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Looking Forward: 2025 Priorities

· 4 min read
Martin Magdinier

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!

Living Our Values​

Just as developing our new Vision, Mission, and Values was last year’s priority, this year is about putting them into practice. We recognize that these statements are only as meaningful as their felt impact. Accordingly, we are committed to proactively and intentionally living our values by being respectful of diverse backgrounds and expertise, approachable, transparent and open, curious, and community-driven – all in pursuit of “a more informed world where working with data is easy and engaging.” We look forward to integrating these principles into all aspects of our day-to-day work, from how we prioritize features in the tool to how we engage with one another. With the backing support of our 2024 User Survey respondents, our new Vision, Mission, and Values will serve as a shared foundation for the decisions we make in the months and years ahead.

Of course, realizing this work will require new resources and investments. We are committed to fundraising this year to enable our continued pursuit of our mission and vision, and to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the OpenRefine project.

Delivering on Our Commitments​

We have been honored to receive generous grant funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Over the past several years through their Essential Open Source Software for Science program. Our most recent grant from CZI enabled a multi-year initiative to improve the reproducibility of OpenRefine workflows. This grant concludes in October 2025, and we will be working diligently to deliver on this grant by further improving the visualization, editability, and reproducibility of a series of operations on new data sets. This work includes advancing long-term systemic changes to operation history management, as well as shorter-term refinements of existing operations to improve visualizations and error-handling while maintaining stability for current users and contributors. We are excited to see some of those improvements being shipped in the upcoming 3.9 release and plan to continuously deliver on those through 2025.

Advancing Our Roadmap​

In 2024, we collected user feedback through BarCamp, bi-yearly surveys, work on the Wikimedia Commons integration, and ongoing interaction on the forum and our GitHub repository. During the 2024 Barcamp, we also strategized about a proposed approach to our roadmap, where we would identify “goalposts” (high-level initiatives) and share them with the community to gauge interest and priority.

In that spirit, we are listing below some of the goalposts the community would like to see implemented in OpenRefine. In 2025, we will seek new grant funding, partnerships, and volunteer contributions to accomplish these impactful, community-proposed initiatives, including:

Any one of these initiatives would meaningfully contribute to strengthening OpenRefine. Further, the goalposting process enacts our commitment to openness, transparency, and community-building, as expressed in our values. We look forward to collecting feedback on this process, and are excited to refine these further with the community. If you are interested in contributing to the realization of any of those goalposts, please chime in on the linked conversations or on the forum.

Between these one-off initiatives and our ongoing efforts to operationalize our Vision, Mission, and Values, we look forward to another year of robust community engagement and technical advancement. Thank you for your continued support in 2025!