Making the case for sustainability of Open Refine

[Owen Stephens]

We are using Open Refine as part of a project and have been asked to outline the case that this is a sustainable approach.

We can make the usual arguments in terms of using OSS but I'd be interested if there is any information we could put forward that is specific to Refine. For example:

How widely used is Open Refine?

What industries are using Open Refine?

Is there any update on the Governance Model that Martin posted on the Open Refine site in April (http://openrefine.org/2014/04/27/a_governance_model_for_OpenRefine.html)

Thanks very much

Owen

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 12:04 PM, Owen Stephens <ow...@ostephens.com> wrote:

We are using Open Refine as part of a project and have been asked to outline the case that this is a sustainable approach.

We can make the usual arguments in terms of using OSS but I'd be interested if there is any information we could put forward that is specific to Refine. For example:

How widely used is Open Refine?

[OpenRefine, please.  It helps keep our branding consistent.]

Google Refine v2.5 has been downloaded over 100,000 times https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/downloads/list?can=1&q=&colspec=Filename+Summary+Uploaded+ReleaseDate+Size+DownloadCount

Unfortunately, Github doesn't offer download counts, so it's difficult to track how usage has changed since our move to Github.  And, of course, downloads and usage are only loosely correlated.

 

What industries are using Open Refine?

Probably the oldest and biggest community is the data driven journalism community.  They're pretty much self-sustaining in that they run their own seminars, teach each other how to use the tool, etc.  It's popular with curators of metadata from libraries to museums to research labs.  It's used by SEO folks normalizing keywords in logs. It's used by patent attorneys and insect scientists and a whole host of other folks.

I posted some additional info a couple of weeks ago about integrations, uses, etc.  There are also a bunch of links on the wiki.

It's tempting to introduce opt-in usage reporting to try and get a better handle on usage, workloads, dataset characteristics, etc, but I don't know how that would go over. 

 

Is there any update on the Governance Model that Martin posted on the Open Refine site in April (http://openrefine.org/2014/04/27/a_governance_model_for_OpenRefine.html)

The informal meritocratic governance model established years ago by David Huynh has served us pretty well to date.  We'd definitely like to increase the number of contributors the project, but I, for one, don't think that an insufficient number of committees or process documents are the main things holding us back.  That blog post reflects Martin's personal opinion, not the opinion of the committers.

If folks have ideas on how to increase the number of contributors, we'd love to hear them.

Tom

[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Tom - that gives me some good evidence about widespread community of use - very useful

[Tim Chan]

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[Martin Magdinier]

Quick and dirty overview of the download through github. Please note that 2.5 have been downloaded more than 125 600 times through Github.

name download_count

openrefine-linux-2.6-beta.1.tar.gz  744

openrefine-mac-2.6-beta.1.dmg 1 910

openrefine-win-2.6-beta.1.zip 2 508

openrefine-linux-2.6-alpha.2.tar.gz 37

openrefine-mac-2.6-alpha.2.dmg 41

openrefine-win-2.6-alpha.2.zip 148

google-refine-2.5-mac-r2407.dmg  10 323

google-refine-2.5-linux-r2407.tar.gz 4 858

google-refine-2.5-win-r2407.zip 110 425

google-refine-2.1-mac-r2136.dmg   36

google-refine-2.1-linux-r2136.tar.gz 11

google-refine-2.1-win-r2136.zip 50

google-refine-2.0-mac-r1836.dmg 15

google-refine-2.0-linux-r1836.tar.gz  5

google-refine-2.0-win-r1836.zip 20

Anyone can retrieve those number with the following curl command: 

curl -i  https://api.github.com/repos/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/releases -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.manifold-preview+json"

As Tom mention the blog post was my way to share my view and collect feedback from the community (and so far I received very little). The blog is open to anyone who want to share idea and vision for OpenRefine. You can submit your own article via pull request here

Martin

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