A (long!) report on our conversations at the Kiva 3rd Birthday Bash in SF, by Diane and Scott. 
Scott and I met just outside the Caltrain station in SF last night and he graciously gave me a lift to the bar where the Kiva 3rd Birthday Bash was being held. It was a long narrow room with a rectangular bar in the center of the room and tables and booths around the outside; a small room at the the rear was being used by staffers to have conversations or show some promo videos on a laptop. There were quite a few people there, probably 50-60 in total, and with everyone pretty much squashed into the space between the bar and the outer booths, it got to be pretty difficult to get through the crowd (and later, to hear: it got very loud). Everyone there was very happy, and positive, and enthusiastic. (But if it were up to me, I'd have chosen a different venue where perhaps there would be a single larger space in which to mingle, rather than shoving your way through a crowded narrow space around a bar. Of course, that could be because I seldom go to happy hours and don't enjoy them much.
)
We started in the small back room, where we met two women who volunteer in the Kiva office. They gave us a small copy of the flyer to be sure we knew about Kiva; we reassured them that we did. We also met several lenders and a woman who does Russian translations, and as with everyone else, their attitudes were totally upbeat and their enthusiasm was contagious.
The first staffer we met and spoke with was JD, who runs the Kiva Fellows program. He was excited at just having sent Group 6 into the field, and wanted to be sure everyone was reading their excellent journals and blog entries. He told us that Group 7 will begin training in January, and that they've already accepted an applicant for Group 8 next summer! In an exciting development, all Kiva Fellows in Group 7 will be receiving video cameras to take with them on their assignments, so journal updates and blog entries will feature more video in the new year! In response to our questions, he said that Fellows run the gamut in age from their 20s through 60s, and that right now they have more English-speaking-only applicants than there are slots available. He said they need more applicants who speak French and Russian, and some "more obscure" languages for placement in countries like Nepal, Indonesia, and Cambodia, among others. They are considering some sort of "loyalty program" where you can sign up for countries of interest, and get notifications when MFIs in that country are about to start posting new loans for the month. He pointed us at the two technical staffers we wanted to talk with, Skyler and Sam.
Skyler has already introduced himself on KivaFriends, asking for input on new platform designs. He was excited about the new tools which will soon be available for the MFIs, which will (among other new features) enable them to do most or all of their Kiva-related work offline and then just upload in a batch way when they are able to get an Internet connection, which will remove many of the obstacles they currently have with using the Kiva partner tools (since having a live Internet connection for their Kiva work is not always possible). He had many dynamic ideas about how to extend Kiva's platform into the future, and was grateful for the input he's received from KF (and would welcome more!). We stressed the need to keep the "common person" in mind when designing new features, and he rightly pointed out that by building interfaces and base platforms which offer more data to each lender in a secure way, it will be possible for others to build all sorts of applications for us to use in managing our portfolios and learning about new lending opportunities. There are discussions with various corporate developers who are thinking outside their standard product box toward what they might build to extend Kiva's toolset; he mentioned some interest by folks at Quicken as an example.
We next tracked down and spoke with Sam, who is Kiva's Chief Technical Officer (CTO), who has posted here a few times also. (He's tall, but not as tall as Charlie.
) We described some of the site access problems some have had recently (but not everyone: as an example, *I* have been getting the "Oops!" page about 70% of the time, and Scott has been getting it almost never). He told us a fact that helps explain quite a lot for me, which is that currently, all parts of Kiva's operations are running on a single server. When there is a high demand for pages (such as large-member team pages), access conflicts cause small page serving failures which cascade into problems accessing other parts of the site as well. The big news is that, very soon (like, VERY soon), there will be a brief site outage while the technical staff migrates from a single server onto a set of servers which has been in testing for a while now. This should help with the site access problems some have been seeing. We asked Sam about whether the introduction of Teams, Team Message Boards, and Lender Messages pointed at a plan to add even more social networking tools to the Kiva.org site, but he suggested Matt would be a better person to ask about that possible trend. He did indicate that they were not planning to duplicate or replace KivaFriends, though. We could have spoken with Sam for a lot longer, but we became concerned that we might be monopolizing his time, so instead we decided to bother Premal.
We had seen Premal earlier in the evening inching his way through the crowd holding a laptop over his head, asking loudly if anyone had an American Express card but had not yet voted in the Member's Choice voting. We didn't ask whether he got any takers or not, but I see Kiva is almost 400 votes above the 4th place project right now, so maybe he did. He was so dynamic and genuinely happy to see us, and had so many ideas and comments in the few minutes we talked with him that I'm sure I'm going to forget some. Touching on the main points of interest, he said that he thought KivaFriends should be even more prominent on the Kiva.org site, perhaps even with a link from the main page. He said that they have so many great ideas, but they really need an even larger engineering staff to carry them out. And he has begun an email conversation with me about serving as a beta-tester or crash-test-dummy to try out prototypes or other site changes before they are implemented in production. If I hear more about this, I'll ask if other testers would be helpful and if so, I'll post about it on KF. At that point we were ready to go, having enjoyed the special rate beer and noting that there was 15 minutes until my train left.
I hope I have accurately portrayed our conversations, and if not I welcome Scott's corrections, or the corrections of anyone from the Kiva staff! Thanks to EVERYONE who brought so much energy to the evening, to everyone on Kiva's staff and all Kiva lenders who make this possible, and to Scott for hanging out with me and giving me the lift from and to the train station. What a great event! (And next time, let's do it in a space that's more conducive to mingling and moving around, so we can talk with each other even more!)
--Diane. (And Scott.)
