I know there's a desire for the data we collect to be available for sale by Universal Cartographics, a sort of bragging rights/agency-permanence thing for explorers. I did a bit of thinking about how this might be implemented:
So one problem with selling player collected data is that not every system is scanned completely. Universal Cartographics data is currently sold under the model that when you buy a system you get the entire system, not just the primary and whichever planets were in range of the arrival point. There's a certain internal consistency to this, Universal Cartographics want to prevent their products from being poor-quality with partial data on systems. Thus I'd suggest only systems where all bodies have been subject to a detailed surface scan should be available for public sale. From a game point of view this gives a purpose to scanning all those rocky little moons which are otherwise not worth scanning if all.
To generate a list of systems which have been fully scanned FD could take a copy of their list of all scanned bodies (which they must have to generate the "Discovered by" tags in the system map) and run it through a script which compares the total bodies in each system there is a discovered item in with the number of discovered bodies in that system. This wouldn't be a short process and it would have to be run on a semi-regular basis using a snapshot of the data available rather than being continually updated (similar to how Power Play takes a snapshot each week and then takes a few hours to run the final results of each cycle).
Once a list of fully scanned systems has been generated then it could be distributed to players during a regular update (It would probably be a few Mb I'd guess) and used to update the galaxy map with the possibility of buying system data from UC.
I don't know the specifics of FDs back-end so I'm only guessing here, but it seems like a fairly straight-forward feature to implement which would allow us to see the combined achievements of thousands of explorers of the Pilots' Federation over the last year or so, along with giving us completionists a purpose to filling in some of the blanks we find along the way.
So one problem with selling player collected data is that not every system is scanned completely. Universal Cartographics data is currently sold under the model that when you buy a system you get the entire system, not just the primary and whichever planets were in range of the arrival point. There's a certain internal consistency to this, Universal Cartographics want to prevent their products from being poor-quality with partial data on systems. Thus I'd suggest only systems where all bodies have been subject to a detailed surface scan should be available for public sale. From a game point of view this gives a purpose to scanning all those rocky little moons which are otherwise not worth scanning if all.
To generate a list of systems which have been fully scanned FD could take a copy of their list of all scanned bodies (which they must have to generate the "Discovered by" tags in the system map) and run it through a script which compares the total bodies in each system there is a discovered item in with the number of discovered bodies in that system. This wouldn't be a short process and it would have to be run on a semi-regular basis using a snapshot of the data available rather than being continually updated (similar to how Power Play takes a snapshot each week and then takes a few hours to run the final results of each cycle).
Once a list of fully scanned systems has been generated then it could be distributed to players during a regular update (It would probably be a few Mb I'd guess) and used to update the galaxy map with the possibility of buying system data from UC.
I don't know the specifics of FDs back-end so I'm only guessing here, but it seems like a fairly straight-forward feature to implement which would allow us to see the combined achievements of thousands of explorers of the Pilots' Federation over the last year or so, along with giving us completionists a purpose to filling in some of the blanks we find along the way.