30,000 Crowd-Sourced Memorial Benches!

Way back in July 2017, Liz and I started OpenBenches.org. It was designed to be a fun way to record all the lovely memorial benches we saw on our walks.

A few weeks ago, Stuart Orford added the thirty-thousandth entry!

Here's what all that collective human effort looks like when plotted on a very exciting graph.

Using a proprietary mix of AI and BIG DATA, I can confidentially predict that there is a slight uplift in entries when the weather is nice. And, by the end of the decade, every bench in the solar system will be mapped.

You'll notice we've had more than 30k submissions. Some are duplicates - which I then merge with the originals. Some are not memorials - which I delete.

More Stats!

We have 535 registered users. Registration is optional for submitting - but mandatory if you want to edit an existing entry. Users can sign in with Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, GitHub, and LinkedIn - I'd like to add Mastodon, but Auth0 doesn't support it.

Photos have been taken with 455 different cameras. Ranging from the obscure DJI FC330 (one photo) to the ubiquitous Motorola G(7) Power (9,825 photos). You can see all the different cameras and their statistics.

The 69,074 photos which have been uploaded take up 281GB of disk space.

Bandwidth is about 5TB per year. About 1.5TB of that was an incredibly aggressive "AI Crawler" which has since been blocked.

We deliberately do not track visitor numbers. But Google's search console says we get about 170,000 impressions per year, and about 12,000 click throughs. However, Google refuses to index the majority of our pages. No idea why - it's has crawled them, but won't show them in search results.

18 people have contributed to our Open Source code on GitHub.

A few times per year, people ask if they can use our data with OpenStreetMap. The answer is yes, our data can be reused. But there are two caveats. Firstly, our data includes historic benches which may not be present any more. Secondly, our benches are mapped with GPS, so might not give a location which is accurate enough for OSM. There is some ongoing work to see if they can be combined. We're not competing with OSM - you should use them for mapping.

We've sold about a dozen t-shirts, mugs, stickers and other merch. Doesn't bring in a huge amount of cash, but it is delightful to see people wearing the gear. We've had a few sponsors on OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors. Again, not life-changing amounts of cash - but keeps things ticking along without adverts.

What's next?

When we go on holiday, we take photos of benches - and we hope you do too!

That's all we want from this site. No VC buyout. No AI / NFT / Crypto grift. Just people exploring the psychogeography of their surroundings.

You can get involved by taking a geotagged photo of a memorial bench and uploading it to OpenBenches.org.