Interested in this, although here in brighton the amount of activity already around is fairly overwhelming - would be nice to have a searchable/filterable "portal" that aggregates all the feeds available. Would anyone be interested in taking this as a "starting point", or even just kicking some ideas around?

IMHO, "skill up" implies training, whereas actually what you want is to "culture out" to an attitude of openness. I suspect those who would like such training already see the benefits of openness.

To themselves, at least. There's a big difference between wanting openness from somebody else, and openness as a society-wide culture (in the style of Open Source, say).

I think there are things you/we can do though - it's about context, mostly. And mostly it's a fascinating subject which we should think/tall/do more about. Happy to discuss further somewhere.

I find the role of money fascinating in all this - there are also various towns setting up their own currency, to keep money within the local system (which isn't a 'gift' economy but does, IMHO, re-inforce local community links and a sense of local value). Not sure on the best way to develop/encourage this though?

Slightly more technically focused admittedly, but I wonder if there's a use for a kind of "public code" repository too, for gathering together code useful to community and government projects, e.g. for accessing open data, useful blog themes, etc.