Field Notes

What is this?

Field Notes is a location-based field journal. It lets you drop short, anonymous notes on a map, tied to the exact spot where you’re standing. Think of it as a shared notebook for your neighborhood, trail, or city block.

What’s it for?

It’s for noticing things. The kind of things you’d point out to a friend on a walk:

• A garden with beautiful poppies in spring
• A coffee shop with excellent espresso
• A spot where you always see herons
• Wild blackberries growing along a fence
• A bakery of aromatic fecundity in the morning

In short, it's a compendium of small things that make a place feel like home.

How it works

1. Pick a shibboleth: a secret passphrase. Anyone who enters the same shibboleth shares the same field of notes. Use terra for the public field, or invent your own and share it with friends, neighbors, or a group.
2. Allow location access: Field Notes uses your GPS to show you where you are and what’s nearby. Your location is never stored.
3. Drop notes: tap the + button to leave an observation at your current spot. Notes are up to 280 characters.
4. Explore: tap any dot on the map to read a note, or open the list view to browse everything nearby.

The three-mile radius

You can only see notes within three miles of where you are right now. This is intentional. Field Notes is about your immediate surroundings; the things you can walk to. It’s a limited tool of the neighborhood.

Move to a different area and you’ll see a different set of notes. The map is alive wherever you take it.

Good to know

• Notes are anonymous. There are no accounts, no usernames, no tracking. Your device remembers which notes are yours (shown with a green border), but nobody else can tell.
• Anyone can delete any note. If something doesn’t belong, tap it and hit delete. The field is self-governing.
• It works offline (partially). The app is a PWA—once loaded, the map shell is cached. But you’ll need a connection to load or drop notes.