I'm on my way back from the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025, a gathering of the technical community around the Wikimedia movement. Here's a little report of impressions from that event 
First, about the event itself: it's not a classical hackathon in the sense that it's not so much focused around producing a prototype of some system during the event itself (nor is it competitive at all). I go there to meet people I would otherwise only interact with online.
The event was a good occasion to explain people that I am leaving the OpenRefine project, but intend to remain active in the Wikimedia community in other ways (at the moment, primarily working on improving the social dynamics of tool maintenance).
Some people have expressed concerns over me pivoting away from OpenRefine, but I have made it clear to them that there are other people behind this project and there is still much interest in the OpenRefine team to serve the Wikimedia community (as far as I can tell!) Still, it would probably be useful to make more faces of OpenRefine more visible in the Wikimedia community, so that people know who to turn to. Beyond events like this (which can be supported via a scholarship if you apply early enough - I didn't), there are of course online channels:
- the Telegram group
- the OpenRefine phabricator board
- I have heard of some Discord channel(s) too, which I'm not part of - maybe someone else can point to them?
- of course, this forum, where a lot of fantastic support is happening - thank you all for that!
- talk pages on wikis (not so active as we encourage people to use the forum)
- of course, most social media platforms…
I also spent a fair amount of time helping people use OpenRefine, reporting issues I observed in the wild, and fixing some of them on the spot.
The best part in all that: there were OpenRefine stickers on the stickers table - and I neither printed them nor brought them myself! A big thank you to whoever made that happen, it made me very happy of course! 