We would like to set up a public instance of OpenRefine. It would be useful for users who may not have the expertise or time to run OpenRefine locally, or for groups who want to use OpenRefine collaboratively.
We must be clear about the restrictions of this instance: OpenRefine has no access control mechanism as far as I’m aware, so this would be completely open to vandalism. We **must** advise users to regularly back up their projects; we **should** also set up automatic backups (similar to [this](https://github.com/lucaswerkmeister/propa-tut-ws1617/commit/f1c82c44388ff5ba84b3f88d0b3a47764a224d84)), but since I don’t expect we’ll be able to provide an automatic restore mechanism, that should be a last resort, requiring manual assistance from the instance administrators.
(For a minimal degree of vandalism protection, perhaps we could at least disable the project listing, so that you need to know the link to a project before you can vandalize it.)
Due to the memory requirements of OpenRefine, as well as the desire to set up automatic btrfs snapshots (see “automatic backups” link above), I think this should be done as a Cloud VPS project, not a Toolforge tool. (A formal [project request](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2875/) will be filed as a subtask later.)
Who is “we”?
* @Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE
* @Pintoch
* anyone else?