Kiva loans - basketing and expiration discussion

[Guest]

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[RichardF]

Inspired by the recent conversations about My Basket on the Kiva lending platform, I thought I would share a little story to help put my position on the matter into a broader perspective.

For a number of years, I worked in the largest school district in my state as an administrator reporting to the superintendent.  For a few of those years, I was responsible for ensuring one of the largest federal school desegregation orders in U.S. history was properly implemented in terms of both racial balance requirements and equal access to school and special program assignments of the parents’ choice for their children, based on a complex fourteen-factor set of priorities for who should be assigned where.

As it turned out, we actually came up with a way to implement all of these “controlled choice” requirements.  In fact, the school assignment process worked so well that even the big shots’ kids couldn’t get into the most popular programs if they weren’t high enough on the priority lists.  As you can imagine, this didn’t sit so well with many of these folks and the issue eventually resulted in a confrontation between the school board and the superintendent.  Long story short, the superintendent was fired/resigned, I was “laid off” about a year later, and the school assignment program eventually was disbanded.

So, what does this story have to do with My Basket?  I see two basic parallels.  First, I am a firm believer in the equal access doctrine – all other things being equal, people should have equal access to opportunities they choose.  Obviously, this doctrine is far-reaching on fundamental as well as simple matters.  In this case, I believe any lender should have equal access to any fundraising loan, all other things being equal.  Second, that “all other things being equal” thing is manageable, even when it’s complicated.  As far as the My Basket issue goes, I believe it is possible to find the highest common ground among the various interests expressed here, as well as ensure the equal access doctrine is not violated.  As you might expect, I have some ideas on how Kiva’s My Basket feature could be implemented to do just that.  When the time comes, I’ll be happy to share those ideas in the proper venues.

So, there you have it.  How’s that for a long-winded way to say I’m a Basket Case?!!!

[Mona]

Hi Richard, how often have you seen people in chat lately? How often did you hear someone complain that he/she could not get on a most wanted loan? How many "very special events" have we celebrated lately? How many birthday, anniversary or whatever loans did we make together during the last months?

Not much. From all I can see, the tradition has as good as died out due to different reasons. Some will cheer to this while others - like I - mourn the "good old days". If you want to make this an issue again, please go ahead. But I do not see much sense in it.

[RichardF]

Hi Mona.  I've never objected to sharing.  What I've always objected to is excluding.  It's possible to do the former without doing the latter.  I'll continue to advocate for Kiva to implement an equal access lending platform.  If such a design ever is implemented, perhaps the good old sharing days will be revived.

[Diane R]

Depends how you want to define "equal access lending platform".

If your vision says that there's never a time when I can hold a piece of a special loan for a dear friend who is not awake yet on another continent, or for a family member who is unavailable for an hour, I will be right next to Mona, mourning yet another small disappointing degradation of the shared experience which has been Kiva lending. 

--Diane.

[JohnAtKiva]

Just a quick note to say that when the time comes to address basketing-related issues, I hope we can find a way to do so that enables basket-sharing while minimizing loan expirations caused by basketing-related issues!

Hi Richard, how often have you seen people in chat lately? How often did you hear someone complain that he/she could not get on a most wanted loan? How many "very special events" have we celebrated lately? How many birthday, anniversary or whatever loans did we make together during the last months?

Wow that's really neat!  There used to be a lot of birthday/anniversary loans that the KF community made together?

[YowieFreak]

If your vision says that there's never a time when I can hold a piece of a special loan for a dear friend who is not awake yet on another continent, or for a family member who is unavailable for an hour, I will be right next to Mona, mourning yet another small disappointing degradation of the shared experience which has been Kiva lending. 

Now, if Kiva implemented a feature where lenders could "sell" ("transfer"?) USD$25 portions of a loan to another lender (perhaps only up to the point at which the first repayment is made by the entrepreneur?  or up to 24 hours after "fully funded"?), maybe we wouldn't need to "basket-share" at all.

[JohnAtKiva]

Woah Ian... that's brilliant!

Do you think a lot of people would buy larger loans and then transfer pieces of them to other lenders?

[YowieFreak]

Woah Ian... that's brilliant!

Do you think a lot of people would buy larger loans and then transfer pieces of them to other lenders?

I don't know whether they would or wouldn't, but I think a lot of the animosity created by basket-sharing (and basket-hoarding, and basket-hijacking) is because of the fact that people are grabbing bits of the loan that they aren't willing to guarantee actually funding.  (Even when intending to share with friends, we aren't always 100% sure that the friend will want a bit of the loan.)

And (providing it is done before any repayments have occurred, which would make things very messy) I can't see that it would be terribly hard to code that sort of functionality - it would just require a lender to specify a loan id, and another lender's lender id, and it should then just be a case of changing the lender id which is linked to the loan.  (Well, a bit more complicated than that, but still not terribly hard.)

The reverse part of the process, transferring the $25 from the receiving lender to the transferring lender, possibly doesn't even need to be done by Kiva - it could be handled by the lenders themselves using GCs.

And with a little bit of extra coding it might mean that Kiva could then implement a way of giving a "Gift Loan" - which might be a better (or different at least) marketing strategy than giving a GC to someone.

[A Nonny Mouse]

Wow that's really neat!  There used to be a lot of birthday/anniversary loans that the KF community made together?

John, there are at least two threads I can think of here - one is the Most KivaFriends On A Loan contest (http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,2318.0.html) we've done in July the last two years, and the other would be celebrating loan milestones (100th loan, 20000th loan, etc) where lots of us pile onto a loan to celebrate (http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,1287.0.html.)

There are probably others I've missed; hopefully other KFs will have better memories than I.   

I don't know that these instances aggravated the basket-manipulation issue; most of the time the loans used for the above purposes were very large and took days to fund.

Nonny

EDIT:  here is another one, started in honor of KF saabnet's first child, Lily: http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,2218.0.html

[JohnAtKiva]

Ian - Very creative. :-)

One complication: would a recipient of a loan ever want to return it?  Say that you loaned $100 to an entrepreneur, and then transfered $25 of it to me... but the loan was a charcoal loan, and I'm an environmentalist.  In that situation, I might not want the loan at all. 

Maybe there'd have to be an approval layer - where the recipient of the loan transfer could accept the loan or return it to the original lender?

A Nonny Mouse - I'll check those threads out... thanks!