This project was published on http://barnraiser.org/ a while ago. Although it has very promising features it was frozen and finally dropped for reasons that are explained here. According to this the main reason was the rise of similar products by companies with sufficient economic power to attract more users than a small enthusiastic bunch of coders.
Today we know where that evolution led us and there's a tendency to move away from data-miners back to software under personal control. Funny enough this was exactly the intention of all projects at http://barnraiser.org/. We could say they were just a bit too far ahead of their time.
Fortunately the latest versions of the projects are still available on their website. In order to preserve the code and hopefully help to adjust it to modern requirements I took the freedom to import them here.
This is the latest version aroundme_c_20080327.tar.gz found at http://barnraiser.org/aroundme. This one and many older versions as well as the accompanying identity servers AroundMe_I and AroundMe_PI can be found at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/aroundme/. I have also set up git-repositories of the latter two here at Github.
I'm not an experienced programmer, so there's not so much activity to be expected from my side. Much more this repository should be considerd as a base-camp for real coders who are able and willing to spend some time on these projects. I don't mind if they fork and develop on their own or ask for write-access to this repo. Although in the first case I would appreciate pull requests in order to keep the things together.
The following is the original description of AROUNDMe, taken from its homepage http://barnraiser.org/aroundme
AROUNDMe collaboration server is the perfect solution for anyone wishing to create collaborative social spaces on the Web.
If you want to extend your brand or build a business model around people forming groups on the web (think "Google groups", "Yahoo groups" or "Ning") then AROUNDMe collaboration server is the solution for you.
Using AROUNDMe collaboration server you can create multiple collaborative group, webspace, community or social networking websites. Each group can create a multiple page collaborative web site. They get social tools such as a guestbook (a wall), a group blog, a forum and a wiki which they can drop into web pages. Each group is fully customisable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Groups can be private or public.
People can connect to a group to contribute using OpenID. They get tracking tools such as forum digest and blog RSS feeds.
AROUNDMe requires a web server running either Apache 1.3/2.x or IIS5/IIS6 with PHP5.x installed including Curl, BCMath and GD library with MySQL 4.1 or MySQL 5.0 database.
AROUNDMe uses a domain name / sub domain as your group. You need to own or have access to a domain name to install this product.