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.

Previously you've needed to be something of a web developer to take the best advantage of this information. But now with Eric Pickles and Francis Maude carrying on the work that the previous government had begun, open data is all around - and the real problem is getting enough people to make use of it.

There are more details at the University of Nottingham pages: they'll run from Monday 8 November through to Friday 3 December. Each class can take 30 to 40 people but tickets are going fast, so be quick.

The events are taking place at: the University of Newcastle on November 8; University College London on November 10; The University of Nottingham on November 12; the University of Aberdeen on November 17; the Royal Geographical Society in London on November 18; and the University of Southampton on December 3.

The aims of the classes are

to teach the general public about the tools and techniques needed to use and analyse the increasing amount of national and local data being made available via the internet, while avoiding the pitfalls of interpreting statistics.

Even if it can manage only the latter, that will be fantastic: there are far too many "surveys" which lack any sort of statistical rigour which get re-reported in, well, the media.

As the organisers say: "The programme of events is open to anyone with an interest in obtaining and using public information on a whole range of topics including crime, healthcare, transport, schools and census data."

It's worth considering just how far we have come in just under a year. A year ago, there was no London Datastore; you couldn't get postcode data for free (and indeed the crew at ernestmarples were getting nastygrams from lawyers); you'd have spent endless time writing FOI requests to local councils if you wanted to know about expenditure over £500, and they'd have probably been turned down on the basis of commercial confidentiality; and there was no way in the world that Ordnance Survey would have let you have its StreetView mapping data for free or allowed it to be incorporated into OpenStreetMap.

Those were the sorts of things that the Free Our Data campaign was trying to change. Did it succeed? Well, actually, we'd still like the flood map data from the Environment Agency. Perhaps we'll make a call.

Then in December came Gordon Brown's sweeping announcement that Ordnance Survey data would go free (except at Mastermap level and Landranger level), the launch of data.gov.uk, and then the London Datastore, and plenty more to come.

Or as Nottingham puts it:

"The launch of sites making government data freely available and the publication of significant geographical data by the Ordnance Survey came following a concerted open data movement, led by web developers, and a Free Our Data campaign by the national Guardian newspaper."



Dr Hanif Rahemtulla, a research fellow in Horizon Digital Economy Research and the Centre for Geospatial Science, said: "The past few months have seen a number of high profile announcements in relation to the release of central and local government data for free.

"The data.gov.uk portal was launched by Gordon Brown during his premiership but has been embraced by the new coalition Government as a means of opening up data, promoting transparency and re-building the general public's trust following the damaging MP's expenses revelations.

"There is great excitement in the developer community and many new mashups and apps have been produced from the released data already. Our master classes are designed for individuals who could really benefit from being able to access this data but don't have the same technical expertise in extrapolating statistics from it."

The events are being funded by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, data.gov.uk through the Cabinet Office, the OS (Ordnance Survey) GeoVation challenge and ESRI UK, the software leader for geographical information systems (GIS).