Let’s be honest, the arts and culture division is really just a part of marketing. Maybe not in name, or even on the org chart, but in practice.
It's very much a hearts and minds project, with stakeholders in engineering, marketing, press and policy. Each dept uses it to aid their local and regional initiatives. For the first few years it had to fight hard for its existence (originally as a 20% project), scraping budgets together from random sources until stakeholders eventually saw the value.
> until stakeholders eventually saw the value
What's the value if it's gone in 2 years? I wish they'd put similar effort into preserving the app/servers (simple life support) instead of shutting them down.
It's been running in one form or another for 11 years now.
The budgets for arts & culture projects are very small, most companies could afford said division