In December 2024, the Advisory Committee brainstormed how we can most effectively use our existing funding in 2025. As @Martin has shared on this forum, funding applications in 2024 were not successful.
Though we are optimistic about identifying and receiving funding in 2025 (including support from CS&S in identifying funders and assisting with application editing), as we enter 2025 we do not have a long runaway to pay project staff.
One idea that the Advisory Committee has is to reallocate funding that might be used for a 2025 Barcamp to instead pay the salary of a Project Manager for several months. The total funds are $17,500.00.
The 2024 Barcamp - the first in-person convening of its kind of OpenRefine community members since the project's inception - was an important and successful event. We (Advisory Committee) will make every effort to hold another similar events in the future.
However, as of today, we believe these funds will better serve the community by supporting a Project Manager in the continuous work needed to help the project run. The continued support for this ongoing work is more crucial at this stage than funding a single event, the largest expense for which is likely to be individual attendee airfare.
We'd like to ask for your - the community's - feedback on the reallocation of the 2025 Barcamp funding. @thadguidry, I know you have already shared your thoughts to some extent, and I'd like to ask to continue that conversation here.
Thanks for your contributions to this conversation.
BARCAMP
I'd say definitely try to have the Barcamp, but only virtual?
PROJECT MANAGER
I think it is fair to pay someone to work on the following:
Continue the Governance refactoring with the community and publish.
Help with hiring, onboarding, conversing with the new developer position.
Update the website (including critical Docusaurus updates) and review PR's and merge, extend, or close them with reasoning.
Expand our social networking outreach into other data wrangling domains such as Science, Medicine, etc.
ALTERNATIVES
Pay for frontend expertise to add an intro guide into OpenRefine to help trainers and essentially replace our 3 old Google videos with an in-app tutorial experience.
Thanks, @thadguidry . Having a virtual Barcamp is a good compromise for this year, when funding is tighter. The PM duties you outline here seem within the scope of what we have agreed that @Martin will work on this year, but the Advisory Committee (currently myself, @Ainali and @jfaurel) should confirm this and/or communciate back to the community the specific scope of the PM's work in this upcoming year.
Hello, all. Thanks again to @thadguidry for your feedback. The Advisory Committee would like to ask for other community feedback by Thursday January 30th to allow for us to make a decision about the reallocation of this budget at that time.
For clarity, I am currently at 10 hours/week, and the extra budget will open another 10 hours weekly.
The following task is already in scope with my contract for 2025:
Continue the Governance refactoring with the community and publish.
Help with hiring, onboarding, and conversing with the new developer position.
Yes, I agree that organizing a virtual edition of the BarCamp is a good idea. I can help with the organization and expect to dedicate around 10 hours per week in the two months preceding the event. This can include some outreach to existing and new communities.
Then where is the priority:
More time fundraising to support the developer role past Oct 2025?
Investment in another other aspect of the project as Thad mentioned?
If we lose a maintainer, even a very part-time maintainer (paid or not), then OpenRefine will likely not stay relevant past 10 more years. As I spoke to Antonin recently, there is a shift of priorities in that of data becoming much less messy since data generation is much more structured than 20 years ago, and instead there are increasing needs for data which is already quite clean and structured to be aligned, reconciled, pivoted, transformed, etc. Those needs are current and increasing rapidly in order to feed quality data into LLM, AI, MCP(Model Context Protocol clients/servers), and the like. I envision that happening more and more over the next 10 years, and OpenRefine could play a major part in that need. Batching and repeatable workflow support (reproducibility), will allow teams to work together by partitioning the work, instead of trying to work within a single OpenRefine instance, OpenRefine itself could help with partitioning the work for individual users to collaborate via solo efforts of data subsets.
At any rate, there are lots of fundamental changes that need to begin to occur to help in those aspects. Major architectural changes need to happen, and the reproducibility project is just a tiny step forward into some of what is needed, but there's much much more.
Given the above, I think it's important to prioritize fundraising a maintainer if there are no permanent volunteer maintainers, since we need great leadership to steer the ship into the next 10 years of OpenRefine's major changes needed. That's my 2 cents on our 10 year roadmap.
Efforts such as a Barcamp supports new and existing contributors who are motivated themself to contribute to and sustain OpenRefine. We need to grow and support these organic contributors more than anything especially given the low number of committed contributors and the high number of "drive-by" contributors.
Grants and similar funding do however, only artificially sustain OpenRefine especially if those hired are not existing contributors.