Yes, this is indeed a topic that comes again and again, where we have not made much progress recently.
Personally I have always been held back on this by the fact that what happens in the project depends a lot on what people find the time and motivation to work on, and we have not got so much visibility on this.
I can at least say what I am motivated in working on personally in the next years (as of today - that can evolve of course):
- Onboarding more people on the project, in all sorts of roles: I see that as an important way to keep the project moving;
- The reproducibility project which just started. There are a lot of important usability issues connected to this topic, and those improvements are necessary for people to be able to rely on OpenRefine not just for one-off projects (importing this dataset in Wikidata, converting it to RDF…) but be able to rely on it durably for follow-up updates.
- Improvements to reconciliation. The current workflows around it are not respectful of users’ time. We can offer a much more principled, reliable and efficient workflow, building on the improvements we have been doing in the W3C Community Group.
- Packaging. It’s really not attractive work, but it goes a long way in making OpenRefine easier to adopt for newcomers;
- A better extension architecture. At the moment extension developers have too few interface stability guarantees, and the user experience of installing and upgrading extensions is poor. There are a lot of open questions around this since OpenRefine’s architecture is quite uncommon, so there does not seem to be an established off-the-shelf model we can adopt.
- General maintenance - there is never a shortage of things to do there, and it can also be satisfying work, thankfully.
- Clustering. This is such a popular feature of the tool and still there is so much we could improve there! I guess I have not touched it yet because it feels daunting to change anything in such a successful feature, but if we carefully test things I don’t see why we could not improve things.
There’s probably quite a few topics missing, but that’s probably a good start.