@tordans On (a), I proposed something like that here (including to offer to implement it), but the community reaction was between lukewarm and actively cold…

Regarding (d), there’s this which contains some interesting ideas.

I presume you’re rather looking for things to spend manhours on than just money, but I’ll add it anyway: In Sweden the national Land Survey collects high quality aerial imagery (0,15-0,37 cm/pixel), but while we’ve gotten a positive but somewhat unclear answer on general usage, we are not allowed to add it as a preconfigured layer in iD/JOSM without paying. Would sponsoring this be a possibility? It would significantly improve the imagery available when mapping in Sweden, thus significantly improving both the velocity and quality of armchair mapping (which, given our ratio of mappers to country area, is how a lot of mapping here is done).

(I actually just a few days ago sent an email to openmaps(at)microsoft.com asking basically the same question)

Another thing, I’m working on a few OSM-related projects (mostly comparing/conflating OSM and various Swedish open datasets) which currently run on my own server and some in Azure (one of these I just yesterday had to put on hold, as it was looking to get a bit to expensive otherwise…). So maybe making processing/storage in Azure available for OSM-related projects?