Not buying satellite images was the point of my question.

To follow the OSM crowdsourcing model, we'd need some way to gather ~street level pictures and reconstruct[1] vertical views, limited of course, no roofs etc, but better than nothing.

[1] think microsoft research project : Photosynth

You wouldn't have enough images to generate anywhere near the data that Google, Bing, Yahoo has. This may change if amateur automated drone imaging takes off.

Now what could be done is crowdfunding an imaging run by a satellite imaging company, and licensing the data under an open license.

For isolated or risky areas I agree, nothing can replace high altitude views. But for lively places ... are you sure ? millions of cellphones, a few snapshots with geoloc and orientation, that amount to a lot of data.

I wish for drone imaging too, but automated cars aren't legal, and I think drones won't be for even longer (unless Amazon unlesh some nice lobby-fu).

About crowdfunding satellite licensing.. I just remember a lot of people are sending high altitude balloons, maybe that would be a cheap middle ground.

> About crowdfunding satellite licensing.. I just remember a lot of people are sending high altitude balloons, maybe that would be a cheap middle ground.

Want to work on an autonomous dirigible project? I'm up for it. We could build a home made Argus for image collection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

"The three principal components of the ARGUS-IS are a 1.8 Gigapixels video system plus two processing subsystems, one in the air and the other located on the ground.[17] The sensor uses four lenses and 368 cell phone cameras, 5 megapixels each.[18]"

I'm up for anything even when I'm clearly unqualified like anything that flies.