hard it is to change OSM, though.

    • edentOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks! We have chatted with OSM. At the time we started there wasn’t an inscription field. I think there now is. We’ve also signed a waiver so they can use our data if they wish.

      The slight issue is that our photos are generally taken with a phone’s GPS and may not be suitably accurate for their needs.

      We also aim to be a lot easier to add to than OSM. So there aren’t many checks.

      OSM is a big, well funded project with lots of users and governance. OpenBenches is just me and my wife. We’re not aiming to be them 😀