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

We will hold an in-person meeting around OpenRefine on June 17th-19th in Berlin, Germany. We hope to gather many interested OpenRefine community members, partners and stakeholders who want to help shape the project’s future. Remote attendance will be possible too.

Co-organizers for this event would be welcome. If you would like to help shape the BarCamp, please let us know on the forum.

More details will follow. For now, just save the date!

OpenRefine 3.7.9 was released today and it fixes a vulnerability with moderate severity (CVE-2024-23833). We encourage all users to update swiftly to the latest version. See the release notes for more details about the vulnerability.

We thank @l0n3rs for disclosing this vulnerability to us.

We are pleased to welcome Julie Faure-Lacroix and Esther Jackson to the OpenRefine Advisory Committee. Both Julie and Esther have demonstrated a strong commitment to OpenRefine, and we're looking forward to their contributions to our team.

For some time, a few team members have been considering organizing an in-person meeting around OpenRefine (for about 20 to 25 people). The goal of such a meeting would be to have contributors get to know each other better, share their views and coordinate together on a diverse range of topics, such as roadmap, governance, design, documentation and likely many others.

Those planning discussions have been held on the forum, which we acknowledge is only actively visited by parts of the broad OpenRefine community we want to reach out to with such a meeting.

If you are interested in shaping the future of OpenRefine and meet likeminded people, you are invited! Whether you are a translator, a trainer, a developer, a designer, an advocate or if you feel involved in the project in any other capacity, we want to see you at this event.

We are currently evaluating different dates and venue options. We aim to make remote participation possible and we should be able to offer travel support for many attendees. Please select the dates that would work best for you in this poll and let us know on the forum if none of the options work for you.

We are excited to announce that Zoe Cooper has joined the OpenRefine team as lead designer. Following our job posting in late August, Zoe stood out as the perfect person for the role.

Zoe's experience in journalism and publishing, as well as her early career fellowships within GLAM institutions (the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and Gagosian Gallery in New York), have given her a deep understanding of the diverse needs of our user base. Zoe’s hybrid career as both designer and writer - her work has been published by Vox, Al Jazeera, Frieze, TASCHEN, AnOther, Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design, Flash Art, and more - gives her unique insight into the artistic, scholarly, and scientific communities we serve. As the current part-time design lead for the Zetkin Foundation, a Sweden-based platform for organizing activism, Zoe brings a unique perspective to the OpenRefine team.

As OpenRefine's lead designer, she will initially focus on improving the platform's Operation History as part of a project funded by the EOSS-5 grant. She will also continue to develop OpenRefine's design practice, following the work initiated by Lozana Rossenova and Lydia Amadi Chinyere through last summer's Outreachy internship.

As we embark on this exciting journey with Zoe, we invite the OpenRefine community to welcome our newest team member warmly. We are thrilled to have her on board and look forward to the exciting things she will bring to the OpenRefine team. Stay tuned for updates on our progress, and thank you for your continued support!

Follow her updates here:

• Twitter: @zoe__cooper
• Instagram: _zoecooper

OpenRefine 3.7.5 was released today and it fixes vulnerabilities with moderate severity (CVE-2023-41886 and CVE-2023-41887). We encourage all users to update swiftly to the latest version. See the release notes for more details about the vulnerability.

We thank @nbxiglk0 for responsibly disclosing this vulnerability to us.

OpenRefine, a powerful data-wrangling tool used by diverse communities, seeks a lead designer to enhance OpenRefine's user experience and functionality.

NFDI4Culture has awarded OpenRefine a EUR 10,000 grant to enhance its reconciliation feature. This grant is a continuation of the progress made in 2022 with Wikibase and Wikimedia Commons integration, the work of our Outreachy intern Ayushi over the past three months, as well as the improvements to the reconciliation protocol made by the W3C Entity Reconciliation Community Group.

Since 2022, with support from a Wikimedia grant, it is possible to use OpenRefine to batch edit and upload files on Wikimedia Commons, with a focus on adding multilingual, linked, structured data to the files on Commons using the Commons Extension for OpenRefine.

This new Wikimedia Commons functionality in OpenRefine is especially useful for cultural institutions who want to upload files to Commons with linked, structured data. OpenRefine offers powerful import functionalities from various data formats (CSV, TSV, Excel sheets, XML…) and APIs (for those cultural institutions which use these). It also allows revisiting existing Wikimedia Commons files, improving their metadata, and adding multilingual structured data to them. Wikimedians in general can also use OpenRefine to batch upload their own or externally-hosted files to Wikimedia Commons.

For 2023-24, as part of its support for Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation is funding OpenRefine for bug fixes to its Commons features, for a train-the-trainer program, documentation, and a WikiLearn course. The Wikimedia-OpenRefine training and sustainability grant is for a duration of 12 months, it started on July, 1st 2023 and is led by Sandra Fauconnier with a total budget of USD 50,000.

Updates regarding the grant progress will be posted on the project’s info page on Wikimedia Commons.