This blog post writes itself. Except that I have a warm feeling as I was a virtual professor at Nottingham for 5 years…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/datablog/2010/oct/13/free-data-nottingham-classes

Nottingham University offers masterclasses in dealing with open data – for free of course

Less than a year on from the release of data.gov.uk and open data sets, university offers classes around the country to those who want to do something with the data flood

Want to become an armchair auditor? Or, even better, push along the free data movement? Then the free masterclasses (though the only requirement is an inquiring mind and “a reasonable working knowledge of web browsing and Microsoft Excel”) being held by led by Horizon Digital Economy Research and the Centre for Geospatial Science at The University of Nottingham may be the ones for you.

“The idea is that it will teach people about how to best extract and interpret the data to produce meaningful statistics which may be useful to them as individuals or their organisations,” say the organisers.

Read the rest…

But a major thing is the message:

The dam has burst

The Guardian (the leading UK woolly liberal newspaper) deserves great credit. So does Gordon Brown (probably the most positive thing he will be remembered for).

Break your dams down. The IPR police is in confusion. If the data deserves to be free – as in speech – then free it and speak about it.