Following the 2012 survey which gather 99 answers, I wanted to have a fresh picture on who are OpenRefine users. The 2014 survey received 129 answers on the span of two weeks. The goal of this second survey was to understand who is OpenRefine audience and what are they relationship with the official community tools (mailing list and Github issue trackers.)

From its inception until October 2012 Refine development was driven mainly by corporations. Metaweb and Google have committed resources to support and grow Refine for more than two years until Google Refine 2.5 release. With the end of Google support 18 months ago, OpenRefine is working as an indepedant community, relying only on volunteer to maintain the code and support user and contributors.

In Fall 2012, I wrote an article on the history of OpenRefine and the need to build a framework for the community. At this time the discussion was focused more on the technical aspect to structure the community (ie moving the code base and documentation to Github) and less on defining a way to work together.

“How do I get started?” is the question we received most during our hands-on workshops on data cleaning and enhancing. OpenRefine is a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled user, but how do you become one?

Yesterday David Huynh announced that Google will soon stop its active support of Google Refine and count of community to get more involved to growth Refine.

Refine is already a mature data cleaning tool, this change in leadership will be a major challenge for the tool continuity. But first I'd like to clarify what I have read on twitter yesterday night. Google Refine has always been an open source tool and anyone can commit changes, develop an extension or update the wiki.

Through this post I'd like to give my insight on the reason of this decision and what will be the short terms consequences of it.