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Rolf Kleef

  • in News
  • 2 min read

Starting 2008

The new year is here, and the holidays are nearly over again. I managed to find some time to finally do some real upgrade work on my website, so it all feels like my own website again. Mainly completing the move from Typo3 to Drupal, and looking at some more content to add in the coming weeks: plugging in a few more external sources of content, and making some materials available as "books".

Over the holidays, I looked at some old notes, flipping through my notebook. It was surprising to read some thoughts of "last century" (around 1999), on online discussions and online collaboration, and realise that several ideas and hopes of then are still waiting to be implemented. Somehow it feels 2008 could be the year in which a lot of that might happen: a year of convergence. Some technology notes to look back on at the end of 2008 perhaps.

  • My move from Typo3 to Drupal was partly motivated by a desire to reduce the number of technologies to deal with. Although Typo3 really is a solid product, setting things up with TypoScript remained cumbersome. I’m more comfortable fiddling with PHP to make my site work, and it fits in with version control and having separate development and production environments.
  • With Nabuur wanting to redevelop their site in Drupal, with Acquia having $7 million to build a commercial foundation under Drupal, and most of my North-American friends as strong believers in Drupal, all "forces" seem to be going in the same direction.
  • The Zend Framework is out, and the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, so developing PHP code has become a lot more powerful, with for instance proper debugging and profiling. Very useful in developing our WebEnq software further: we’re running into the first performance bottlenecks.
  • Eclipse also has Mylyn and Tasktop as powerful task-managment tools. They nicely connect to our Mantis bug tracker, and to Google calendar as shared calendar tool, forming a good foundation to improve our project management practice at Nivocer.
  • After a year of mainly setting up our business, it looks like we’re able to accellerate now, and hopefully hire our first programmer in the first half of the year, to speed up development work on our survey software, as well as it work on making it more available again as open source tool.

It feels as if a lot of experiences from the last few years come together now, and all help to focus and advance our work in "online collaboration" for a few projects all aimed at international development.

  • in News
  • 3 min read

Private initiatives for international development should organise

Lau Schulpen of CIDIN at the Radboud University in Nijmegen researched the effectiveness of Dutch “private initiatives” working in international development. Last week, his first findings were published, and created a little storm in the Dutch development sector (see e.g. the Dutch Trouw newspaper, copied by most other papers). I’m just returning from a presentation of his results, followed by a debate with Henny Helmich of NCDO, and Robert Wiggers of Wilde Ganzen: two organisations who fund a lot actvities of private initiatives. My take-away: private initiatives need a branch organisation, a kind of union.

Schulpen’s findings

schulpen.png

Schulpen did a qualitative research, starting with an address list of 257 private initiatives, narrowing it down to interviews with 35 of them, and visiting 28 field projects in Ghana and Malawi. Of those, he qualified 24 as “brick & mortar” projects (like building, handing out materials, paying for certain things), and 4 as “complex” (like micro credits, educational programmes). Schulpen concluded that many projects do not deliver sustainable results, due to a couple of main reasons:

  1. There often is (too) little attention for capacity building, often taking one of these forms:
    • Working with local individuals rather than organisations, sometimes even harmful
    • Having a mirror organisation of family or friends, with not enough self-reflection or patronising local capacity
    • Working with a whole village or community, resulting in unclear responsibilities and relations
    • Working with volunteers and no budget, and not investing money
  2. Many work in splendid isolation, not benefiting from learning opportunities
  3. Almost no monitoring & evaluation, and no full accountability of activities and spending.

The debate

The panellists mainly concluded that the donor organisations who fund private initiatives should align their policies more, have stricter requirements before funding, work together on that, and support more collaboration and learning events for their grantees. When finally some of the people of private initiatives in the audience got a chance to say something too, their reactions were somewhat to be predicted:

  • Don’t talk about us, talk with us.
  • Stop talking as if we are not professionals.
  • Acknowledge our strengths and work with us.

My takeaways

The funders ask you to comply with requirements before you get training and support as part of a grant. The definition of “private initiative” seemed to narrow down to those who apply for funding with them. Take away the money, and the service of the funder looks bleak. Its value mainly defined by the grant. The private initiatives would benefit from being organised in a way where their interests are leading:

  • Connect with each other, and learn from each other based on their needs
  • Offer their skills and expertise to the big NGOs, and get proper support when needed

This was exactly the kind of input I was hoping for: tomorrow I’m meeting again with people from many COS centres. They actually work with a lot of these private initiatives to support them in their work. We’ll discuss next steps for the Dutch World Atlas, a platform helping you find such an initiative near you to join (well, if you’re in The Netherlands…), and this fits nicely in distilling a service offer for that platform.

First look at Tasktop

Today I took a first look at Tasktop (claiming it "takes the effort out of being organized"). It didn’t quite take the effort out of being installed, but I’ve kind of grown used to that with Eclipse, and it is still in beta. Tasktop is taking Mylyn, the "task-focused interface" to a whole new level. First geeky impressions from an Eclipse user.

Mylyn starts…

  • Creating and scheduling tasks: define the things to do, and schedule them for a particular day. Then work through the list.
  • Provide "context": activate a task, and Mylyn keeps track of which files you open and edit. You can then "focus" the interface, showing only those files, and store the context with the task. Next time you activate the task, it will only show those files. (I still have to get the hang of it, though)
  • Integrate with several issue trackers (Bugzilla, Trac, and also Mantis). So I have the issues in our tracker that are assigned to me available as tasks in Mylyn.

Tasktop continues…

The thing I like the most so far is the integration with Google Calendar, since I already use that to share information with my colleague.

  • See items from selected Google calendars in a week overview, and post the tasks I schedule to a calendar of choice. Makes it easy to share more detailed workplans, and to reschedule from either Google Calendar or Eclipse with Mylyn and Tasktop.
  • Have a week overview with all the tasks from various calendars.
  • Easily navigate to either a browser window for a calendar appointment, or the issue ticket in a tracker. Tasktop nicely stores a link to the issue tracker in the Google Calendar appointment.

Tasktop also can link to your Outlook tasks and emails. I can only hope someone will make that work for my Palm desktop too… I’m still not ready to start using Outlook.
Ever since I read the first bits about Mylyn (called Mylar in the old days) I have been eager to see each next step. Eclipse makes it easy to connect to different version control repositories, work in different languages, and on different servers. Mylyn makes it easy to connect with various issue trackers to work as task repositories, and now Tasktop starts adding more scheduling options too. Having a single, uniform, and consistent interface to work on a variety of projects and backbones is getting closer.

  • in Tools
  • 1 min read

How does Google see your site? Their Webmaster Tools will tell you.

I just discovered Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a nice addition to Google Analytics: add your site (or sites), and Google will give you insight in how it sees your pages:

  • See when Googlebot last indexed your home page, and how many pages per day it crawls.
  • Analyse your robots.txt, add a sitemap to help Google index your content.
  • Find out in what queries pages from your site were returned (and in what position), and which links people clicked on.
  • Check out how the PageRank of your pages is performing.
  • Learn about all the trouble Googlebot had with your content: HTTP errors, links not found, URLs timing out or unreachable, restrictions by your robot.txt.

An interesting toolbox for webmasters, to help you optimise your site, and get an idea of how you’re performing.

  • in News
  • 2 min read

FLOSSmanuals is go

Last Friday, Adam Hyde pressed the big green “go” button for flossmanuals.net: a place to read, write, and remix free manuals for free software. The Netherlands Media Art Institute provided the place and time as part of the opening of the Video Vortex exhibition (they call it their response to Web 2.0). Part of the exhibition is a workshop space for projects, available for a week, and flossmanuals.net is the first one there. Adam also announced a good Board of Advisors that’s just established, and a grant from the Digital Pioneers fund.

What’s the link between art, free software and free manuals? Many art schools still teach new media based on proprietary software. But as an autonomous artist, you’re basically forced to hand in your tools upon graduation: the educational licenses on your software expire, and you usually don’t have the money to buy an official license.
So you either continue to work with “illegal software” (kein software ist illegal?) or you have to rebuild your studio with open source and free software, and learn to work with the new tools.

Programmers are working on the software, but it’s often hard to make it work. On the other hand, many artists make (part of) their living by teaching, and so the ones involved in the software development are already used to explaining things to newbies. And they’re keen to introduce these tools into the art schools they teach at, so that you can graduate there with a toolbox you can continue working with.

flossmanuals.net is offering a place to jointly write the manuals. And to remix that content in whatever way suits your needs: pick and choose the chapters you need. And, for instance, integrate it in your own website through AJAX: always up to date.

It will be interesting to see if the remixed manuals become available on the site too. And to place the remixed manuals next to toolboxes on Social Source Commons: just download your “Toolbox in a Box” including manuals. Stephany Hankey of Tactical Tech and their NGO-in-a-Box is on the Board of Advisors, and they’re experimenting with it in the Citizen Journalism Toolkit.

I also learned that the Netherlands Media Art Institute is walking the talk, and has moved to open source IT themselves (you can read the Dutch description at Toltech’s website). Nice!

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Your neighbor in Amsterdam

I feel privileged to enjoy another NetSquared rollercoaster ride of fun for good! I'm joining Siegfried Woldhek of NABUUR, and together with our champions and cheerleaders Kristine Mucher and Michael Brown, we're looking forward to see you join the global neighbor network: a little bit of your time and talents can help change the lifes of many people!

And since the network is the message in this day and age… I'll be in San Francisco for a few more days (until the weekend), and to cite another source of inspiration, I'd love to meet friends I know and friends I haven't met yet. Saturday night is the designated party time… get in touch, 'cause I'm not sure yet where 🙂 (hey, you could get a free stay in the kewlest part of Amsterdam)

original post

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Facilitate or help?

I’ve tried to find projects that truely put the “local agenda” of the end user at the heart of their work. “Facilitator projects” that are not becoming a stakeholder, but a means to a (local) end. Giving people tools to improve their own situation in their own way, extra opportunities to be effective with their energy and ambitions.

Some of my favourites:

  • Nabuur.com: realising concrete local results with global neighbours
  • Kabissa: catalysing conversations in Africa
  • TakingITglobal: Generation Ne(x)t
  • Martus: being able to bear witness when human rights are violated
  • The Hub: another one to bear witness
  • Dgroups: involving more stakeholders in policy discussions

I like to consider myself an optimist, and browsing through the list of 150 wonderful projects reconfirms my belief that so many people are trying to do so many good things, with many potential synergies as well. It's brutal to have to bring down the selection to only 10 for my vote.

Note (2026): original content recovered via archive.org for http://www.netsquared.org/blog/rolf-kleef/facilitate-or-help

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Track your MP (UK)

An interesting set of sites in the UK, volunteer-run, to keep track of Parliament. TheyWorkForYou lets you check who your MP is, based on postcode: voting record, topics they’re interested in, and "performance" like participation in debates, recent appearances, responsiveness…

NetSquared Online Sessions

I am in San Jose now, just a few hours away from the opening reception of NetSquared, probably the biggest "Web 2.0" conference I will be attending for a while, with some 350 participants expected. Many many interesting talks and sessions proposed, including a parallel online event, with two important items.

Tuesday 30th May, 11AM PST (which is 8PM Western Europe, 7PM UK, 6PM UTC) I will have an hour session on our Custard Melt project, and especially on what our ambitions and expectations are. I hope that many people will join to explore how we can make the online platform help in galvanising offline action.

At 4PM PST, 1AM Western Europe, midnight UK, 11PM UTC, Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions will be online for a session on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net". Of course, as the producers behind Al Gore’s movie about climate change, this is of particular interest to us.

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Conference schedule as Google Calendar

Following the example of Michael Heilemann for Reboot8, I created a public Google calendar based on the schedule of the website. Available as XML and as iCAL.

Some more work is needed: the parallel online conference, descriptions, keeping it up to date. Let me know if you want to contribute, and I'll add you as manager for the calendar!