Feedback Request on OpenRefine's Draft Vision, Mission, Values

Community
1

Over the past few months, our team at Bocoup has partnered with the OpenRefine community to facilitate the development of its Vision, Mission, and Values.

This project aims to:

  • Conduct research on the OpenRefine community and its needs
  • Engage in community input-gathering to inform OpenRefine’s Mission, Vision, and Values
  • Deliver a set of community-vetted Mission, Vision, and Values statements
  • Provide high-level recommendations for next steps in implementation

To date, we have connected with many members of this vibrant community and deeply appreciate your willingness to participate in this initiative. We’ve collaborated with Martin Magdinier to review historical materials and develop an engagement plan. As part of that plan, we interviewed 17 community members who were selected to represent a range of perspectives on the OpenRefine tool and community. We then joined a session at BarCamp to discuss our initial drafts, and incorporated the participants’ feedback.

The input received so far has been instrumental in shaping these materials, and we are excited to continue enhancing them together.

As the next step in this process, we are seeking feedback on the latest draft materials. You can engage in this round of feedback in two ways:

  1. Provide feedback on this Discourse post
  2. Sign up to participate in one of two facilitated focus group discussions

If you have previously connected with us but still have questions or thoughts, you are also welcome to join these discussions.

We ask that all feedback on Discourse be shared by July 19th so that we can consider it in our next round of updates.

In order to accommodate varying time zones, the focus groups are scheduled for Tuesday July 16th at 8pm GMT and Wednesday July 17th at 2pm GMT. If you are interested in participating, please email ashley@bocoup.com by Wednesday July 10th with your preferred session, and we will follow up with further details.

Thank you all for your time, and we look forward to receiving your feedback!

Materials for review: OpenRefine: Draft Vision, Mission, Values

3 Likes
2

I really like a lot of this. One thing that I am thinking about that I don't totally see articulated here is the work that we have done with students. There is an ethos of training and mentorship which I would love to see captured. Additionally, I think that this community has respect of different backgrounds but also celebrates difference in contributors. There is excitement when we hear about how someone in a different domain, institution, or country is using OpenRefine. I'd like to see that a little more clearly here, if others agree.

4

Hi all!
Reminder - there is one more week to share feedback on these materials.

Thank you to everyone who has engaged in this process!

5

Hello,

We are approaching the end of the engagement with Bocoup to clarify OpenRefine's mission, vision, and values. Thank you all for your enthusiasm and input throughout the project.

I am attaching the latest report prepared by Bocoup. OpenRefine Vision, Mission, Values - Bocoup Final Deliverables.pdf (130.9 KB). It contains

  • An updated version of the vision, mission, and values (see also below)
  • Recommendations for next steps
  • Synthesis of the 17 initial interviews
  • BarCamp Feedback Synthesis
  • Discourse Feedback Synthesis

Updated Vision, Mission and Values

Vision:

A more informed world where working with data is easy and engaging.

Mission:

Empowering everyone to meaningfully engage with data by providing an
accessible open source tool and nurturing a diverse, supportive community

Values

Respectful of Diverse Backgrounds & Expertise: We celebrate that people come to the OpenRefine tool and community from varying backgrounds, identities, technical abilities, geographies, privileges, industries, linguistic backgrounds, and more. We honor the diverse experiences and expertise of our users and contributors and aim to develop features and training that encourage and nourish diverse engagement with the tool, prioritizing accessibility and usability to broaden reach and impact.

Approachable: We ensure that OpenRefine is inviting and supportive of all participants by providing various on-ramps to engagement with the tool and community, including but not limited to clear documentation, thoughtful mentorship and training, and by prioritizing ease-of-use and participation across backgrounds and skill-levels. We expect everyone to engage with kindness, warmth, patience, and an unwavering commitment to mutual support.

Transparent & Open: We create pathways for and encourage clear communication and knowledge-sharing, ranging from regularly-updated documentation to consistent public participation in community forums. We believe that transparency is essential to a collaborative community where everyone is informed and feels empowered to engage. The tool mirrors this commitment to transparency through prioritizing privacy of all users and their data.

Curious: We believe in the importance of a learning mindset, where everyone leads with questions and engages with humility. We recognize that we have a lot to learn from one another, and seek opportunities to foster our mutual growth. This includes being thoughtful in how we give and receive feedback, consistently examining our own biases, and providing proactive support to new learners in our community. For the tool itself, we operate with humility and listen to end-users to prioritize their needs and plan for features and iterations that optimize their use of the tool.

Community-driven: We seek to facilitate a meaningful sense of community among users and contributors, and to prioritize the perspectives of community members in key decisions. We believe that our users and contributors define OpenRefine, and should collaboratively drive our work forward – not as isolated individuals but as members of a diverse, supportive, and vibrant community. This is reflected in open communication about the future of the community and tool, a sense of agency among community members, and in democratic decision-making around strategic and technical priorities.

Next steps.

As outlined in the recommendation for the next steps, we plan to do one last round of revision following the results of the 2024 user survey. After that, we will be able to incorporate them into our website.

Feel free to share how you feel about the new mission, vision, and values in this thread.

6

I think Approachable is too similar to Respectful of Diverse Backgrounds & Expertise. Approachable means welcoming, in both diversity (our community is approachable) and ease of use/clear docs(our project is approachable).

Both paragraphs also mention key phrases like our "priorities" and welcoming diversity. In regards, to "priorities" we should be very careful there, and I'd replace "accessibility" and "usability" and just say ease-of-use. Anyways, we can rename Respectful of Diverse Backgrounds & Expertise to Approachable, and combine the core essence from both, which will leave us with 4 core values instead of 5.

My recommendation thus would be for the new Approachable to be rewritten to combine a bit of both:

Approachable: We celebrate that people come to the OpenRefine tool and community from varying backgrounds, identities, technical abilities, geographies, privileges, industries, linguistic backgrounds and more. We honor the diverse experiences and expertise of our users and contributors and aim to develop features and training that encourage and nourish diverse engagement with the tool, prioritizing accessibility and usability to broaden reach and impact. We ensure that OpenRefine is inviting and supportive of all participants by providing various on-ramps to engagement with the tool and community, including but not limited to clear documentation, thoughtful mentorship and training, and by prioritizing ease-of-use and participation across all backgrounds and skill-levels. We expect everyone to engage with kindness, warmth, patience, and an unwavering commitment to mutual support.

Thus, rewritten and further edited...

Approachable: We celebrate that people come to the OpenRefine tool and community from varying backgrounds, identities, technical abilities, geographies, industries, and more. We ensure OpenRefine is approachable by providing on-ramps to engagement with the tool and community, including but not limited to clear documentation, thoughtful mentorship and training, and by prioritizing ease-of-use and participation across all backgrounds and skill-levels with kindness and patience.

7

@thadguidry, thanks for your feedback. We will integrate it when we process the user survey results.

8

During the 2024 user survey, we asked participants for their feedback regarding the proposed Mission, Vision, and Value.

We received 226 answers, and the majority are in support of the proposed statements.

  • 166 answers: I am comfortable with them and have no changes to propose. (73.5%)
  • 12 answers: I am comfortable with them but would like to propose changes. (5.3%)
  • 4 answers: I am uncomfortable with them but have no changes to propose. (1.8%)
  • 3 answers: I am uncomfortable with them and would like to propose changes. (1.3%)
  • 41 answers: I have no thoughts on them (18.1%)

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Feedback received

Here is a summary of the changes feedback and how they are addressed.

Comment Revisions Made
Transparency and openness alone aren't enough. They benefit those privileged few individuals who have the luxury of time and skills to engage with a mass of information. More proactive consultation, summarizing, and communication are needed to make the ecosystem feel inclusive and co-owned by all. This comment aligned with the initial input we'd gathered, and we agreed that this could have been clearer in the values descriptions
I think they are too long in descriptions and unnecessarily long-winded and could be more concise? There's a lot of 'diverse,' 'community', etc. that seems too often repeated." "Maybe 'Respectful of Diverse Backgrounds & Expertise' and 'Community-Driven' and 'Approachable' could have less overlap? To address both comments, we closely reviewed the values descriptions and removed any language that felt redundant or unnecessary
The values mostly sound like a code of conduct. I would expect values like prioritizing FAIR and commons-based and open data. There were a couple comments about more explicitly prioritizing commons-based and open data, which we found a way to better incorporate.

Updated document

As a result, we only edited the description of each value. You can review the updated document
SUGGESTED EDITS - OpenRefine Vision, Mission, Values - Bocoup Final Deliverables.pdf (131.2 KB)

The Mission, Vision, and Values are not fixed. We can (and should) revisit them at least yearly to ensure they still represent our community and where we want the project to go.

Next step

As the next step, I propose incorporating those changes along with the update of the governance outlined here Improving Transparency: Advisory Committee's Role and Community Involvement - #37 by Martin