Producing Radiation Maps - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 102

association 30 , and director of the MIT Media Lab, is also a
member of the Advisory Board for the Creative Commons
organization 31 . He advocated the use of the Creative
Commons 0 license (or CC0) for the Safecast data, which is
normally used for data “dedicated to the public domain” 32 .
With this type of license, any modification can be made on
the data without having to ask for permission or cite the
source.

This change in the organization of Safecast reveals the
association's civic commitment. When the data were scarce,
the members of Safecast gathered every piece of data
available online from different sources. Then, once they had
enough self-produced data, they were able to leave out the
other data sources to focus on their own. For example on
June 15, 2013 they announced having collected 10 million
recordings, which became possible due to the bGeigie
sensors 33 . With the large amount of data they collected, the
association aimed to rival official sources by becoming just as
legitimate a data source 34 .

Other cartographers chose not to use Geiger counters as
they considered them unreliable and therefore strictly used
governmental, prefectural and TEPCO data.

6.2.2. Using official data

Two criteria are put forward by several cartographers to
justify their exclusive use of official data, namely the lack of
regularity and the inconsistent quality of the data

30 http://blog.Safecast.org/team.
31 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons.
32 “Copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial
purposes, all without asking permission.” See: creativecommons.org/

publicdomain/zero/1.0.
33 http://blog.Safecast.org/2013/06/over-10000000-data-points.
34 Pieter Franken, interview, August 30, 2011.