Developer and Community Engagement update: May 2025

Hi all! Another month, another update. I hope that these updates provide a clear picture of what I've been working on and what I plan to work on. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments!

Last month, I worked on better understanding Butterfly and how it's used by OpenRefine. I opened a PR with some preliminary notes here: Start documentation section for Butterfly by SoryRawyer · Pull Request #460 · OpenRefine/openrefine.org · GitHub
I was initially interested in this from the perspective of updating the REST API and I started a thread to discuss adding support for different API versions, but ultimately that discussion highlighted that there is more work to be done on establishing a motivating use case for this work. I've been working on putting together an automated pipeline using the REST API as a demonstration, but that hasn't been a high priority for me.
I also attended the OpenRefine meetup in Quebec City, which was a great opportunity for me to learn more about all aspects of our software and the community.

Looking ahead to June, I'd like to focus on the following:

  • Releasing version 3.10. There were some PR discussions that needed to be resolved but I think we're all set. I'll follow up on the release timeline thread with more details.
  • Continue adding documentation, particularly around extension points. Following my research into Butterfly, I'd like to understand the extension ecosystem a little better.
  • Related to the extension ecosystem, I'd like to make more of an effort to learn more about the Wikimedia/OpenRefine community. Given the recent discussion around moving the Wikibase extension to its own repository and the recent issues and pull requests on the Commons extension, I think it would be helpful to talk about maintaining those extensions and supporting the Wikimedia use case.

As always, please feel free to reach out with any feedback about how I can better support the OpenRefine developer community!

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