I would like to share some suggestions for the EOSS-6 call for proposals and how we could use the grant to continue investing in day-to-day support for the community.
Firstly, we could improve the support for the trainer community. OpenRefine is currently missing out on important relationships with our trainer community. Trainers not only teach new users but also act as our ambassadors and provide the first level of support within their own community. On the other hand, they are relevant liaisons to escalate bugs and scope feature requests and inform the roadmap. In my recent interview, I found that trainers are shy to reach out to the core community. I think @Sandra work with the Wikimedia community (Open call: train-the-trainer program for OpenRefine-Wikimedia trainers) is a great example of how things can be improved.
Therefore, the grant would be used for the following purposes:
- Developing a community to maintain training curricula for bioscience users, which will be the focus of the EOSS-6 grant. This will be similar to what the Carpentries are doing with their OpenRefine lessons for Library Carpentries Lesson , Scocial Science and Ecology
- Offering a financial support for trainers to serve as liaisons between their local communities and OpenRefine.
- Improve the feedback loop process from trainers and community leaders.
- Support a project manager, which could evolve into a community manager role, would support the program administration.
Secondly, the grand would fund a technical position. The person would act as release manager and would help maintain the GitHub repository by triaging tickets, reviewing pull requests, and onboarding new technical contributors. That person could also help implement bug and feature request as reported by the community (including the trainer laison). Currently, I don't see the need to include support for specific new features as we are still in the process of releasing OpenRefine 4.x.
The grant duration is two years, so I propose that we begin on January 1st, 2025. This will ensure continuity from the previous grants, EOSS-5 and EOSS-Diversity, which both end on December 31st, 2024. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
I am looking forward to reading your thoughts and feedbacks.