Public Data Activities

Just looking at the latest post from the OKF blog, and this having coincided with my finishing a draft of my chapter about web 2.0 - it feels very much where my research is heading. That the  methodologies of Web 2.0 - as scholz has stated there is a history of social media outside of tose constituted by commercial web 2.0 apps, in part derived from OS and activist media practices, can be used to act upon the huge amount of data sets that are becoming available via initiatives such as OKF. The issue for me, as practitioner is how to interface with these datasets; in thinking of them as material I feel compelled to get my hands on them and much about, but do not have the technical ability to do this. I need therefore to learn this, and quick, but this would happen in a more informed and collective manner, borrowing from the  communitarian nature of OS, rather than some lone, fiddler, artist type, trouble is I might be that type.