- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
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!
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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.
Ooh ours is already on here. I don’t understand the purpose of it but am somehow very glad it exists.
I saw one somewhere that opened with, “Wet Paint!”, and then in smaller letters said who it was dedicated to.
And you can see highlights on Mastodon: @openbenches@botsin.space
Awesome, they’ve now got another follower.
This is a wild hobby. What inspired you to create a place for people to document memorial benches?
Part of it is being an open data geek. And part of it is trying to understand the psychogeography of the world.
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!
Well this is a lovely project! Apparently no benches recorded anywhere near me so will definitely start keeping an eye out 👍
Cheers for this, will keep an eye out! Sometimes it feels like there’s more benches than people here. I love it.
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.
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 😀
