How to align external grants with OpenRefine

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Dear Martin,

What is your stance on research or research infrastructure grants that would mainly secure funding for external developers?

Let me present myself, I lead a group at HITS, a privately funded, not-for-profit research institute in Heidelberg, Germany. My group does scientific data management for biologists.

In my work I am interested in Excel/LibreOffice workbook transformation for the purpose of transforming scientific data. I am aware or involved with some tools in this respect, and I would like to merge much of their functionality into one, combining their strengths, and apply for a grant to this end. There is infrastructure related competitive research funding in Germany.

A proposal of this type would mean change, i.e. extensions, and sometimes changes to openRefine. Promising something like that beforehand and having to fulfill it could go against the grain of a democratic open source project.

This is why I ask the question: How would one have to set this up in order to align this with openRefine and be long-term interesting for openRefine? Is there a process you would suggest in order to initiate a discussion to that end?

In my head, so far openRefine is the likely center of what we would want to achieve in our research infrastructure project, and we would try to add functionality, some of which would be for general tables, some other for groups of tables, and some other functionality potentially spreadsheet-specific, as e.g. embedding some information into spreadsheet formulas.

My aim would be handing in a proposal in the next 3-6 months. The size I am envisaging is 2 people 2-3 years, people who would have to learn how these tools work and then could start contributing. I think the funds would have to stay in Germany, except (maybe) for subcontracts. I am aware that two external developers would mean strain to the core team.

I would be very thankful for advice on how to proceed and what you think about that.

Best,

Wolfgang

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Hi @wolfgang,

Thanks so much for reaching out early. This kind of advance coordination is very appreciated, especially for a project of this scale.

On externally funded development

OpenRefine is absolutely open to contributions from externally funded developers.

Our formal funding governance process only applies when a grant is led by the Advisory Committee or when funds flow through our fiscal sponsor (CS&S), so if the project is run entirely on your side, you are free to proceed as PI. Early coordination, as you're doing here, is always helpful.

Lessons from past large changes

From previous large development efforts, we’ve learned that the process matters as much as the code:

  • Big changes developed in isolation are hard for the community to review.
  • Smaller, incremental, reviewable milestones work far better.
  • Moving too fast on a long-lived branch makes it hard for others to follow.
  • Early engagement avoids misalignment.

Recommended approach

  • As you draft your application over the next 3–6 months, feel free to share the features and changes you are envisioning so the community can offer early feedback. Sharing early doesn’t imply any commitment, it simply helps us all understand scope and alignment before things become too fixed.
  • Break work into manageable milestones and share early drafts or ideas as you refine your proposal. This helps the community understand the direction, provide feedback and ensures smoother integration.
  • As you mentionned, consider using the extension model for domain-specific or experimental features so your team can innovate independently while keeping the core stable.
  • We can explore ways for part of the grant to help fund onboarding and support from our developer advocate for your team.

Next steps

If helpful, I’d be happy to set up a call to discuss collaboration models, governance expectations, and how best to coordinate with the community as you shape your proposal. In my role as Project Manager, I am not in a position to make feature-related decisions ; these are made openly with community participation. So the purpose of the call would be to clarify collaboration mechanics and expectations, not to make technical or feature commitments in advance.

Thanks again for considering OpenRefine as part of your research infrastructure plans. I am looking forward to continuing the discussion.

Best Regards,
Martin

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Dear Martin,

thanks for this long and very informative reply. I will go back with this to the potential partners. We will come up with a two-pager about what we aim at, what would be key features of what we want to achieve. And then a call would be really great.

Timing wise, I think this will happen early next year. In Germany it’s a bit more than 3 work weeks to go with the usual year-end-stuff.

I am very much looking forward to this. It is my turn to thank you all for this great piece of software :-).

Best Regards,

Wolfgang

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