Kiva Community Conference Call, February 18th 2009 - Discussion

[Guest]

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[Fiona Ramsey]

Hi KivaFriends Community:

Looking forward to next month's call, which we're scheduling for February 18th.

Two items for discussion:
1 - Stick with 2pm Pacific?  I know in the last discussion there were suggestions for 1pm Pacific.  Either work for us - let the community decide!
2 - Agenda - I think there were a lot of good reasons to have January's call last over 2 hours, but ongoing we will need to restrict the length closer to 1 hour, to be sensitive both to time availability of the community (many of whom were at work during the call) as well as Kiva staff.  That said, I really want to make sure that we cover as many topics that affect the largest number of the community, as possible.  We will ask those who have customer service type questions to pursue those outside the call so that we can keep the call to addressing larger, "big-picture" type topics as well as "problem" topics e.g. MIFEX.  So, I would love for the community to come up with a few general topics that we should have an on agenda.  That way, I can make sure that the appropriate Kiva staff are in the room to address issues, as well as scheduling time with the Kiva staff when they're required on the call, rather than having everyone sitting through the whole call when they might only be relevant for a few issues.

With that said,  I'll let the community discuss and debate here.  I won't be monitoring this thread, but I'll check in from time to time to see what decisions have been made.  And I'll check the agenda just a few days before the call, but let it continue to be discussed right up until the call (so that any last minute issues can be incorporated.)

To be clear, I will still be taking questions from the community via IM and chat during the call.  The agenda is by no means to replace Q&A.  We want to have the majority of the call be a Q&A.  However, the purpose of the agenda is to make sure that we have the right people in the room to answer the questions, so just the general topics are what I'm looking for.  Also, there were some questions PM'd me which we didn't specifically cover last call, but were incorporated in other questions.  I won't be keeping questions that weren't covered for the next call, otherwise we'll build a list that we'll never get through.  Each month we'll start a list from scratch again, that way we can make sure we keep the hottest topics at the top.  So if you sent a question for a previous call and it wasn't covered, and it's still a hot topic for you next month, pls send me the question again.

Thanks everyone for your input, and talk to you next month!

[Tatiana]

Hi Fiona,

Thank you very much for making this a regular thing. It was really interesting to hear the answers of the different kivastaff members.

As for the time, for me it was definitely to late, I was completely exhausted today.

I guess 1pm PST would suit most Europeans much better.

Other parts of the world might think otherwise....

[reb-mar]

Will the conference calls always be on Wednesdays?  Would you consider hosting them on different days of the week from time to time?

                     Rebecca 

[Fiona Ramsey]

For right now we should stick to wednesdays as we're most likely to get more Kiva staff available for the call.