Techcrunch has revealed that the program launches this week in beta with a small group of partners. The images provided to these organizations will be publicly available under a Creative Commons license.
These details comes via the Skybox blog…
In this beta phase of the program, we will select a small group of organizations and acquire the imagery they need to accelerate their work. The images collected for these partners are being made available publicly, under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), for everyone to see and use. We’ve already started collecting a few images, which you can see on this map. Check out the images in West Virginia, where SkyTruth and Appalachian Voices are monitoring and measuring the rapid expansion of mountaintop-removal (MTR) mining which is devastating forests and communities across Appalachia, visible in the image below, right next to the popular hiking trails of Kanawha State Forest.
Google Earth Outreach gives nonprofits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story. In the future, we hope to expand the program to allow many more non-profit organizations and public interest groups to benefit from the use of Skybox data.
Follow us @earthoutreach
Recall, Google acquired Skybox in the summer of 2014
According to TC you can check out all of the currently available images from the program on this map.