You can contribute gpx traces (of unmapped streets, paths, etc.) that you took while cycling, driving, walking, etc. to OSM.
If you’re regularly cycling you could also look into capturing and contributing street level imagery. Though a (durable) device and some technical know-how is probably needed.
Sites like mapillary.com (now owned by Meta) or cartaview can be used to share these. They then detect and blur faces amd licence plates before making the image series public.
The easiest is using a smartphone, but sooner than later the camera will suffer, and take damage, like mechanical autofocus stops working.
Probably because of the constant shaking when attaching it to a bicycle and riding not the most perfectly smooth surfaces (and the purpose would be to capture all paths with all surfaces anyway.)
The second best is some form of dashcam, but then you’d be taking video and have to record a gpx track separately and correlate them after the fact and extract still images, which is all possible but somewhat of a hassle.
Then come most action cams like the Gopros. They usually record their own GPS, and can capture single still images at a set regular interval like every 0.5 seconds. Depending on brand, price, resolution, and lense angle the images are better or good enough.
All of these have the “issue” that they only record in one direction, usually the front. This is of course good as a base coverage, but still sometimes lacks details of buildings etc. next to the road.
Hence, a 360 cam is most optimal.
I own a (refurbished, ca 350€) Gopro max for taking spherical 360⁰ imagery. That’s currently the best option I know of. (Apart from commercial big multi-camera solutions attached to a car used by Google streetview or Apple or other such professional services. Which easily cost a few thousand and need special software for processing, etc.)
The only drawback is that it takes images at a minimum of a 2 sec interval, but those are stitched on the camera, geolocated and ready to upload coming from the SD card.
Alternatively taking video with it requires extracting still frames and stitching them after the fact on a computer with some software and then geolocating them with (I think) a separately recorded gpx track. But it’s possible.
