Passing on the maintainer hat

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!