- 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.
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.
And you can see highlights on Mastodon: @openbenches@botsin.space
Awesome, they’ve now got another follower.
Well this is a lovely project! Apparently no benches recorded anywhere near me so will definitely start keeping an eye out 👍
I saw one somewhere that opened with, “Wet Paint!”, and then in smaller letters said who it was dedicated to.
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!
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 😀
