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.

About the role​

• Role: Developer & Contributor Engagement
• Job Type: Part-Time Contract
• Duration: 9 months with possible extension.
• Job Location: Remote
• Total funding available for the position: USD 90,000 annually

Role Summary​

This part-time role for an OpenRefine Developer, contracted through Code for Science & Society Inc. (a 501(c)(3) charitable organization in the USA), will focus on enhancing OpenRefine's stability, reliability, and quality to support the project’s long-term sustainability. This role is funded by the EOSS-5 grant.

Key responsibilities include bug fixes, quality improvements, and ongoing maintenance, with an emphasis on features supported by grant funding. Over time, the developer will expand into release management, security maintenance, and mentorship within internship programs (e.g., GSoC, Outreachy).

We have released OpenRefine 3.8.4, which contains important security patches. We encourage users to upgrade swiftly. See the release notes for details about the vulnerabilities fixed.

To continue using the Google Drive and Google Sheets integration, users need to obtain their own application credentials from the Google API Console.

On Thursday 24th October 2024, we will publish version 3.8.3 of OpenRefine, with fixes to a collection of important security vulnerabilities. Given the severity of those vulnerabilities, we encourage users to get ready to upgrade swiftly to this new version.

Earlier this year, inspired by ongoing conversations within the OpenRefine community, we decided to organize our first-ever hybrid Barcamp. This idea emerged from discussions about enhancing community engagement and collaboration. Our goal was to create a space where contributors could gather, share insights, and work together to improve OpenRefine. We decided to go with a barcamp format so attendees could set the agenda and discuss important topics for the community.

The Barcamp took place from June 16 to June 19, both online and in Berlin. There were 14 in-person participants and 15 remote attendees.

Here are the main takeaways and highlights from our event with a link to the summary of each session on our forum for you to continue the conversation.