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!

  • @[email protected]English
    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.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      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 😀