Team Lending

[Guest]

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[saabnet]

Maybe it's (just) something like this: http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,2092.0.html ?

Well, I don't know. Wouldn't seem to be such a big improvement to me - and I most definitely would not want to "compete" against anyone else here, either.

Great link! Perhaps Kiva is addressing something like that.

Again, I really don't think it is about competing against one another. That probably would not make a lot of sense here.

-Scott

[Robert]

I have to admit that I can't see the use of team building. Everything that a team can offer is available on KivaFriends: a website, socializing, encouragement, suggestions for loans, suggestions for the Kiva website, etc.

There are 2 features that KF can't fill, and I think that they aren't needed or wanted:

Joint displaying of team members:

People have expressed their concern about being associated with other people they don’t necessarily want to be associated with, for privacy reasons: the member invitation feature. However, unlike this feature, members of a group would always have the choice to leave the group (at least I hope that they would have that choice).

Competition:

If a competition between KF members was wanted (which it definitely is not), the KF site could handle it. If a competition between the KF group and another group was wanted, that other group has to be created, and only Kiva could handle it.

Moreover, I doubt that team building is able to increase lending activity. At least it isn't able for SETI in particular or BOINC in general. I'm myself a dedicated BOINC cruncher. My favourite projects are Climateprediction.net and, alternatively, Einstein, Sztaki and RCN (I crunched only a few SETI work units). I am a lonely cruncher, not member of any team. However, I have more credit points than the 32 members of the Burning Man Team together (both measured as "Total credit" and "Recent average credit"), despite my complete lack of a competition sense. How could the participation in a team increase my commitment?

Robert

[Peter S]

This upcoming team lending feature was something that Premal spoke about at the Penn Microfinance Conference in April. Chris (Kiva Store Chris) who was there, reported here on KF that one of the features Premal mentioned was:

"Lending teams - lenders can band together as a team, and "compete" with other lending teams."

see: Report from the Penn Microfinance Conference (upcoming features announced)

Some pros and cons of "team lending" were discussed in this thread here back in September: Forming Groups on Kiva

My own 2 cents on this, for what it's worth, is that I remain to be convinced that an element of competition and gaining some kind of team bragging rights is really what Kiva is about.  Call me a curmudgeonly old grump (please, why don't you...) but I suspect that it's something that might tend to find more favour with younger Kiva lenders, the ones who (apologies for the huge generalization..) tend to congregate in online communities like MyFace and SpaceBook.

Peter Old Grump

[saabnet]

"Lending teams - lenders can band together as a team, and "compete" with other lending teams."

Thanks for that, Peter. I guess my example from the Seti@Home project was right on after all.. whew.

-Scott

[abc]

Where do I sign up to be a member of the Old Grump team?
I assume we'll never have meetings, right?
No t-shirts, no websites, no consensus, no nothin'.
Just my speed.
Our motto is: "Hmph,"
and I think we all *know* the secret hand signal.
Yup. count me in.

"Team Grump"

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Keeping Kiva Loans Funded The Old-Fashioned Way, One Grump At A Time

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What I would like to see is what folks have talked about before:
A better way to deal with school-based Kiva projects.

[geekthegreek]

My own 2 cents on this, for what it's worth, is that I remain to be convinced that an element of competition and gaining some kind of team bragging rights is really what Kiva is about.  Call me a curmudgeonly old grump (please, why don't you...) but I suspect that it's something that might tend to find more favour with younger Kiva lenders, the ones who (apologies for the huge generalization..) tend to congregate in online communities like MyFace and SpaceBook.
Peter Old Grump

Hmm. That seems a bit crass to me, but maybe it could be fun. As for online communities, wait a sec - online discussion boards, like this one, are just one step away from online communities like MS and FB. The reasons many people are on those are similar, I believe, to the reasons many folks here are on KF (but, hopefully, not Kiva itself). I also suspect that many people active here are subtly 'competing' with each other to some extent as well. I mean, can anyone claim that their involvement in KF has *reduced* their lending or participation on Kiva? I think not. A good test would be to ask, how would your involvement in Kiva be different if you couldn't tell anyone about it? Maybe that's going too far, I dunno.

My problem with the competition thing is that it seems a given that the richest teams would 'win'. I'm not sure what sort of incentive or benefits or bragging rights are associated with winning, but if they are any incentive at all, then it could lead to some 'corporatization' of Kiva. Would this bring more money to Kiva? Perhaps. Would it be a bummer for active lenders who don't wish to partake? It kind of seems like it.

[saabnet]

...despite my complete lack of a competition sense. How could the participation in a team increase my commitment?

Robert,

I think you are 100% correct. And, I think for most KivaFriend users, this would apply as well. But I started thinking about this and then I went to the KivaFriends stats page and to the Kiva stats page.

KivaFriends.org Total Members: 2,930
Kiva.org Total Members: 311,802

So, we represent a little less than one percent (0.93969%) of Kiva users. I think we are quite a special 1%, really special, so special   that we probably are not representative of typical Kiva users or the potential avalanche of Kiva users (if Kiva would turn their PR machine back on). I think a lot of us single KivaFriends users will always be ahead of many Team Lenders too and there will be no particular draw for many of us.

That's just to say that perhaps Team Lending will draw on yet a different type of Kiva user.

The great news, I think, is that nobody I know knows about Kiva and I suspect that's the case for many people which means Kiva has a TON of room for lender growth - huge room - gigantic room!

-Scott

[Peter S]

[...]
What I would like to see is what folks have talked about before:
A better way to deal with school-based Kiva projects.

Kiva Staffer Roma had something to say about this in that context recently, and it sort of blended in with the other more MyBook / SpaceFace kind of community angle...

[...]Just as some background, this has come up as a fix to the more basic problem of being able to lend and create impact as a group, which is something our customer service folks hear a great deal about. It's also an attempt to create more viral awareness around Kiva since we need to start recruiting more lenders to the site. Richard, you mention "social networking." We don't want to create a social network for a social network's sake; there are sites out there that already do this much better than we ever will be able to or care to. Rather, we want to build a community/site for people who care about alleviating poverty (KivaFriends is in many ways the cornerstone of this community). Having more viral and community-motivating features is one way to do this.
[...]

which was from page 2 of the thread: Kiva Looking into Group Lending Functionality



To sign up to Team Grump, I suppose you just have to muster up the energy to give the secret hand signal, and yes, there will be no meetings, or if there are, they will immediately be adjourned when no one can think of anything viral to say.

OG

[Robert]

My fear is that if Kiva creates a sorting of lenders, or if Kiva enables team building (who on their turn will sort their members according to one or more sort parameters), some/many lenders will use their creativity to cheat beat the system, just to get a higher ranking. That would be to take commoditization to extremes.

Kiva engineers would spend their time devising patches to stop this, but it would be as always: the police is permanently trying to catch up, without succeeding once and for all. Why not leave Pandora's box closed?

[abc]

"...many lenders will use their creativity to cheat beat the system, just to get a higher ranking..."

Yeah, Robert, I'm not even comfortable with the notion of folks holding giant chunks of loans that
they don't intend to use, but just grab so they can dole them out to their friends. (I know,
I know, somebody's going to jump on me for this, but I hope they are gentle about it...)
Perhaps if the limit for holding an amount from any one loan in one's basket was lowered it wouldn't feel
so weird to me. The rollercoaster of seeing an attractive loan filled, then available, then filled,
then available again has to be confusing to those who are not inside the action of that particular loan.
Some might give up and move on, thinking the loan was gone -- that would be the logical assumption
to someone, say the majority of everyday Kiva lenders who are not KFers, who didn't know what was
going on. It just seems like a way of using the system in a way that it probably was not designed for.
(Ow. Did someone just throw a tomato at me?)




"...To sign up to Team Grump, I suppose you just have to muster up the energy to give the secret hand signal,..."

Um, Peter, the Sainted Spouse doesn't like it when I use that secret hand signal in public. There is a particularly unpleasant company that is trying to set up shop in our community, and many many of us use the hand signal, quite visibly, when we drive past their building. SS fears that I will be beat up some day for my wayward finger. I'm thinking the Old Grump's Club might oughta use another hand signal than the one I was thinking of originally. Um. Probably one that involves scratching, huh?