OpenRefine Meetup in Québec City – May 21–22

Community Events
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Hello everyone!

We’re excited to announce a casual two-part OpenRefine meetup in Québec City later this month. If you're in town, we’d love to see you there!

Wednesday, May 21 – After-Work Meetup
Join us for a relaxed 5@7 gathering at Noctem Artisans Brasseurs in St-Roch. This is a great opportunity to meet other OpenRefine users in the area, chat about projects (or not!), and see what kind of community connections emerge.
:backhand_index_pointing_right: Register and share the event here

Thursday, May 22 – Full-Day Session at Université Laval
The next day, @jfaurel has kindly offered to host us at Université Laval (Adrien Pouliot Pavilion). We have a room booked from 10 AM to 6 PM that can accommodate up to 25 people.

This day is mostly intended to give Rory the opportunity to meet the community and gain a deeper understanding of the various aspects of OpenRefine in an in-person format.

@timtom, @Rory, @Antoine2711, and I will be present. It’s also an opportunity to bring in broader perspectives. If you know community users or relevant organizations in Québec City or nearby, let us know; we’d love to include them!

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Yay! I shared the link internally (U Laval). I targeted some librarians who attended a workshop (or several tbh I have a fan club).

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Looking forward to this event! I've also shared the info with some librarian friends.

I'm trying to post it to the Agenda du libre but for now their submit form is returning an error. I'll keep looking into it.

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It's been posted on the agenda: L'Agenda du libre du Québec | 5à7 OpenRefine

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I wanted to highlight this section from the recent Advisory Committee notes:

Following up on that first point, I wanted to open up discussion about holding an office hour call during the morning of the Thursday meetup. It sounds like we'll be able to do this using equipment available at the conference room. The recent office hours calls haven't had that many visitors, so I wanted to see how we could further publicize that this is an option for the Thursday meeting.

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Hi everyone,

Here’s a draft agenda for the in-person OpenRefine session tomorrow (Thursday, May 22), at Université Laval in Québec City:

2025-05-22T14:00:00Z – 2025-05-22T15:30:00Z Technical office hour
Open call - join here.
See @Rory’s previous message. This session is open to community-driven topics. If we’re looking for topics, I propose the following (which can still be discussed later in the day if other topics take priority during the call):

2025-05-22T15:30:00Z – 2025-05-22T16:00:00Z Break

2025-05-22T16:00:00Z – 2025-05-22T17:00:00Z Advisory Committee meeting
Open call — please ping me if you’d like to join.
Tentative agenda: continuing conversation regarding fundraising status, planning for the September Barcamp, and Wikimedia Group integration.

2025-05-22T17:00:00Z – 2025-05-22T18:00:00Z Lunch

2025-05-22T18:00:00Z – 2025-05-22T20:30:00Z Informal knowledge exchange (in-person only)
A relaxed session where participants can share practices, questions, and feedback with Rory and others.

After 16:30 Unstructured time, depending on energy and interest.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

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Very nice that you're doing this!
If you're hoping for remote participation, one thing you could do is give the times in UTC (or with Discourse's fancy feature to adjust the time dynamically based on the reader's timezone), so that people can know when to join :slight_smile:

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I forgot about that feature! I updated the message and added the link to the first call. Advisory Committee call invitation are upon request, ping me if you like to join.

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Here are my notes from yesterday's in-person meeting with @timtom @jfaurel @Rory and I.

This day was organized to give @Rory the opportunity to meet other community members and engage in more unstructured conversations. This helped build relationships and provided him with additional context. This post highlights some of the most meaningful conversations, but we also discussed several other points more informally.

Morning

The minutes of the Advisory Committee call are published separately in: May 22, 2025 Advisory Committee

Developer Community call

@antonin_d joined the group remotely. Unfortunately, I had to set out for part of this call, and I am not able to provide an update on those conversations.

Goal Post Conversation

This follows up on the conversation regarding goal posts during May 15, 2025 Advisory Committee

Martin presented to the group the structure of the goal post and his intent to make it a community-driven effort. Overall, there is not enough guidance for the community to understand what needs to be done to move one goalpost further. For example, we could

  • Provide templates on how to scope a feature,
  • Invite the community to document their use case for a feature
  • Let individual add their contact details if they want to help scope or define a specific goal post
  • Better advertise the goal post section in the contribution guide in the documentation.

The forum is a good place to better document the goalposts at the Needs Scoping and Needs Solution Definition stages by publishing user stories. Then we can coalesce the different use cases for the Core Dev Group to review and help shape the technical direction for implementation.

It is unrealistic to expect the community to manage the goal post page, as it requires a comprehensive understanding of the project's status. Instead, the Project Manager or the Developer in charge of Community Engagement could update the page on a monthly basis, reflecting recent discussions and releases. This can be accomplished during an open community call.

Afternoon

The afternoon was mostly informal conversation and demo between participants. Here is a lose transcript of what we discussed.

NER Extension

Part of the afternoon was dedicated to playing with the GitHub - sunilnatraj/llm-extension: LLM extension for OpenRefine built by @Sunil_Natraj (see also the conversation in Using local ChatGPT-like LLMs in OpenRefine for data wrangling)

We realized that while we have good documentation on how to set up and deploy the extension, the community has not published many use cases and tutorials. Martin shared the recording of the Data Umbrella webinar "Solving NLP Tasks using LLMs" (video, slides) as a good starting point for building use cases.

Accessing Function in Jupyter Notebook from OpenRefine

Thomas demonstrated how to access functions available in Jupyter Notebook through OpenRefine. This helps to work around the limitations of Jython.

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Thank you all for the interesting meeting and @Martin for organizing and writing up the minutes!

On the last point, credit is due to @Michael_Markert who posted about this approach on the forum last year.

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