Kiva as an Information Retrieval System Maureen Southorn IST 616 Fall 2007

Kiva: Fighting Poverty with Microfinance

Kiva: What is it?  Kiva is a microfinance website that allows individuals to lend money to entrepreneurs in developing countries  Lenders provide capital in $25 increments using PayPal  Borrowers work through Kiva’s field partners, non-profit agencies that offer work skills programs on-site

Kiva: What is it?  Kiva’s website provides several information retrieval functions: The “Find Businesses” function, which allows lenders to view businesses participating in the microfinance program. The lender social networking community The Kiva blog, which tracks new developments The Press and About sections, which provide daily statistics about lenders and businesses * We’ll be looking primarily at the “Find Businesses” function.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System Lenders: 160,539 Number of dispersed loans: 24,701 Number of “unfilled” loans: 57 Total amount loaned since founding in Oct 05: $15,956,485 (Figures as Dec 1, 2007)

Kiva lets lenders browse or search

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses The first part of Kiva’s information retrieval system is the “find businesses” function. This function allows lenders to search for businesses by several categories:

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses Status: In Need, Raised, Active, Paid Back, Defaulted Gender: Male, Female Sector: Agriculture, Services, Clothing, Health, Retail, Manufacturing, Arts, Housing, Wholesale, Food, Construction, Education Region: North America, Central America, South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses Results are automatically provided in “popularity” order. Lenders can choose to instead sort results by loan amount, random order, old to new, or new to old. The “search” box allows lenders to use a term of their choice to search businesses. Let’s test it out.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses In test searches, I noticed that the search box does NOT work independently from the drop down lists indicating status, gender, etc. This is not indicated anywhere on the site, so users may not realize that their searches are not retrieving existing records because the drop-down choices have limited the search.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses First, we’ll test the recall powers of Kiva’s “find businesses” function.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Testing the Search Function Searching for “Ukraine” brings up 516 hits. Of these hits, 510 are businesses located in the Ukraine. 6 hits are businesses in Moldova. These records state that the owners import goods from the Ukraine.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Testing the Search Function After browsing through Kiva’s loans funded in Eastern Europe by the Hope Ukraine organization, it appears that the information retrieval system’s recall function is solid. I counted 510 loans funded in the Ukraine, which matches the search hits.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Find Businesses Next, we’ll test the Kiva information retrieval system’s precision.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Testing the Search Function Searching for “book store” brings up 3 hits. Hit 1’s owner started out running a bookstore before expanding to an office supplies business. Hit 2 is a book and video store. Hit 3’s owner currently runs a home products sales business, but formerly ran a bookstore.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Testing the Search Function Searching for “bookstore” as one word brings up 10 hits. These hits include only 1 of the 3 hits returned from the “book store” search. 3 of the hits are listed as bookstores. This list does NOT include the bookstore hit found during the “book store” search.

Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Testing the Search Function The discrepancies between the “book store” and “bookstore” searches indicates that Kiva’s information retrieval system may not perform with great precision.

Kiva’s user base is made up of primarily Caucasian lenders of many ages (averaging 25-60), but evenly split by gender and marital status. Most users live in household with incomes of $35,000 to $120,000 per year. Over 80% are college- educated, and use the computer more than 4 hours a day. Source: chronicles/archive/2007/04/09/early-user-data-1#commentshttp:// chronicles/archive/2007/04/09/early-user-data-1#comments Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: User Base

Kiva’s overhead generally runs around 10 percent of its lending traffic, but these costs include staffing, office space, insurance, and employee benefits. Kiva has 16 paid employees and 250 volunteers. Kiva’s staff is made up of many former staff members of PayPal, Tivo, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and YouTube. Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Costs

Google provides about a third of Kiva’s server space free. Readytalk has donated free web conferencing. Lenovo has donated free computers and laptops to Kiva. Paypal donates free transaction processing, saving Kiva the normal 3% fee. Kiva has many other partners. Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Costs

Fifteen percent of traffic comes from free ad space at YouTube, which places Kiva’s ads on pages with videos that may include copyrighted material. YouTube is not permitted to post revenue-generating ads on pages with potential copyrighted material. Other free advertising is provided by Yahoo!. Kiva has gained free publicity from the Daily Kos Blog, a PBS Frontline documentary, appearances on Oprah and Bill Clinton’s recent book, Giving.

Kiva had pro-bono legal help to gain non-profit 501(c)(3) status. Kiva has also received grants from foundations like Kellogg, Draper Richards and DOEN, but funds most of its overhead costs through donations by lenders, who can choose to add a 10% donation to Kiva on top of their loan amount during “checkout.” Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Costs

References The Kiva website: Haven, Cynthia. “Small Change, Big Payoff.” Stanford Magazine. Nov/Dec Retrieved Dec. 1, 2007 from org/news/magazine/2007/novdec/features/kiva.html org/news/magazine/2007/novdec/features/kiva.html Kawaski, Guy. “The Six Lessons of Kiva.” November 28, 2007 blog entry. Retrieved Dec 1, 2007 from /11/five-lessons-fr.html /11/five-lessons-fr.html Matt Flannery’s Kiva Chronicles blog: chronicles/weblog_view?b_start:int=0&-C= chronicles/weblog_view?b_start:int=0&-C