Rolf Kleef - making internet work for civil society

An update on Wordpress as my Social Hub

Rolf Kleef — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An update on Wordpress as my Social Hub

How do you let people interact with a static website? At FOSDEM last month, Matthias Pfefferie discussed the changes to the social layer on the web. The new Social Web builds on earlier tools like RSS and PingBacks, with new tools like ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

The whole day at the Social Web devroom made it clear there is a lot to do still. And perhaps combining the reach of Wordpress with the little experience I have managing Wordpress sites (and a bit more in programming PHP) is my best bet to add a social layer to my now static main website.

So thanks to the wonderful world of LLM-assisted programming ("AI for software development"), I managed to develop a first version of a Wordpress plugin to enable social interactions on a static site.

Benevolent Dictator For Life?

Rolf Kleef — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Benevolent Dictator For Life?

The term benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is popular in the open source world[^1], mainly as a way to acknowledge the importance of the person leading a particular project into early success and giving that person absolute rule.

But there are no benevolent dictators. Recent developments in the Wordpress world brought me back to my TYPO3 days of long ago.

Plinius, a knowledge worker's assistant

Rolf Kleef — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Plinius, a knowledge worker's assistant

I worked on a project to process scientific articles to help researchers. To quote myself:

The main goal of the...

Using AI in Obsidian

Rolf Kleef — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using Perplexity for a while now. It became my AI tool of choice because it provides good links to sources.

However, it was difficult to combine it with working on my notes in Obsidian. I had to bring my notes to the AI, and then bring the answers back to my notes.

But no more!

FOSDEM 2025, 2026

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM 2025, 2026

{loading=lazy} A few more weeks to the next FOSDEM conference in Brussels, an annual gathering of thousands of open source developers and users. Time to finally finish some of my notes from last year, and look ahead.

My focus is on socio-technical discussions: how do technologies and society interact with respect to access, representation, and autonomy? Two perspectives:

On an individual and community level: how can we reclaim "social media" to be the public space we intended it to be?
On a societal and global level: how can we reclaim "open source" as a technical driver for a better society?

Those perspectives touch on a tension between "free" and "open".

Digital gardening

Rolf Kleef — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Digital gardening

If I had to pick a dominant thread throughout my life, it would be: exploring new ways to organise my notes and knowledge. As a teenager, I typed out paper index cards, to track lemmas in my parents' encyclopedia. Since then, I tried different tools and systems (like Zettelkasten).

Today, I'm starting yet another chapter, and will call it digital gardening: the trend to make more of my notes available on my public website. In my case: I combine Obsidian to take notes, with Material for MkDocs to publish them.

- ![obsidian-logo-gradient.svg](obsidian-logo-gradient.svg){loading=lazy} - ![material-for-mkdocs-logo.svg](material-for-mkdocs-logo.svg){loading=lazy}

Will DeepSeek democratise AI?

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Will DeepSeek democratise AI?

Will DeepSeek be a game changer like ChatGPT was? The benefits and the public release of their models could level the playing field, as Mike Pound of the University of Nottingham argues in this Computerphile video. But will it be able to challenge the current quasi-monopoly, and democratise AI? And how accurate are the DeepSeek claims anyway?

My logo

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My logo

Over the years, I used a portrait photo and a landscape shot from a kayak trip as my main “brand images”. But, a while ago, I started looking at a “real logo”. Something a little abstract, but (literally?) grounded, related to path-finding, or the idea of long-term growth. And linked to the idea that IT is more like gardening (on-going), than building something (one-off).

AI for participatory urban planning

Rolf Kleef — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

AI for participatory urban planning

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On Thursday, the [Rebooting democracy in the age of AI lecture...

Jon Stewart and Lina Khan on AI

Rolf Kleef — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Stewart and Lina Khan on AI

{loading=lazy} :material-youtube:{ .youtube } Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI (The Daily Show 2024-04-02)

In The Daily Show, Jon Stewart debunks the false promises of “AI for Good”, and interviews chair of the FTC Lina Khan on oversight of AI companies and algorithms.

Obsidian as my new knowledge hub

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Obsidian as my new knowledge hub

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It has happened. After more than a decade of taking notes with Zim, I have switched to Obsidian.

ChatGPT as your new assistant

Rolf Kleef — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

ChatGPT as your new assistant

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ChatGPT is a hot topic. Tom Scott compared it to a “Napster moment”, when suddenly everyone started sharing music and videos, Jonathan Stark called it the iPhone effect, when everyone started using a mobile device everywhere, and Bart Lacroix compared it to the first time using Google or Spotify: “I opened [ChatGPT] in my browser as a tab and never closed it since.”

Some practical examples of using ChatGPT as a tool to run an organisation:

A Friday Night with OpenAI about IATI

Rolf Kleef — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A Friday Night with OpenAI about IATI

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I finally had a chance to interact with the OpenAI chat bot. I’ll happily use it as my co-worker for general consultancy work: it seems to do an excellent job in summarising the main narrative! 🙂

Inspired by Mike Gifford, I asked a couple of my own questions about the IATI Standard.

Adding my site to the Fediverse

Rolf Kleef — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Adding my site to the Fediverse

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Thanks to the renewed interest in actual social media, rather than an algorithm-driven advertisement space, I find myself having interesting online conversations again.

I really wanted to use my own website and domain for further engagement.

But… experience with earlier attempts at federating networks made me cautious. Setting up and maintaining my own Jabber/XMPP and Diaspora servers was a lot of effort for little result. An excursion into the current field of microformats and protocols again suggested a lot to choose from, with very little guidance.

So after reading about Ton Zijlstra’s vision on “an operating system for the Open Social Web” (presented at the Dutch WordCamp 2022), we had a good conversation about experiences and the state of things (thanks Ton!).

Discussing “wicked problems” online, in 2021

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Discussing “wicked problems” online, in 2021

Nearly 20 years ago, Aldo de Moor and I presented our Social Context Model (supporting online collaboration processes for wicked problems in society) at the “Sustainability in the Information Society” symposium[^1].

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FOSDEM 2021

Rolf Kleef — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM 2021

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Like many years before, I will attend FOSDEM, the biggest open source convention in the neighbourhood: up to around 8000 attendees at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a good reason to take the train down south for a weekend.

Obviously, this year it will be (more than ever before) an online event. So from the comfort of my home, I’ve assembled a list of sessions I hope to attend:

Can IATI benefit from XBRL’s experiences?

Rolf Kleef — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Can IATI benefit from XBRL’s experiences?

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{loading=lazy} Over the last weeks, I started exploring XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Its purpose is “ to improve the accountability and transparency of business performance globally, by providing the open data exchange standard for business reporting.”

{loading=lazy} There are clear parallels with IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the open data exchange standard for development and aid activities I have been working on.

In essence, the data collectors benefit more than the data publishers in both cases: what can we learn?

Around the web, again: interesting events

Rolf Kleef — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Around the web, again: interesting events

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Time to get back into the habit of capturing things on my website… First up: my calendar watch list and some events.

I’ve been keeping an “Open Dev” calendar with events related to open development and online civic space (data, standards, ethics, digital rights, and so on). I’m broadening the scope a bit to include more technical events as well. It’s “Rolf’s events watch list” now.

XML, the hidden technology behind IATI and a lot more

Rolf Kleef — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

XML, the hidden technology behind IATI and a lot more

Last week I attended the XML Prague conference: 3 days of workshops and presentations about XML technology and tools that are widely used, but mostly invisible.

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The new IATI Validator is open for public testing

Data4Development — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The new IATI Validator is open for public testing

Cross posting from our Data4Development news:

With the start of public testing of the new IATI Validator, we like to briefly look back at how we got here, and our vision for the future.

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