Saturday June 6, 1pm  @ Kiva HQ

 

What you need to know:

 

• Kiva offices open at 1pm  (3180 18th Street, Suite 201, SF, CA)
• Designers+Engineers, building/fixing/hacking apps for Kiva
• Bring your laptop
• Kiva engineers on hand
• We'll code until the last person leaves
• Snacks, Drinks
• Pizza for those staying through dinner

 

RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

 

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Schedule

 

June 6th 2009

1:00	Doors Open: Meet the Kiva team and other developers
1:30	Welcome/Kick-off: we will be self organizing into groups based on projects and interests
2:00-6:00	Sprinting: Snacks & Beverages provided
6ish	Show-N-Tell & Dinner (pizza)
After Party	Some of us may self-organize to a local bar afterwards

 

* Street parking is available, but we recommend taking public transportation or biking.  You can safely store your bike in our office.

* When you arrive, dial 010 to buzz up into the building, and follow the signs to our office

* We will have workstations, but we recommend bringing your own laptop

 

We'll be using the #KivaDevGarage hashtag!

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Brainstorming

 

Please write stuff here.  What apps should we work on?  Who has an app that they are brining to the event?  What skills are needed to work on a specific idea?  Helpful dev environment setup needed?

 

Javascript Loan Browser

The experience on Kiva.org for browsing for loans isn't the best. There are a lot of great ideas on how to help people filter through loans and quickly find what they are looking for.  Such an app could be even more powerful if it was a simple single-page JavaScript app to speed browsing and shopping.  Once complete it could be served up live on the web or packaged in an desktop container like AIR.

 

We kicked off this project on June 6.  Check out the ongoing project page.

 

Kiva Web Service Backend Proxy

Concept: skylar woodward

 

Writing a JavaScript-only app for the browser currently has the limitation of same-domain requests.  As a result, developers need to make server-side proxies for the JS requests.  The suggestion here would be to write a simple tool that securely allows your apps to make Kiva API requests to the proxy and have them served up on the same domain.  The proxy would also cache many of the requests to save hits to the Kiva API servers.  Suggested to be implemented with MERB.

 

(Obviously this project is compliments the JS loan browser mentioned above.)

 

 

Lending Team Leaderboard

Concept:  Anne-Laure Behaghel

 

The Kiva community tab is great for showing the overall leaders amongst lending teams, but it can be much more interesting to see the leaders amongst a restricted set of groups of local or vertical interest.  Imagine 7 classrooms in a high school wanting to easily advertise which group is in the lead by lending.  Or, you might imagine a regional soccer league where each team is working to recruit the most lenders by the end of the season.  What these groups need is a leaderboard that ranks a pre-defined set of lending teams by various criteria.

 

Some more specific requirements might include:

• PHP for broadest appeal (esp into CRM type apps like Wordpress and Drupal)
• ability to sort the leaders by different criteria (most loans, most $, most members)
• local caching of team data to limit roundtrip hits to the Kiva API

 

Aggregate Funded Widget

Concept: ABC News

 

Most views of loans only show how much of one loan is funded.  This widget would take loans of an aggregate match (like all loans from this month from Uganda) and show how much the group is funded in total.  ABC News is specifically interested in this widget to use for a Kiva promotion.

 

So, for instance, your criteria might be "All loans this month for the partner Prisma Microfinance."  There might be 134 loans that match this, 78 of which are totally funded, and $8473 is left out of the 56 loans still fundraising.  So, the widget might show "78 of 134 funded" or "$8473 left to fund" while also cycling through many of the loans still available.

 

Lend On My Dime

Concept: Daniel Raffel

 

There have been several ideas floated about by several parties to allow their friends or customers join in the lending experience but using funds provided by the offering party. The party, or "provider" of the app, promises to donate a certain amount in loans through Kiva (making loans, then donating the repayments afterward), but wants others to choose or at least help choose the loans to which the funds go.  A couple specific ideas:

 

• A company runs a promotion for a new "green" product, perhaps a construction tool. It then features loans in the construction sector on Kiva and promises to donate 1 cent to funding a loan for every action the user takes on that site.
• An couple plans a wedding and doesn't want to give out trinkets like picture frames or bubbles.  Instead, they let every guest visit the wedding website and vote for loans to fund.  The couple then makes a couple of loans to Kiva in honor of the guests based on the votes.
• Instead of doing a traditional corporate Christmas gift, a company wants to make a loan on behalf of every employee.  They want each employee to make a loan and then record and show which loan each employee choose for routing their funds.

 

The idea here would be to build some kind of reusable application that might help any or all of the use cases above work as a microsite or a promotional site of sorts.

 

 

Facebook

Concept, Ideation:  Jackson Hull

 

Facebook is a huge opportunity to grow the Kiva lender base and to energize existing lenders.  As a leading social networking platform, Facebook is a good target to start with for building an app that will do the basics of keeping lenders apprised of their Kiva loan activity, lending teams, etc. and providing the ability to view loans.  The app should do these basics well... two great examples -- KivaHeads and the "Facebook Application for Lenders" -- have already been built.

 

A few suggestions for the next revision ... it should go beyond the basics:

• Create as a unified social networking application -- allowing users to interact with Kiva in whichever social network they use; Facebook first.
  • The application should also be built to interact with other social networks (MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, hi, etc.) -- the ecosystem.  This can be done most easily by leveraging an existing framework, like OpenSocial.
• Extend Kiva loan marketing -- advertising new loans and loans that meet user or group preferences (below).
• Create networks of users with similar "preferences" -- loan preferences could be defined as the current Kiva nouns (location, trade, gender, etc.).
• Enable the funding of loans within the social app ecosystem -- enables users to "fund-on-the-fly".

 

Chris Cinelli - I think the concepts above about Facebook are a little too vagues. These are my ideas:

• The current application should take advenatage of the publishing on the stream rich content that are appealing for other users . The durrent aplication seem to publish only a short post on Wall of the people that are making the loan.
• Introduce Virtual currency
  •     A lot of Facebook application users use OfferPal Media and all the other virtual currentcy provides to make a loan
  •     Insert a leaderboard for the greatest donors
  •     Reduce the minimum amount for a donation to $1-$5

        Cons: Part of the money goes to Virtual Currency operators. Maybe you can contact them and get them to give up their revenues (or making a donation)

 

Bharath M. Some more points to add to the above

• In addition to the leaderboard we should have a list of leading recruiters who are incentivized to spread the word about any given loan or kiva in general. The feature would work as follows
  • The FB app with take the users Twitter credentials as well as permissions to set facebook status
  • Each loan displayed in the FB app will have a "Spread the word" button. Once clicked, a bit.ly URL pointing to that loan is generated and posted to the users twitter account and FB status
  • Lead recruiters are defined as people whose bit.ly URLs generate the maximum hits (derived via bit.ly API).
• Existing apps seem to focus on displaying loan info in profile boxes. One integration point that is missing from the mix is the newsfeed. Publishing all transacted loans to a given users newsfeed should be doable. Note that we dont have to rely on any "callback" from the API. Our server will have a cronjob that simply fires maybe once a day to get all our users' latest loans and calculate a "Delta" from the last such request.
• The offerpal idea sounds interesting. But is it possible within the current constraints of the Kiva architecture? A Facebook version of the JavaScript app seems more doable ie a rich UI to browse loans, add them to a basket and head to kiva for checkout.

 

Skillz

[ offer yourself and your skills up here ]

 

Halle: ideas, mock-ups, basic programming, and lots of encouragement!

 

Chris Cinelli: ideas, mock-up/wireframes, PHP/C++/Python/Javascript/CSS etc., Facebook API