There are plenty of people doing open source data gathering and investigations. It's pretty interesting. Bellingcat is one of such orgs.
You can find a lot of individuals and small orgs on Twitter doing stuff like spotting military ships and their cargo, spotting drones on satellite imagery, collecting lists of destroyed heavy weapons, listing ATGM attacks, airstrike victims (airwars.com), geolocating videos/pictures posted to social media, colleting info on chemical attacks (bellingcat), collecting and publishing ISIS documents online, recreating 3D models of some events from public videos/photos, etc.
One example of 3D modelling (they call it forensic architecutre) based on open source data is in this report on Douma attack:
You can find a lot of individuals and small orgs on Twitter doing stuff like spotting military ships and their cargo, spotting drones on satellite imagery, collecting lists of destroyed heavy weapons, listing ATGM attacks, airstrike victims (airwars.com), geolocating videos/pictures posted to social media, colleting info on chemical attacks (bellingcat), collecting and publishing ISIS documents online, recreating 3D models of some events from public videos/photos, etc.
One example of 3D modelling (they call it forensic architecutre) based on open source data is in this report on Douma attack:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000058408...