How to avoid building a walled garden?

Question

Some friends and I have had an idea for a website and have started working on it. It will rely on people contributing to a shared knowledgebase, and people will also be able to create personal profiles with reasonable amounts of data. We intend people should be able to leverage their content on other sites (e.g.: flickr, youtube) when building their profile on our site.

It occurred to us that we want to be good internet citizens, and make our website accessible and useful for people regardless of whether they have an account or not. We also want to make sure that any data people contribute to our site is not 'locked in' and is available to other sites appropriately.

Are there any specific practices we should follow, and similarly ones we should avoid?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should look into attaching a particular license to the content on your site. For example, StackOverflow uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license for all content provided. Depending on what restrictions you want placed on usage of your sites content, you should investigate something similar.

Answer 2

I would suggest that you follow the example of this very site.

Use OpenID for non-anonymous accounts/login, but allow anonymous posting.

Answer 3

You can use OpenID for authentication. I'd recommend giving options to export your data in open standards, if such standards exist for the sort of data you're dealing with. For instance, if you have any sort of news or events feeds, then provide RSS feeds for those. If standards don't exist for the data you're working with, then provide a good way for your customers to get it in a reasonable format; preferably a REST style API with data in a reasonable serialization like XML or JSON.