safe2pee is dead. long live safe2pee.

UPDATE: Some folks in the community have offered to take over and continue our mission! Safe2pee lives on through Refuge Restrooms.

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Dear Community,

We appreciate all of the support, assistance and feedback we have received over the years. We feel grateful to have been a small part of a much greater movement advocating for gender neutral restrooms — raising awareness in the media, building alliances and working with so many individuals, organizers, college campuses, businesses, cities, LGBTQ groups around the world.

Started as a way to serve those in San Francisco, this project went so much further than we ever expected, and we remain in awe of the thousands of bathroom submissions it received. We chuckled at parodying our local startup scene and at drawing ire from a conservative commentator or two, feel especially proud to have shown safe2pee at the Museum of Modern Art. We tried our best to remain in the background and out of the way, to make safe2pee about providing an inclusive community resource, not about the people involved.

After working on this effort for the better part of a decade it’s time for us to move on. We love this project, but our core crew has been consumed by life and with other struggles and endeavors; lately, we haven’t given safe2pee the attention it deserves. Some of our code was written in 2005 and desperately needs to be re-done from scratch. And web based mapping, mobile have matured from clunky interfaces and hack-y mash-ups to well developed, mature spaces.

As we disband, we encourage you to go forth, collaborate and make the next safe2pee something the community can be really proud of: a spectacular open-source, non-commercial resource for everyone.

For the time-being our domain will remain pointed here, we are happy to link to developing gender neutral bathroom projects that are non-commercial and community focused in nature. You are welcome to use our database and mobile code as a starting point for your project. We are open to passing our name and domain along, if you would like to contact us, share your bathroom mapping effort, assume our name/domain, or have any other questions please email info at safe2pee.org.

Thank you, we truly appreciate everything the community has done for us, this site would not have existed without you!

We bid you adieu and wish you all the best,
Genderqueer Hackers

safe2pee 2.0 design

safe2pee mobile app

After a long hiatus we have decided to update safe2pee! In addition to a new API, and many changes behind the scenes (the ability to modify /erase entries is coming, we promise!), we’re launching a mobile app.

The most exciting feature for us is the ‘nearby’ button, which uses your phone’s GPS (or other location capabilities) to determine your physical location and bathrooms within the vicinity (currently this works on iphone/ipod touch 3.0 software and android phones). We hope to soon expand this for bathroom submission.

If you would like to check it out you can visit it at http://safe2pee.org/beta/mobile/ or simply http://safe2pee.org/ from your mobile device.

Please note that we do not store any information about your location. It is transmitted for the purpose of generating a list of nearby gender neutral bathrooms and immediately discarded. The whole process is opt-in, you are likely prompted to allow safe2pee to use your location before viewing the results.

This service is based on an draft of a new web standard and is known to work with Google Android and Ipod Touch/Iphone 3.0 Software. If you know of other phones or browsers that include this capability, please let us know (info at safe2pee.org), we want to see it work on many as possible! One of the advantages of writing a web application over platform specific is that works for many more people. If you know a particular platform well and have the inclination, you can write your own app with our API

From your home computer you can use these capabilities via Firefox 3.5, Opera, Google Chrome or Apple Safari 4 (an attached GPS device is required for this browser).

News

Exciting news, safe2pee was selected to be a part of the upcoming MoMA exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind.” If you are in New York between Febuary and May you should check it out! We are extremely thrilled about this and think it will be great exposure for the issue. More details will follow very soon.

myspace… or we caved in

perhaps it is a sign of the times, but we caved and joined myspace! So you all should join up and support your favorite gender neutral bathroom directory…. Our Profile

proximity search / “bathrooms near me”

we’ve launched a basic proximity search in both web and mobile flavors. If you’re looking for the nearest bathroom you no longer have to stumble around the site and look through a long list, you can just text us or fill out the simple form!

over 1000!

I’m proud to say that over the weekend we reached the 1000 bathroom mark! Thank you to everyone who contributed. We’re reworking a few things on the backend, which should improve handling of Canadian locations. You might not see some locations on the map for the next day or two, but this issue should be resolved shortly!

support for lat and long … finally

hey folks,

This is long overdue, but this evening we added the ability to create new entries by latitude and longitude.  This should make it easier for people to add hard to find spots, university campuses, bathrooms in parks, etc. We’re working to put together further upgrades and broader international support. you will hear more from us soon.

New Flyer

mexico added, downtime

We just added support for Mexico, so we’ve now got all of North America covered.

Sadly, almost simultaneously our database went down and is now reporting “too many connections.” I am not sure if it is just an intermittent failure or if we’re under attack or just received a huge spike in traffic! We’ll see soon, I hope we do not have to revert from back ups.

UPDATE 06/16 9:40AM: Everything is back to normal!