OpenBenches is a recipient of a Microgrant!

We're delighted to announce that our OpenBenches.org project has been awarded a $250 microgrant from Icculus!

Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus

Google gave me an award for my contributions to Linux gaming and open source, and while I’m honored to be acknowledged, I can’t accept money from a company that is actively engaging in union busting.

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Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus

Replying to @icculusWhen I agreed to the award, I hadn’t heard about @eiais’s firing, or any of the others. It’s not much money, but I don’t think quantity is relevant.

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Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus

Replying to @icculusAs such: I’m announcing the 2019 Icculus Microgrant. If you have a cool open source project, reply here about it and the one I like best, I’ll give $250 dollars. Do whatever you want with the money. I’ll try to pick one this week.

If anyone wants to match my donation, DM me.

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Ryan C. Gordon

@icculus

Replying to @icculus(If I don’t get any good projects, I’ll buy 250 bucks worth of pizza for the next Google organizing meeting or something. But if you’re proud of your project, tiny or not, that should be all you need to tweet it at me. Good luck!)

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Huge thanks to Ryan, and everyone else who chipped in.

Because I'm part of GitHub Sponsors, the donation will be matched by GitHub.

So, that's US$500 - about £375. Nice!

If you'd like to sponsor us, you can do so on GitHub or via PayPal directly. Or, we have an Amazon wishlist if you'd like to get us a physical present.

What will we spend the grant on?

This is what we said we'd use the money for:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @icculus@icculus @mjg59 My wife and I run openbenches.org
It's an open source / open data project which crowdsources photos of memorial benches.
$250 would allow us to move away from Google's OCR engine, and on to a faster web host.

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No one is auditing us, so we could spend it all on a luxury holiday to Bognor Regis. But we won't!

Although... There are a lot of unmapped benches in Bognor...

The web is cheap!

Don't tell anyone who wants to give us money, but it's quite cheap to run a niche site on the web!

We're lucky to be in the free tier of our 3rd party providers:

• OpenCage provides the reverse geocoding, and is free for 2,500 calls per day.
• CloudImage is free for small projects.
• Auth0 does social login - and offers more features free for Open Source projects.
• MapBox renders beautiful OpenStreetMap tiles for free, up to 50,000 per month.
• Google Cloud Vision we're just about within their 1,000 free scans per month limit.

We've occasionally gone over those free limits, so will keep a couple of quid in reserve in case of a surge in our popularity.

Our major cost is hosting. We paid £300 for 3 years of shared hosting with Krystal.uk - use code EDENT at checkout and we both get a fiver.

That hosting deal runs out in August this year, so the bulk of the grant will go to upgrading our package to something a bit bigger. Notably, we're capped at 2GB of RAM which we seem to regularly max out.

Because we have over 130GB of photos, we'll probably stay with Krystal - unless anyone knows of a UK based hosting provider with impeccable green credentials?

In the spirit of the grant, we'll look at moving away from Google's Cloud Vision. Current contenders are

1. Amazon Rekognition
   • Although they're just as ethically dubious
2. Microsoft's Computer Vision
   • Ditto!
3. The Open Source Tesseract OCR
   • Which is sponsored by Google...

Suggestions very welcome!

Unions

Regular readers will know that I'm a proud member of Prospect - the union for ambition. As a professional knowledge-worker, I rely on my union to provide me with legal services and support me in pay negotiations. If you're in the UK and want to be part of a union for professionals - join Prospect today.

If you join Prospect, and mention my name, I'll make a £10 donation to charity.