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.

This job posting has been archived and was filled in March 2025 with the hiring of Rory Sawer.

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.

Our first ever BarCamp is coming up in two weeks, on June 17th-19th, in Berlin and online. If you haven't yet, register now to participate, whether you want to attend onsite or remotely. This will give you access to the video conference room, let you propose and vote on sessions.

The event will start Monday afternoon:

• 14:00 CEST (12:00 UTC): Introductions round and opening of the event.
• 14:30 CEST (12:30 UTC): Collaborative review and scheduling of the proposed sessions (which you can still submit).
• 16:00 CEST (14:00 UTC): Break
• 16:30 CEST (14:30 UTC): Allocation of volunteering shifts (session facilitation, note-taking, Zoom caretaking)

The sessions themselves will then take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, following the schedule established on Monday. The schedule will be published on the BarCamp's website.

We are looking forward to kicking off this gathering with you!

The OpenRefine project participates in the 2024 Google Summer of Code program, which provides remote internships in software development on open-source projects. We are happy to announce that for this year's cohort, we will be joined by Zyad Taha, who has applied to work on improvements to clustering. He will be mentored by Antonin Delpeuch.

Zyad already contributed several pull requests in the last week. However, this is the opportunity to welcome him into the community formally! The Google Summer of Code internships will run from May 27 to August 26.

We thank all the applicants for their work during the contribution period and encourage them to continue working on free and open source software. The number of interns we can accept is limited by our mentoring capacity.

OpenRefine 3.8.0 was released today and is the first stable release of our 3.8 series. It contains a range of improvements and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the release notes for 3.8-beta1.

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.

Registration to our meeting around OpenRefine has opened. The gathering will take place on June 17th-19th in Berlin, Germany and online. We hope to gather many interested OpenRefine community members, partners and stakeholders who want to help shape the project’s future. Please forward the news to anyone who could be interested in attending!

OpenRefine will be offering internships as part of the Google Summer of Code this year.