> google's solution was to just pay people to drive around and collect house numbers which no one is probably going to volunteer for While Google’s Streetview

> google's solution was to just pay people to drive around and collect house numbers which no one is probably going to volunteer for While Google’s Streetview cars were pretty nifty things, apparently the Streetview cars were not the source of house numbers in many countries. Instead, Google simply bought the rights to existing sources of information. National postal systems and municipalities had quietly created their own databases over the years. People do volunteer to add house numbers to OpenStreetMap. My own city of half a million people got house numbers precisely because our local OSM club organized weekend outings where we would walk around town and add all the numbers. Then, when I moved out to the countryside, I would bicycle around to add all the house numbers for the surrounding villages.