Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View (opens in new tab)

If you want to repeat that in your neighboorhood in a smaller scale, there's https://www.openstreetcam.org/ (software open source, content CC-BY-SA) and https://www.mapillary.com/ (propietary afaik, content CC-BY-SA)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services

I was impatient for Street View to reach my country so I made my own back in 2014. I took photospheres of my university campus and made a website for it using an embedded Street View container. I did it as a personal project. The university ended up discounting a reasonable chunk of my tuition as a recognition and for my effort! First I was taking individual photos on my DSLR and stiching them manually then I continued the bulk using a spare Android phone which made everything (slightly) easier (auto stiching, geo-tagged...) but I still had to stand at each point and take 18+ photos for each photosphere. You can check it on http://discoveruob.com

While I’m glad someone found a way to turn money into happiness, this feels like the Black Mirror future of the gig worker economy.

“We need a map of Kansas City using devices we provide you. We pay nothing up front, nothing at completion, and no residuals for profits we earn from your imagery. You may not keep the equipment we provide. You are responsible for all expenses.”

Who on earth would accept that Taskrabbit?

I wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)

While this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing? How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too, even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this and is still happy to do it, but for that not even to be commented on in the article is kinda weird.

Did he just gift the images to Google? Did he retain copyrights? Are they available under a license that would allow inclusion into an open repository of street view photos?

Back in 2014, a Moroccan guy did something similar, created a Street view clone for a 10 cities in Morocco huge challenge for one person, with limited resources: http://carte.ma/

"Google Trusted Photogapher" here.

https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/

Verification: https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m

We can now add to Streetview instead of just adding to Google Maps. I.e. we can create a blue line instead of just blue dots.

And a lot of us are doing it, by request, and paid. And no, Google never paid us anything, we had to sell by ourselves and set our own prices.

So this guy will get paid, this is great PR.

I’d love to see the vast trail systems of the US get the street view treatment.

While I may comprehend that any of those contributors must know and well understand a thing: that's a PROPRIETARY service, you pay but you do not really own ANYTHING after.

So consider OpenStreetMaps (they also have a kind of streetview project) or any other kind of FREE project in witch you invest money and after co-own the data.