OpenRefine's presence at INDIAFOSS

Lately, I and Ranjith Siji (an experienced Wikimedian) had the opportunity of conducting a 2 hour workshop about OpenRefine at the fourth edition of INDIAFOSS which was held in Bengaluru, India on 8th September 2024. INDIAFOSS is one of the largest annual Free and Open Source Software conferences by the FOSS United community in India which attracts FOSS enthusiasts from all over the country.

The room was packed with people from different domains like entrepreneurs, corporate working professionals (data analysts and scientists) and students who were looking for a data cleaning tool which saves tonnes of their time and energy.

We started with a small introduction of ourselves and the attendees.After helping people to install OpenRefine in their systems, we even gave them a test data set (about Bollywood movies) so that they can learn about the tool by doing operations on that dataset, side by side with us.

After briefly introducing OpenRefine, I quickly jumped to showcasing it's various capabilities like reconciliation, clustering, infinite undo-redo, other column operations like faceting, joining, splitting and the most sought after WikiBase extension on the dataset.We tried to keep the event interactive to ensure that people are following through and asking questions.We also made an effort to monitor their progress by taking rounds alternately.

While I mainly focused on explaining the reconciliation process theoretically and practically, Ranjith directed his energy towards showing them how can they upload data directly to Wikidata using OpenRefine and some GREL Operations on the columns.

We ended the workshop with an introduction to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs, encouraging people to join the forum and ask their doubts here as we are an active community and explaining path to follow if someone wishes to contribute to OpenRefine in Development and Design roles.

At last, we opened for informal chats and networking, outside the room while distributing OpenRefine and Wikimedia stickers among the attendees.

Here are the pictures from the event-Category:Openrefine Workshop at IndiaFoss 4.0 - Wikimedia Commons.

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Wonderful news @Ayushi_Rai !
Any feature feedback or issues coming from attendees? GitHub issues, linked forum Support and Helpdesk discussions?

@thadguidry Yes, on of the attendees inquired how can he make his own reconciliation service explaining that he spent hours doing the work manually, as I told him about how he could make one. I did not have much feedback because most of the attendees were new to the tool.

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