In the I Don't Know What to Make of This Organization category is V2_Organisation, Institute for the Unstable Media in the Netherlands. It's an artists' co-operative that carries on a variety of activities of value to society. What caught my eye on wandering over from Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades site at The Well is the DEAF03 (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) program with the theme of Data Knitting that focuses on the value of archives as a portion of this introduction to the theme demonstrates:
Archives no longer just hold our past for inspection by historians, tax collectors and other researchers. We are permanently living in archives: all the sites we visit on the Internet are being logged by our search engines. All our shopping is being registered by our supermarkets. Each time we perform an electronic act we add information to the running archive of our activities as both individuals and members of target groups. On the basis of such archives the policies for the future are being planned, from marketing strategies to decisions about where to build shops. Behind almost all activities in the hard, material world nowadays there is an immaterial archive, for instance the storage of data from video surveillance and other security equipment. We are living in the world's online archive, or, more to the point: we are living in the world-as-archive, as a constellation of databases.