Tim Bonnemann

    Tim Bonnemann

    I’m a longtime community builder and e-participation expert.

    Founder, Web Monday. Director, Center for Applied Community Engagement (CACE). Founder, Intellitics, Inc.

    Lovable Certified Expert App Builder 2026

    San José, CA & Bogotá, Colombia


    Recent work

    AI Alliance

    Community Lead, IBM Research 2023 – 2025

    Community lead for the AI Alliance, the open-source AI consortium spanning models, data, evaluation and safety. Represented it at 15+ international conferences including NeurIPS and FOSDEM, ran dozens of meetups end to end across North America and Europe. AI-assisted prototyping and web development, community ops automation.

    Open Source Science (OSSci)

    Community Lead, IBM Research 2022 – 2025

    Helped launch and build OSSci, a NumFOCUS initiative sponsored by IBM connecting open-source research software to the researchers who depend on it. Program design, global ecosystem engagement.

    IBM Data Science Community

    Community Program Manager, IBM 2019 – 2022

    Community specialist on the IBM Data Science Community team, running day-to-day operations through an early growth phase. Helped take it past 25,000 members and built the global meetup outreach program.

    Full history on LinkedIn

    Building with AI

    I’m not a web developer or software engineer, so being handed these new AI superpowers has been nothing short of amazing. Since late 2024, I’ve shipped a range of (social) web apps using AI-assisted tools (Lovable, Claude Code, among others), covering a broad range of use cases.

    Every project ships against the same baseline:

    • In-depth product requirements document (PRD)
    • Mobile first
    • Accessibility (WCAG)
    • Privacy by design
    • Automated tests on every load-bearing path
    • Built in public (open specs, open build log)
    • And much more…

    Each project is run by its own AI agent. They share one versioned library of standards, so when one project finds a rule is wrong, the fix reaches all of them.

    A couple of projects use AI agents for automated web search and data processing.

    Learn more on GitHub: Tim’s vibe coding manual (living document)

    Check out a few highlights below…

    ParticipateDB

    The digital engagement catalog

    The most comprehensive global directory of e-participation tools, projects and references. First launched in September of 2009, the site went dark around 2021 due to maintenance issues, taking a decade of the field’s institutional memory with it. Scripted the catalog out of Archive.org snapshots and reverse-engineered the app: 396 tools, 327 projects, 276 references.

    Explore: participatedb.com

    Schlagerwolke

    The social graph of German Schlager

    The social graph of German Schlager credits: who wrote what, who performed it, and where the data came from. Built and maintained by two AI agents running locally on a cron schedule: Crawler, which decides what is worth reading, and Sherlock, which reads it and records every claim it finds — including the ones that contradict what is already there, because a conflict is data rather than an error. 14K songs, 3K people, 31K credits and counting (as of September 29, 2026), each sourced and confidence-scored.

    Explore: schlagerwolke.de

    Levantrain

    Imagining high-speed rail for the Middle East

    A peacebuilding initiative envisioning a Middle East (re-)connected by high-speed rail. Advanced georeferencing pipeline, turning scanned images of 19th- and 20th-century survey maps into usable geodata, with measured accuracy. Every record carries its source. Full dataset is open source.

    Explore: levantrain.net

    Capuchino

    Master the 10,000 Spanish words behind C1

    A vocabulary trainer for advanced Spanish learners working toward the DELE C1: the top 10,000 high-frequency words. A short stratified assessment across frequency bands estimates where your knowledge stops — the cliff most learners hit past B1 — and the app works the long tail beyond it, then exports to whatever spaced-repetition tool you already use. A separate Python pipeline builds and ranks the word list. I’m the target user, building it against my own exam prep.

    Explore: capuchino.co

    Stratatouille

    Build, compare, and share historical timelines

    Scaled, multi-lane history timelines built for visual comparison — seeing what overlapped what. One-click import of structured data from Wikidata, and the whole app runs bilingual in English and Spanish.

    Explore: stratatouille.com

    Polligoncoming soon

    A new kind of online survey

    Re-imagining the online survey: questions roll out over time, participants watch results emerge, and shifts in opinion get tracked. Agile, where the traditional survey is waterfall. The spec was stress-tested before it was built — an adversarial review of the requirements document that surfaced 58 issues, 14 of them serious enough to block, while they were still cheap to fix.

    Explore: polligon.io