In Gratitude: 2024 in Review

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.

Improving Our Tool

We published a series of new releases this year, including the milestone version 3.8, which was downloaded a total of over 139,000 times and introduced a range of new features and improvements. Among the issues prioritized were:

• Usability including improvements to keyboard navigation, the data reconciliation experience, UI consistency and predictability, improving the Wikibase and Wikimedia Commons extension, and tons of bug fixes,
• Performance including switching out our CSV parser engine for a more efficient option and running more processes as needed,
• Security patching a range of vulnerabilities in OpenRefine, and
• General Refine Expression Language (GREL) improvements.

This is significant progress! We want to give a special shoutout to everyone who wrote, reviewed, and engaged with these PRs, contributing to a more usable, performant, and secure tool for all.

Investing in Our Community

We know that the strength of our community is central to our shared success. Accordingly, this year we prioritized initiatives focused on increasing inclusion, alignment, and transparency within and across the OpenRefine community. We are endlessly grateful for everyone who participated in the conversations, workshops, and lively debates that fueled these initiatives.

Clarifying our Mission, Vision, Values

Through a series of conversations with open-source project leaders, we identified the need to clarify our Vision, Mission, and Values. Starting in April, we partnered with Bocoup to facilitate a community engagement process that included interviews with users and contributors representing a range of perspectives, an interactive BarCamp workshop, and forum discussions.

This process yielded our new Vision, Mission, and Values statements, which we will be vetting and iterating on in the coming years. The vast majority of respondents in our 2024 User Survey expressed support for the statements. We are excited to integrate them into our day-to-day work as we collectively strive toward our vision:

A more informed world where working with data is easy and engaging.

Increasing Transparency in our Governance

We made significant progress this year toward greater transparency into our work. For instance, we updated the OpenRefine website to more clearly illustrate the project history, funding sources, and options for contributing. We also began the practice of publicly sharing minutes from our weekly Advisory Committee calls. Both of these changes allow users and contributors to better understand and engage with the advisory committee work, which lays the foundation for a more inclusive community.

Additionally, this year we reopened the conversation on how we can improve our governance and better document how we currently operate. To this end, we hosted a series of generative discussions through the forum and in community meetings, where we heard an array of thoughtful, diverging perspectives. This work is ongoing, and we look forward to further discussions in the new year.

Creating Space for Collaboration

2024 was the year we hosted our first in-person BarCamp in Berlin! This three-day event created space for in-person and virtual participants to discuss the past, present, and future of the OpenRefine project. This summer, 14 in-person and 15 remote community members came together to workshop new uses of the tool, align on OpenRefine's status, and strategize about our priorities. Community members generated ideas and next steps through interactive sessions, such as "Approaches to Training People to Use OpenRefine," "Making OpenRefine More Useful As An Exploratory Tool," and "Strategizing Our Roadmap for User Needs." The notes from BarCamp were then shared with our forum for wider discussion. We intend to continue making space for in-person and virtual gatherings in the years to come.

Expanding Our Reach

We reached a growing audience this year and continued our work with a range of communities, including journalists and media professionals, GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), Wikipedians and Wikimedia contributors, scientists and researchers across a range of disciplines, data analysts, and educators. More and more people are joining the community and are enthusiastic about learning, using, and teaching the tool. As librarian Thomas Guignard shared earlier this year,

Teaching OpenRefine is the absolute best – people feel so much joy that it exists.

Highlighting Our Usage

OpenRefine was downloaded on average 15,500 times per month and received over 800 academic citations in our last full year of operation (2023). Since the start of 2024, activity on our GitHub has been bustling, with 33 active GitHub contributors, 241 issues created and 192 closed, and 223 PRs merged. Our average number of active GitHub contributors per month has remained steady for the past two years.

Additionally, we've seen a burst of activity on our forum, with 271 new users signed up in the past year, for a new total of 637 forum users. This year, 364 topics were created for a total of 1,900 messages. Our 2024 survey reflected this engagement, with 226 responses (up from 207 in 2023) across skill levels, geography, and tenure with the tool. Respondents also reported using the tool in over 30 languages.

We are deeply grateful for our active community on both GitHub and the forum, and believe our tool is strengthened by the range of perspectives we've engaged this year.

Welcoming Wikimedia Sweden

This year, we enthusiastically embraced a new partnership with Wikimedia Sweden (WMSE), who joined us to make improvements to our Wikimedia Commons integration. This partnership took shape thanks to the Wikimedia-OpenRefine training and sustainability project. Through this partnership, WMSE developers ramped up on OpenRefine code and tackled strategic bug fixes and other enhancements to address feedback we had received since the integration was first released.

Thank You

In our 2024 user survey, on a 1-10 scale, respondents gave an average 8.9 score for their likelihood to refer OpenRefine, with 91% indicating high likelihood of referral and more than half of respondents rating their likelihood a 10 out of 10.

In open comments, one survey respondent referred to OpenRefine as "a lifesaver," while another described it as "the best tool for my data needs." More than one respondent said that they "would not be doing this work without OpenRefine," and several expressed immense gratitude for the community at large.

We recognize that maintaining OpenRefine can be a complex endeavor, especially given our majority-volunteer contributor base. That is why we wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the impactful tool and community it has become – thanks to all of you. We hear repeatedly from community members that the opportunity to work collaboratively toward a common goal provides a sense of comfort and purpose, in addition to the impact of the tool itself. We're looking forward to continuing this collaboration in the year ahead, and remain grateful for your partnership!

2024 Donor Shoutouts:

We would like to thank our 2024 individual and institutional funders, including the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Wikimedia Foundation, Timothy Braith, Alex Eichorn, knothist, Frederic Kerloch, Mitzi, Katy Preen, Vy Nguyen, Lennart Rouxel, Luis Ascenso, M Lewis, and GitHub users @Robaa2168, @DaxServer, @timtomch, @RefinePro, @trantor, @alanorth, @ostephens, @EstebanMH-SiB, @wetneb, @anchardo.

If you would like to support OpenRefine, please consider making a donation at https://openrefine.org/donate.

2024 GitHub Contributor Shoutouts:

Our contributors play a critical role in our success. If you're looking for opportunities to get involved, you can start here: https://openrefine.org/community.

In alphabetical order, our GitHub contributors were associated with the following accounts: @5tigerjelly, @Abbe98, @abhishekkujur1307, @Ahmed-Elgamel, @akashinde, @amparab, @Ash-Crow, @ayushrai206, @ComgLq24, @cooperzoe, @DaxServer, @dino2580, @dori4n, @elebitzero, @EliasStihl, @fivecut, @frafra, @GittyHarsha, @growfrow, @Hisiste, @Huishin-pie, @IjayAbby, @jenny-Musah, @jnchen1, @Kurocifer, @lozanaross, @Lydiaofficial, @mahikaajain, @payalsaraljain, @pkumar2001, @prashasti-7, @Redeem-Grimm-Satoshi, @santi4o, @sebastian-berlin-wmse, @skhoylow8, @SoniaSun810, @SrinathKadam048, @steve-kasica, @sunil-atheer, @sunilnatraj, @surajbora59, @t8210103, @tejasbhosale17, @teolemon, @tfmorris, @thadguidry, @tledoux, @tsukipedia, @VhugoJc, @wandernauta, @wetneb, @WR-Smiley, @wsmmxmm, @Xiayucheng1212, @xinluz6, @yeungven, @zyadtaha.