May 1st, 2025 - Advisory Committee Call with CS&S

Attendees

  1. OpenRefine: Jan, Julie, Martin
  2. CS&S: Linda, Rachel, Noël, Danielle, Ronald

Duration 45 minutes.

Discussions

Varia

  • CS&S asked OpenRefine to produce an organization chart to include the Advisory Committee and every contractor and employee
  • Martin provided an update regarding Barcamp. Jan suggested https://eventyay.com as an open source platform to organize the event.
  • Martin informed the group that we received feedback from Tom today regarding the governance. It is positive, and we will be able to merge the PR regarding the governance by early next week so that the community can review the latest round of comments.
  • We are organizing a 1.5-day event in Quebec City for Rory to meet Advisory Committee member, contributors, and users on May 21 and 22nd. Martin will prepare a public announcement for next week.

2025-2026 Budget

  • OpenRefine must provide a budget for the Fiscal Year from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026
  • Martin completed the template with the following assumptions:
    • No new revenue identified.
    • Keeping Rory and Martin on staff at the same rate.
    • If we extend the EOSS-5 grant to December 31, 2025 and use deplete our General fund we have funding until end of the February 2026.
    • We need a minimum of USD50,000 to complete the budget until June 30, 2026
  • Ronald Brooks (CS&S Chief Financial Officer) commented that
    • The current budget is enough
    • CS&S will reassess the cash and budget status in the fall 2025.

Funding Effort

Working with Lila Jane (LJ)

Martin met with LJ to discuss how she can support OpenRefine fundraising effort. We agreed on a bi-weekly meeting where LJ can

  • Identify potential funders and individual contacts
  • Provide guidance on how to approach them
    Martin will
  • customize the outreach message based on our two-pagers (see the update here for details)
  • Perform the outreach and follow up with potential funders.

Martin and LJ also strategize around the floss fund and how to better present the GitHub sponsors tier. Based on this conversation, Martin will provide a separate community update.

Funding pipeline

We reviewed progress with other fundraising efforts: