Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Both Mirror and Protect Crowdsourced Data?
New submitter cellurl writes "I run wikispeedia, a database of speed limit signs. People approach us to mirror our data, but I am quite certain it will become a one-way street. So my question is: How can I give consumers peace of mind in using our data and not give up the ship? We want to be the clearing house for this information, at the same time following our charter of providing safety. Some thoughts that come to mind are creating a 'Service Level Agreement' which they will no doubt reject, or MySQL-clustering, or rsync. Any thoughts, (technically, logistically, legally) appreciated."
Be the best Make all information free Choose a good licence Expect to be taken over one day from something better, when that comes along ... help them
Make it easy for anybody to use your information
It is counterintuitive but the moment you put up protective barriers, you fall over. The moment you depend on an artificial barrier to protect your lead is the moment you will degrade the quality of your product. Happens every time on products and services that grow on openness and suddenly feel the reason they are good is more so because of their qualities than the openness.
If you develop a product/service based on a closed environment, that is a different story. It makes business sense to improve your model based on a closed environment until a disruptive product/service comes along.
You want to "Protect...Data", "not give up the ship", "follow...our charter of providing safety". But what is it that you don't what mirrors to do with the data? Less verbiage, more clarity, please.
Other sites slurp OpenStreetMap data all the time. No biggie, that's what it's for - if the traffic gets too much they *ask* you to take a mirror to reduce bandwidth costs. OSM has a "share with attribution" kinda licence.
If you're really wiki-anything, you'll recognise that this is public information that you curate. Let 'em have it.
Well that's nice until a facebook comes along to crush the myspace. "Public data" isn't something to be owned. But a specific distribution method or implementation of it can be. Yellowpages anyone?
If they're trying to make a living off this there is the real world factor of keeping this info someone secured and then following up with a business model of some sort. Just because it says non-profit doesn't mean everyone works for free.