We are excited to announce that Zoe Cooper has joined the OpenRefine team as lead designer. Following our job posting in late August, Zoe stood out as the perfect person for the role.

Zoe's experience in journalism and publishing, as well as her early career fellowships within GLAM institutions (the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and Gagosian Gallery in New York), have given her a deep understanding of the diverse needs of our user base. Zoe’s hybrid career as both designer and writer - her work has been published by Vox, Al Jazeera, Frieze, TASCHEN, AnOther, Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design, Flash Art, and more - gives her unique insight into the artistic, scholarly, and scientific communities we serve. As the current part-time design lead for the Zetkin Foundation, a Sweden-based platform for organizing activism, Zoe brings a unique perspective to the OpenRefine team.

As OpenRefine's lead designer, she will initially focus on improving the platform's Operation History as part of a project funded by the EOSS-5 grant. She will also continue to develop OpenRefine's design practice, following the work initiated by Lozana Rossenova and Lydia Amadi Chinyere through last summer's Outreachy internship.

As we embark on this exciting journey with Zoe, we invite the OpenRefine community to welcome our newest team member warmly. We are thrilled to have her on board and look forward to the exciting things she will bring to the OpenRefine team. Stay tuned for updates on our progress, and thank you for your continued support!

Follow her updates here:

• Twitter: @zoe__cooper
• Instagram: _zoecooper

OpenRefine 3.7.5 was released today and it fixes vulnerabilities with moderate severity (CVE-2023-41886 and CVE-2023-41887). We encourage all users to update swiftly to the latest version. See the release notes for more details about the vulnerability.

We thank @nbxiglk0 for responsibly disclosing this vulnerability to us.

OpenRefine, a powerful data-wrangling tool used by diverse communities, seeks a lead designer to enhance OpenRefine's user experience and functionality. This job posting has been archived and was filled in December 2023 with the hiring of Zop Copper.

NFDI4Culture has awarded OpenRefine a EUR 10,000 grant to enhance its reconciliation feature. This grant is a continuation of the progress made in 2022 with Wikibase and Wikimedia Commons integration, the work of our Outreachy intern Ayushi over the past three months, as well as the improvements to the reconciliation protocol made by the W3C Entity Reconciliation Community Group.

Since 2022, with support from a Wikimedia grant, it is possible to use OpenRefine to batch edit and upload files on Wikimedia Commons, with a focus on adding multilingual, linked, structured data to the files on Commons using the Commons Extension for OpenRefine.

This new Wikimedia Commons functionality in OpenRefine is especially useful for cultural institutions who want to upload files to Commons with linked, structured data. OpenRefine offers powerful import functionalities from various data formats (CSV, TSV, Excel sheets, XML…) and APIs (for those cultural institutions which use these). It also allows revisiting existing Wikimedia Commons files, improving their metadata, and adding multilingual structured data to them. Wikimedians in general can also use OpenRefine to batch upload their own or externally-hosted files to Wikimedia Commons.

For 2023-24, as part of its support for Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation is funding OpenRefine for bug fixes to its Commons features, for a train-the-trainer program, documentation, and a WikiLearn course. The Wikimedia-OpenRefine training and sustainability grant is for a duration of 12 months, it started on July, 1st 2023 and is led by Sandra Fauconnier with a total budget of USD 50,000.

Updates regarding the grant progress will be posted on the project’s info page on Wikimedia Commons.

OpenRefine 3.7.4 was released today and it fixes a vulnerability with moderate severity (CVE-2023-37476). We encourage all users to update swiftly to the latest version. See the release notes for more details about the vulnerability.

We thank Stefan Schiller of SonarSource for disclosing this vulnerability to us.

OpenRefine is seeking a new member for its Advisory Committee (unpaid position).

OpenRefine's advisory committee is delighted to officially announce Martin Magdinier (github, forum) as the new Project Manager of OpenRefine.

The OpenRefine project participates in the Outreachy program, which provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living. We are happy to announce that for the May 2023 cohort, we will be hosting two more interns, after participating to previous rounds in 2020 and 2022.

Lydia Amadi Chinyere will be joining us to work on improving design workflows in the project and documenting the design patterns currently followed in the OpenRefine application. She will be mentored by Lozana Rossenova.

Ayushi Rai will help us out with various improvements to our reconciliation features. She will be mentored by Antonin Delpeuch.

We thank all the applicants for their work during the contribution period and encourage them to continue working on free and open source software. The number of interns we can accept is limited by our mentoring capacity. We are also grateful to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for funding then OpenRefine team's participation in Outreachy via a Diversity and Inclusion grant, part of the Essential Open Source Software for Science program.

OpenRefine is looking for a part time project manager. This paid role is intended to help facilitate community processes in the project, improve our capacity to liaise with partners and our governance structures.

The responsibilities of this project manager will include:

• Facilitating regular meetings within the OpenRefine community and with external partners;
• Run outreach activities such as our biyearly user survey or by representing the project in events;
• Maintain the project's communication channels (such as moderating the forum)
• Help organize in-person events for the OpenRefine community
• Coordinate our participation in internship programmes such as Outreachy or Google Summer of Code;
• Help with grant applications and reporting
• Liaise with Code for Science and Society, our fiscal sponsor

The scope of the role is anticipated to evolve, to adapt to the manager's interests and the project's needs.

Requirements:

• Good communication skills and fluency in English, both written and spoken
• Self-motivated and organized
• Able to work fully remotely
• Familiarity with OpenRefine or a related open source project

Nice to have:

• Experience with working in a volunteer organization
• Ability to travel to events a couple of times a year

This role will be compensated depending on the applicant's experience, from $40 to $70 per hour. We anticipate a time commitment from 10h to 30h per week depending on the applicant's availability. The position can be filled as soon as possible, with a trial period of 3 months. Code for Science and Society is able to hire collaborators in most jurisdictions not targeted by US sanctions, via a local employer of record. The project manager will report to the advisory committee, which currently consists of Martin Magdinier, Antonin Delpeuch and Jan Ainali.

Update: we have already received more applications than we can review and will not be looking for further applicants. To respond to this opportunity, send your application (CV and short motivation statement) to hiring@openrefine.org. We will start to review applications on March 25th and we aim to respond to all candidates.

OpenRefine is fiscally sponsored by Code for Science and Society (CS&S). CS&S is an equal opportunity employer committed to hiring a diverse workforce at all levels of the organization thereby creating a culture that allows us to better serve our clientele, our employees and our communities. We value and encourage the contributions of our colleagues and strive to create an environment where everyone can reach their full potential and drive outstanding results. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, age, sex, religion, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, gender identity or expression, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal law. This policy applies with regard to all aspects of one's employment, including hiring, transfer, promotion, compensation, eligibility for benefits, and termination.