The Shape of Public Engagement - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 142

This form of engagement abides by the principle of
economy, according to which efforts should be minimized if a
task has already been carried out. The division of labor is
illustrated by Marian Steinbach's activity. While his
commitment to finding data was initially driven by the will
to produce visualizations, he gave up this objective to focus
on data extraction. When asked about the fact that he did
not create any map in the end, he replies:
Initially I wanted, but then I had my place then, I
had my task: creating these data feeds and
keeping them updated. […] I tried to do, and not
coming with something mediocre on top of that.
[ sic ] Interview with Marian Steinbach, August 25,
2011
Moreover, many maps stopped functioning and went offline
once their scope had been achieved 19 . As Huan Erdoa claims:
The main reason I created the site is let
foreigners living in Japan who evacuated just
after the Fukushima #1 bldg exploded and does
not have rich information to know how is the
radiation level of surrounding areas, planning
when to return back. [ sic ] Huan Erdao, interview
by email, August 19, 2011.
So the maps were created with a specific aim in mind.
Once this was achieved, the applications were of little or no
interest:
In middle of may, most of my friend (non-
Japanese) have came back to Japan, so the main
purpose of the map has been achieved, and this
19 For the other maps from the corpus which disappeared, it is impossible
to know whether this was because the scope was achieved: http://erd-
radmon.appspot.com/; http://labs.geigermaps.jp; http://radiocial.org/#map.