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...

Overview

Free Software gives rise to unprecedented economic realities and possibilities. For the first time in history, significant amounts of economic value are able to be created with near zero variable cost. Software is essentially free to duplicate and run, and it can dramatically benefit its users. This raises new possibilities for the advancement of human good if a way can be made to pay the fixed costs and produce the software in the first place.

The following are organizations, projects, and websites which seem to be like-minded with the SharedUniverse Project in the pursuit of users' freedom.

• http://www.dataportability.org/
• http://www.movemydata.org/
• http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability
• http://practicalportability.org/
• http://www.opsn.net/
• http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability
• http://diso-project.org/wiki/Main_Page

• Online Computing Freedom - Online Computing Freedom is the ability to choose and change your service provider(s) of virtual world services at will, to take all of your data with you, and to modify or retract the data you have entered from non-favorable service providers. An increase in user freedom means increasing the power of the users and decreasing the power of the service providers. A user who is enjoying Online Computing Freedom is not locked-in to or constrained by a service provider to which he has entrusted some of his data.

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.

Documentation Overview

The documentation of the SharedUniverse Project is primarily in four books maintained online at shareduniverse.net.

The following pages will increasingly contain all of the information necessary to install, configure, and operate the SharedUniverse software.

The following pages will increasingly contain all of the information necessary to use the SharedUniverse software.

Our Mission

The mission of the SharedUniverse project is to protect and enhance each person's Online Computing Freedom in the Virtual World by doing the following:

The Mission of the SharedUniverse Project

• The mission of the SharedUniverse project is to protect and enhance each person's Online Computing Freedom in the Virtual World.

What Problems Are We Trying to Solve?