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.