Partnership opportunity with Superbloom via the OTF

After we decided not to apply to the Open Technology Fund last year last year, I continued to explore potential funding sources from them, as I initially mentioned in Funding Opportunities - Q2 2025.

With input from the Advisory Committee, we have decided to pursue a partnership with Superbloom under the OTF Secure Usability and Accessibility or User Experience & Discovery Lab programs.

In this grant, we are seeking actionable design deliverables from Superbloom so that the project can be easily transitioned into development. In our previous attempt to involve designers, I found that focusing on specific features was more effective than concentrating on general design patterns and frameworks.

In this case, Superbloom will submit the grant application directly to the OTF. If accepted, they will receive funding to work on OpenRefine, and no funds need to go through CS&S.. The draft grant application is available for review and comment.

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Good news: OTF approved the concept note, so now we have to submit a so-called "task order request," which is a more concrete proposal. :tada:

Superbloom has started drafting the project details here. Your feedback is crucial, especially regarding which projects would benefit most from Superbloom's experience. We have currently shortlisted the following projects, but we welcome any additional suggestions:

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I think design expertise would have the biggest impact on the enhanced support for nested data structures and a guided tutorial. I feel that both of these topics could benefit from dedicated research on what people would expect from the functionality, such as which topics to focus on in a tutorial or how people expect to work with nested data.

Meanwhile, I imagine that GREL could be mentioned in a tutorial and in-editor support can be improved by following recent trends in code editing environments (autocomplete, in-editor function documentation, etc).