After about 8 years of contributing to OpenRefine, I am moving on to other projects and want to give some more context about this move.

Working on OpenRefine has been a real honor. I am very grateful for the trust and warm welcome I was given when I discovered the tool in 2017, looking for ways to import data in Wikidata. I was, and still am, a strong believer in maintaining existing software, avoiding its unnecessary obsolescence and adapting it to the changing needs of its users. As a maintainer, I have always considered my role as limited in time and have tried to keep in mind the duty to onboard other contributors so that they are also able to take this project in new directions.

For already quite some time, I have had it as a goal to leave the project to better make space for others. This has now happened. I have left the advisory committee last year, the core dev group this year and stopped developing and maintaining OpenRefine a few months ago. It's not an easy move to do, as I still care about this project and I can still see many areas that I would have hoped to leave in a better state, but I think it is the right thing to do and I have a lot of trust in the team to take good care of this tool and its ecosystem.

I'm very grateful for the many past and current team members for their involvement and wish the community the best. Have a great 2025 barcamp too!

The annual unconference for the OpenRefine community

📅 September 8–11, 2025 from 13:00 to 18:00 UTC

🌍 Fully virtual via Zoom

💬 Open to contributors, users, trainers, developers, and the curious!

📍 Register to attend

We are excited to announce that Rory Sawyer has joined the OpenRefine team as our new Developer and Contributor Engagement Specialist. After our job posting in November 2024 and a thorough interview process, Rory emerged as the best candidate for this position.

The OpenRefine AI Extension bridges the power of modern language models with OpenRefine's robust data transformation capabilities. This extension enables users to leverage any LLM provider that supports a chat completion API endpoint, bringing AI-powered data wrangling, enhancement, and analysis directly into your OpenRefine workflows.

The OpenRefine Advisory Committee is excited to announce that we are now recruiting new members.

As a key part of our governance structure, the Advisory Committee runs the administrative aspect of the project on a day to day basis with the support of our fiscal sponsor, Code for Science and Society (CS&S). Its members are bound by the fiscal sponsorship agreement with Code for Science and Society. The committee meets weekly including once per month with Code for Science and Society. Weekly calls are open to the OpenRefine community. We invite interested candidates to join us for a first-hand experience of the advisory committee's daily operations work.

OpenRefine 3.9.0 was released today and is the first stable release of our 3.9 series. It contains a range of improvements and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the release notes for 3.9-beta1.

The following webinar presents many of the new features in this release, with a focus on improvements around the newly developed Wikimedia Commons integration:

Thanks go to our many contributors who have helped shape this release in a variety of ways. Please report any issues with this release on our forum or GitHub.

OpenRefine provides a powerful feature for generating detailed file information from selected directories in your local system. This functionality allows users to create projects containing comprehensive file metadata.

Features included in this extension:

• Start an OpenRefine project by loading details of files from one or more folders on your local system.
• File details included are file name, extension, size in KB, creation date, last modification date, permissions, SHA-256 checksum, author and file path

It works with OpenRefine 3.8.7 and later versions of OpenRefine.

File extension details can be found here

2024 was a year marked by generative collaboration and tangible growth. We entered 2025 optimistic about continuing this trend toward an even stronger tool and community, and are excited to preview some of our collective plans for the year ahead!

Every two years, OpenRefine conducts an extensive survey among its users. Our sixth edition was live in August-October 2024. The 2024 user survey included a feature prioritization poll (see the results) and questions regarding our new mission, vision, and value statement (see the results). This year, we received 226 answers. This post focuses on the survey analysis.

As 2024 draws to a close, we would like to express our profound appreciation for OpenRefine's vibrant community of users, contributors, and donors. Thanks to all of you, we were able to make meaningful strides this year toward maximizing the impact of our tool and creating a supportive, nurturing, and inclusive space to engage with it. While there is always more work to be done, this community deserves a pause to highlight and celebrate some of our collective achievements from the past year.