Earlier this year, inspired by ongoing conversations within the OpenRefine community, we decided to organize our first-ever hybrid Barcamp. This idea emerged from discussions about enhancing community engagement and collaboration. Our goal was to create a space where contributors could gather, share insights, and work together to improve OpenRefine. We decided to go with a barcamp format so attendees could set the agenda and discuss important topics for the community.

The Barcamp took place from June 16 to June 19, both online and in Berlin. There were 14 in-person participants and 15 remote attendees.

Here are the main takeaways and highlights from our event with a link to the summary of each session on our forum for you to continue the conversation.

Our first ever BarCamp is coming up in two weeks, on June 17th-19th, in Berlin and online. If you haven't yet, register now to participate, whether you want to attend onsite or remotely. This will give you access to the video conference room, let you propose and vote on sessions.

The event will start Monday afternoon:

• 14:00 CEST (12:00 UTC): Introductions round and opening of the event.
• 14:30 CEST (12:30 UTC): Collaborative review and scheduling of the proposed sessions (which you can still submit).
• 16:00 CEST (14:00 UTC): Break
• 16:30 CEST (14:30 UTC): Allocation of volunteering shifts (session facilitation, note-taking, Zoom caretaking)

The sessions themselves will then take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, following the schedule established on Monday. The schedule will be published on the BarCamp's website.

We are looking forward to kicking off this gathering with you!

The OpenRefine project participates in the 2024 Google Summer of Code program, which provides remote internships in software development on open-source projects. We are happy to announce that for this year's cohort, we will be joined by Zyad Taha, who has applied to work on improvements to clustering. He will be mentored by Antonin Delpeuch.

Zyad already contributed several pull requests in the last week. However, this is the opportunity to welcome him into the community formally! The Google Summer of Code internships will run from May 27 to August 26.

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.

OpenRefine 3.8.0 was released today and is the first stable release of our 3.8 series. It contains a range of improvements and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the release notes for 3.8-beta1.

Thanks go to our many contributors who have helped shape this release in a variety of ways. Please report any issues with this release on our forum or GitHub.

Registration to our meeting around OpenRefine has opened. The gathering will take place on June 17th-19th in Berlin, Germany and online. We hope to gather many interested OpenRefine community members, partners and stakeholders who want to help shape the project’s future. Please forward the news to anyone who could be interested in attending!

OpenRefine will be offering internships as part of the Google Summer of Code this year.

We will hold an in-person meeting around OpenRefine on June 17th-19th in Berlin, Germany. We hope to gather many interested OpenRefine community members, partners and stakeholders who want to help shape the project’s future. Remote attendance will be possible too.

Co-organizers for this event would be welcome. If you would like to help shape the BarCamp, please let us know on the forum.

More details will follow. For now, just save the date!

OpenRefine 3.7.9 was released today and it fixes a vulnerability with moderate severity (CVE-2024-23833). We encourage all users to update swiftly to the latest version. See the release notes for more details about the vulnerability.

We thank @l0n3rs for disclosing this vulnerability to us.

We are pleased to welcome Julie Faure-Lacroix and Esther Jackson to the OpenRefine Advisory Committee. Both Julie and Esther have demonstrated a strong commitment to OpenRefine, and we're looking forward to their contributions to our team.

For some time, a few team members have been considering organizing an in-person meeting around OpenRefine (for about 20 to 25 people). The goal of such a meeting would be to have contributors get to know each other better, share their views and coordinate together on a diverse range of topics, such as roadmap, governance, design, documentation and likely many others.

Those planning discussions have been held on the forum, which we acknowledge is only actively visited by parts of the broad OpenRefine community we want to reach out to with such a meeting.

If you are interested in shaping the future of OpenRefine and meet likeminded people, you are invited! Whether you are a translator, a trainer, a developer, a designer, an advocate or if you feel involved in the project in any other capacity, we want to see you at this event.

We are currently evaluating different dates and venue options. We aim to make remote participation possible and we should be able to offer travel support for many attendees. Please select the dates that would work best for you in this poll and let us know on the forum if none of the options work for you.