With multiple, overlapping imagery needs and multiple, overlapping acquisition efforts ongoing (e.g. DigitalGlobe and related providers working in the commercial sector with Virtual Earth, Google Earth, et cetera), various government mapping programs, whether initiatives primarily at the state level (e.g. Imagery For The Nation) or federal (NGA, NAIP, NDOP, et cetera) - it seems to me that it would be beneficial to have an initiative to coordinate, leverage and review all of these disparate acquisition efforts and requirements, with respect to minimum requirements (e.g. resolution, positional accuracy, et cetera) and unique requirements (e.g. leaf-on vs. leaf-off, hyperspectral, et cetera)

It definitely still seems that even with the coordination that is ongoing via IFTN, there still remain many existing and potential gaps and overlaps, along with the issues associated with the politics of money. As such, I agree that there is huge potential for a mess to be created - and this can actually be compounded by burying efforts within law-enforcement and homeland security components, as these folks generally do not have a good track record for sharing with other agencies.

Always tradeoffs - either a national bureaucracy that tries to herd cats at the state level, or at the state level, where new bureaucracies exist and where each agency may fight with the next, and on down to counties who also still need imagery. For others, things like transportation networks and watersheds do not know or respect political boundaries, so again the artificiality of political bureacracy is imposed rather than a more seamless approach.

I don't have any answers, but it does seem clear that SOME kind of governance needs to be there, and where bottom-up and top-down approaches can meet.

Either that or we keep doing what we've generally been doing, and leave it all up to the aerial photography sector, whose primary interest is not in providing seamless imagery, but rather in profits.