“How do I get started?” is the question we received most during our hands-on workshops on data cleaning and enhancing. OpenRefine is a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled user, but how do you become one?

Yesterday David Huynh announced that Google will soon stop its active support of Google Refine and count of community to get more involved to growth Refine.

Refine is already a mature data cleaning tool, this change in leadership will be a major challenge for the tool continuity. But first I'd like to clarify what I have read on twitter yesterday night. Google Refine has always been an open source tool and anyone can commit changes, develop an extension or update the wiki.

Through this post I'd like to give my insight on the reason of this decision and what will be the short terms consequences of it.