Using the OpenRefine Twitter account for personal use

[Tom Morris]

I just saw this tweet:

    https://twitter.com/OpenRefine/status/509371957071327232

and was disappointed to see you using the OpenRefine project account to promote your own personal commercial venture.

I don't know how the other developers feel, but I feel strongly that this is an inappropriate use of the project's Twitter account.

Normally I like to see stuff like this ruled by common sense, but I guess we need to come up with some project guidelines on use of the Twitter account, blog, the OpenRefine brand, etc.

What do others think?

Tom

[Thad Guidry]

I think that:

Any commercial venture is prohibited from use of the OpenRefine community accounts, brand, blog, etc.

No matter that venture's creed, mission, or motto, such as RefinePro's:

Our mission is to support the growth of the OpenRefine community and advocate its functionality to new industries and audience. RefinePro is a supporter of open source philosophy and plans to contribute to the maintenance and development of the OpenRefine core.

+1 for inappropriate use.

All ears, Martin...

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-Thad

+ThadGuidry
Thad on LinkedIn

[Martin Magdinier]

Tom, Thad,

Thank you for sharing your concerns.

I have been maintaining OpenRefine twitter account for over a year now. My work revolved around two axes:

• answering and directing people looking for help with Refine to the right resources (wiki page, tutorial or the mailing list)
• sharing news related to the Refine community including
  
• major announcement,
  
• new extensions, plug in and reconciliation services,
• tutorial and training material written on any blog / personal or corporate website
  
• event and courses announcement (free or paid)

I think the tweet you refer to belong to the second category as a new concerning the community. Through the OpenRefine twitter account other commercial venture have been promoted (paid training, tutorial written by other start up or more established businesses ....). I see it as a way to engage and foster participation from any organization or person with OpenRefine. As a two way exchange between OpenRefine (exposure to our community against some kind of contribution).

I am conscious that I need to separate OpenRefine and RefinePro interest. Sometime this is walking an thin line and I welcome any feedbacks from the community. You can read more about the philosophy behind RefinePro on my blog. This is at very early stage and, again, feedback and comments are more than welcome to shape the next steps.

Thanks for breaking up this conversation. I agree that an official guideline regarding OpenRefine brand and communication channel is welcome to draw a clear line on what the community want and doesn't.

PS I also extended the conversation to the general OpenRefine mailing list as this topic is not limited to developers.

Martin

[Sergio Fernández]

My two cents:

* it shares related to the community

* it is a commercial product that (hopefully) will bring improvements
to the community

Therefore I do not see where is such big deal...

Sergio Fernández <ser...@wikier.org>

[Thad Guidry]

Here are the quick guidelines for separating personal business concerns from that of the non-profit OpenRefine Community. (non-legal BUT this are now the effective Community biding rules below, if you don't like them...speak up).

Quick Synonpsis about the big deal of use of OpenRefine accounts for personal use (responding to Sergio and any others that do not see where the problem lies):

There is no guarantee or binding legal contract that RefinePro or any other commercial entity would operate in the best interest of the OpenRefine Community.  But a guarantee is not even needed or necessary from anyone or any business, because the issue is about potential abuse or a diminished OpenRefine Community or even worse, some form of confusion for OpenRefine users.  We want to avoid confusion for our OpenRefine users, and that means clearly separating any contributors personal business interests from our non-profit OpenRefine Community interests.

Quick guidelines and acknowledgements and thank you's to the OpenRefine contributors: (especially Martin!):

RefinePro or any commcercial entity can certainly setup itheir own Twitter account (and any other accounts) for their own benefit, but RefinePro or any other entity is not the owner of any OpenRefine accounts and cannot use them for its own interest.

Designated OpenRefine Community contributors maintain OpenRefine's accounts in the best interest of OpenRefine and never any other entity or commercial product.  Specifically, Martin does NOT maintain the OpenRefine Twitter account, but instead Twitter maintains it for us.  What Martin does is help contribute to the community by answering questions, responding, and contributing lots of time and some code, ON THE COMMUNITY'S BEHALF.  And we graciously thank him for that and want him to continue if at all possible ! :-)

There is a clear separation between RefinePro and OpenRefine, even legally under current US laws, without any legal document being necessary for defining that separation.  And we want to keep this separation and distinction very clear to our OpenRefine users as well.

The OpenRefine Community welcomes advancement of its sourcecode, and acknowledges the generous offer of help from all of it's contributors, including Martin.

But shall continue to agree to separate our personal projects and personal businesses from the non-profit OpenRefine community and all of the resource that the OpenRefine community maintains as a rights / account holder.

Summary of RefinePro behavior and its interests regarding OpenRefine:

Thanks Martin for understanding, and the OpenRefine Community wishes RefinePro the best.  (and does hope that it contributes back in some fashion to OpenRefine).

Please setup RefinePro accounts and DO NOT use, post, blog, email, with OpenRefine accounts in the future, but instead use RefinePro's own accounts.

-- 

-Thad

+ThadGuidry
Thad on LinkedIn

[Martin Magdinier]

Thad,

Thanks for sharing this. I would just let you know that I won't have time to answer it until early next week as I am away this week end.
I am looking forward to read other member inputs / feedbacks.

Martin

[LeVan,Ralph]

+1

 

But, I think this is only half of the solution.  I’ve watch DSpace go through the same growing pains and had the chance to talk to some of the DSpace leadership recently at a symposium on OpenSource software.

 

It is clear that commercial distribution of OpenRefine needs to be encouraged.  If the commercial vendors are successful, then we all benefit from their participation.  This means that we need to do more than just erect a bamboo curtain between OpenRefine accounts commercial accounts.  We need to provide a mechanism for them to publicize their presence in the OpenRefine community.  For DSpace this means a page listing (I believe in a random order every time the page is viewed) the organizations stating a commercial interest.  We need to point at that page in our support documentation and we need to be willing to refer to commercial support whenever the question comes up.  We need to provide a mechanism to allow the commercial vendors to make announcements through our media.  We, as a community, get to decide when we think announcements turn into spam and throttle that, but I’ve not seen that to be a problem in DSpace and I doubt that it would be a problem here.

 

Martin made a first cut at introducing the role of vendors in the OpenRefine community.  Like most first cuts, we need to step back and refactor.

 

Ralph

 

Ralph LeVan

Sr. Research Scientist

OCLC Research

[LeVan,Ralph]

+1

 

But, I think this is only half of the solution.  I’ve watch DSpace go through the same growing pains and had the chance to talk to some of the DSpace leadership recently at a symposium on OpenSource software.

 

It is clear that commercial distribution of OpenRefine needs to be encouraged.  If the commercial vendors are successful, then we all benefit from their participation.  This means that we need to do more than just erect a bamboo curtain between OpenRefine accounts commercial accounts.  We need to provide a mechanism for them to publicize their presence in the OpenRefine community.  For DSpace this means a page listing (I believe in a random order every time the page is viewed) the organizations stating a commercial interest.  We need to point at that page in our support documentation and we need to be willing to refer to commercial support whenever the question comes up.  We need to provide a mechanism to allow the commercial vendors to make announcements through our media.  We, as a community, get to decide when we think announcements turn into spam and throttle that, but I’ve not seen that to be a problem in DSpace and I doubt that it would be a problem here.

 

Martin made a first cut at introducing the role of vendors in the OpenRefine community.  Like most first cuts, we need to step back and refactor.

 

Ralph

 

Ralph LeVan

Sr. Research Scientist

OCLC Research

 

From: openref...@googlegroups.com [mailto:openref...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Thad Guidry
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 11:35 AM
To: Sergio Fernández
Cc: openref...@googlegroups.com; openrefine
Subject: Re: Using the OpenRefine Twitter account for personal use

 

Here are the quick guidelines for separating personal business concerns from that of the non-profit OpenRefine Community. (non-legal BUT this are now the effective Community biding rules below, if you don't like them...speak up).

[Thad Guidry]

Ralph,

I disagree that OpenRefine should in any form or fashion try to "sponser" commercial endeavors, even if giving them a space somewhere to do so.  The closest that we come to that is on our wiki saying "This is a list of related software to OpenRefine:".

Instead, I think the sponsorship actually needs to be the other way around.  Commercial endeavors contributing back and giving space, hardware, resources, money, etc towards OpenRefine development that the benefit from.

OpenRefine can foster and improve, if folks (even commercial ones) dedicated time and resources towards the project.

[LeVan,Ralph]

If there is no support, then they’ll fork-and-run and we all lose.  Our community gets fragmented and we don’t get contribution from the vendors.

 

I think you’ve got the cart way ahead of the horse in terms of give-back.  I doubt that RefinePro is even providing Martin with a salary yet, much less being in a position to pay for OpenRefine hosting.  But, if we do what we can to help make them be successful, then I wouldn’t be surprised to find that generosity returned.  Helping them be successful includes all the things I listed before.

 

I’m sorry if you’re offended by commercial participation, but they are a critical part of the OpenSource ecosystem.

 

Ralph

[Thad Guidry]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 2:16 PM, LeVan,Ralph <le...@oclc.org> wrote:

If there is no support, then they’ll fork-and-run and we all lose.  Our community gets fragmented and we don’t get contribution from the vendors.

 

We provide FREE support through our mailing list and sometimes answering questions on StackOverflow.  Their is always a risk of fragmentation with open source software.  I personally am not worried, typically forking happens for very good and honest reasons, that have nothing to do with quality or support, but sometimes they happen for political reasons... (I must have control over the sub-features I want in master, and screw the rest of the world...IT'S NOW ALL MINE, because its open source....yeah, that happens and GitHub then profits on those backs quite nicely in-fact. :-)

 

I think you’ve got the cart way ahead of the horse in terms of give-back.  I doubt that RefinePro is even providing Martin with a salary yet, much less being in a position to pay for OpenRefine hosting.  But, if we do what we can to help make them be successful, then I wouldn’t be surprised to find that generosity returned.  Helping them be successful includes all the things I listed before.

I think you have what I value wrong, Ralph.  I value open source software, not commercial vendors.

I am not helping any commercial endeavor in the name of OpenRefine.  And will not.  I subscribe to open source software as much as possible.  I also hate software patents. :-)

 

 

I’m sorry if you’re offended by commercial participation, but they are a critical part of the OpenSource ecosystem.

Agreed that they can help foster and grow open source.  Google has done so, in alternate fashion.  They have also never asked for anything from the OpenRefine community, except for 1 small thing....inclusion of the Google redistribution clause to continue in our sourcecode.

[Martin Magdinier]

I do agree that we need guidelines regarding the usage of the community communication channel (mailing lists, blog, twitter ....). The retweet regarding RefinePro launch was not the first tweet regarding a business related OpenRefine, so a clear guideline is welcome.


At an higher level, I think we need a generic position from the community on how vendors can interact with OpenRefine. Since all companies are not the size of Google (with its large pool of resources), vendors might expect some kind of formal exchange when engaging with the community. The type of exchange can be something like:
- the vendor commit resources to help the community (developer time, documentation and marketing resources ...)
- the community offer some kind of recognition (listing on a page, usage of the project name ...) like it currently does with personal code contributors.

The things is today we have no process to reach a consensus on a sensitive issue like those. We actually have no clear guideline on how the community works, what are its expectations or even who can represent it. Last April, I drafted a governance model to clear those points along with a blog post to explain why we need it. So far I received little if no feedback. It is never too late to resume the conversation.

On a separate topic, I will publish a blog post on my personal blog to clear RefinePro vision and what we want to accomplish.

Martin