Transcript Kiva as an Information Retrieval System

Kiva as an Information
Retrieval System
Maureen Southorn
IST 616
Fall 2007
Kiva: Fighting Poverty with
Microfinance
Kiva: What is it?
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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?
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Kiva’s website provides several
information retrieval functions:
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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 Information Retrieval System:
User Base
• 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 collegeeducated, and use the computer more than
4 hours a day.
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Source: http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/kivachronicles/archive/2007/04/09/early-user-data-1#comments
Kiva’s Information Retrieval System: Costs
•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’s Information Retrieval System: Costs
•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.”
References
The Kiva website: http://www.kiva.org
Haven, Cynthia. “Small Change, Big Payoff.” Stanford
Magazine. Nov/Dec 2007. Retrieved Dec. 1, 2007 from
http://www.stanfordalumni.
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
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/ 2007/11/five-lessons-fr.html
Matt Flannery’s Kiva Chronicles blog:
http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/kivachronicles/weblog_view?b_start:int=0&-C=