For Local Communities (Hromadas) and Local Self-Government

This page is also available in Ukrainian: Громадам і місцевому самоврядуванню.

Preserve your community's memory and give residents a useful service — without having to build a separate platform.

Why this is useful for you

A community's cemeteries hold the names of the people who built it, and the answers to questions that residents and their descendants ask every year. Working with OpenHeritage gives a community:

• a ready public burial search, with no need to build and maintain a website of its own;

• a place where collected materials are not lost once a project ends or the people in charge change;

• a way to involve both local residents and people who live far away;

• a result the community can use in its own work and on its own channels.

Scenarios

A community's cemeteries are part of its history

It is worth gathering information not only about the central cemetery or well-known people, but also about active, closed, historic and forgotten burial grounds: their names, locations, photos and information about the people buried there.

In the cemetery directory you can filter cemeteries by country and oblast and see those that do not have a single memorial yet. The cemetery map helps you notice which places are already marked and which are missing. A cemetery missing from the directory only means that nobody has added information about it yet.

You can start with a single cemetery

There is no need to approve a large program or a dedicated software budget first. A small joint project can look like this:

1. Choose a coordinator — a community employee, a teacher, a local historian or a volunteer.

2. Collect what already exists: books, lists, old photos, plans.

3. Agree how to work safely on site: who takes photos, when, and with whose consent. Useful tips are in the Ukrainian guide Preparing materials in the field and at home.

4. Involve cemetery staff, students and volunteers. You can announce a photography day in the events calendar.

Community memory is reachable for those who live far away

Displaced people, relatives abroad and descendants of former residents often cannot travel. On OpenHeritage they can:

• find a grave by name and see the photo of the monument and its place on the map — without registering;

• share a link to the page with their family;

• clarify details, pass on family information or help transcribe inscriptions from home.

The platform interface is available in sixteen languages, so cemetery pages are understandable to relatives abroad as well.

The result stays useful to the community

• A public burial search that residents and community services can use.

• A link, QR code or printable cemetery poster for the local website, a notice board or the cemetery entrance. The poster is produced in Ukrainian, Polish and English.

• Copies of the data for your own work: from the cemetery page you can download public memorials as CSV or JSONL after you sign in.

• For the community's technical staff there is public access for software and AI agents and personal access keys in the user profile.

What you can do now

1. Check which of your community's cemeteries are already in the directory, and add the ones that are missing.

2. Pick one cemetery for the first step and appoint a coordinator.

3. Announce a photography day in the events calendar.

4. Upload photos of monuments — free and with no limit on the number of photos.

5. Put the link or the cemetery poster on the community's channels.

6. Invite residents who live far away to join transcribing inscriptions.

What we can develop together

Below are possible directions of cooperation, not ready features. They could appear only by agreement, after discussing responsibility and data protection.

• Possible direction: a shared page for all of a community's cemeteries.

• Possible direction: local collections — for example, graves of participants in particular events or of people important to the community's history.

• Possible direction: embeddable search elements for the community's website.

Important: a community's contribution does not have to be money. Organizational support, access to materials that may be shared, a local coordinator, a room for meetings and spreading the word among residents are just as valuable.

From a photograph to a name

Organize the photography on site — people from anywhere can join the transcription. You do not need a ready text register to start: photos become tasks for volunteers and AI, and every transcription is checked by other participants. That way a local initiative gets the support of a wider volunteer community. Read more in From a Photograph to a Name That Can Be Found.

Write to us

Propose cooperation on behalf of your community — write to support@openheritage.online with the subject "Cooperation with a community". Tell us which community and cemeteries you mean, who could coordinate and what materials already exist.