Title:

Software Freedom in an Online World: Identity Management and Data and
Service Portability

Description:

As no-cost proprietary service providers on the internet proliferate
and their adoption increases, it is important for Free Software
advocates to understand the new challenges to Software Freedom.
A background of the economic, social, privacy, and ethical issues will be given.
Details of new trends, movements, and projects will be described
to explain what is happening and how to get involved.

The CyberSpace Charter of Rights

I recently came across this CyberSpace Charter of Rights by Stephen Downes, dated from 1999. It seems quite appropriate for the present day. And it would appear we have made little progress in the right direction.

•  http://www.downes.ca/post/184

I copied the body of the Charter below in case the original should ever disappear.  However, the additional commentary at the original location is also quite useful.

The first step to setting up the SharedUniverse software is to set up Drupal. I plan to document this with my own set of screencasts, showing how to set up the specific modules which are used to give Drupal all of the features shown here. Meanwhile I found the following website which shows how to set up a simpler installation of Drupal.

• http://www.howtotuts.com/2008/01/12/how-to-create-a-web-site-using-drupa...

• http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/08/18/GoogleWorkingOnSocialNetwor...
• http://valleywag.com/tech/brad-fitzpatrick/livejournal-creator-leaves-as...
• http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
• http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability

A Brewing Storm

We all have subscriptions to many free service providers on the internet: Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the list goes on. And we enjoy them. And we appreciate the fortunate circumstances which allow us to use these services at no cost.

However, as more and more of our real life has an online component (i.e. a component in the virtual world), we grow to expect more control over our data and the services we use.