skylarwoodward

Since Kiva started, I had always dreamed of seeing a loan come full circle in the sense that an entrepreneur I had funded would eventually be able to sell wares to me or my friends. There are lots of sites which help to make fair trade goods available to the international community such as Ten Thousand Villages or Trade As One, but none of these were connected directly with any entrepreneurs on Kiva. The best example I had to date was Kilama George requesting a home loan which he would pay for with bracelets he made for the Invisible Children project (sold here in the US).

Today, Kakeda Sun is breaking the mold by selling kramas from Cambodia online. She’s doing so with the help of a site called Ahkun.org started by a former Kiva Fellow from Brooklyn. On the site you can choose between blue and white kramas or orange and red kramas. (Krama’s are Cambodian scarfs which are used for everything from skirts to headbands). For the full story on Kakeda and her product, check out this video from Ahkun:

Though the kramas sell for $15 online, it’s really interesting that you could buy one directly from the entrepreneur for 44 cents if you happen to be in the Chroy Ompel Village. Sanjaya (the former Kiva Fellow who started Ahkun) is being pretty open about the cost discrepancy on the product page and has a complete breakdown of the Ahkun costs on the site. (He’s paying a 31 cent premium on each krama and not looking to profit from the venture.) However, it probably does more than a loan or a monthly wage to help demonstrate the disparity between costs in our communities and those living in the poorest regions of the world.

Today, we had a great discussion at Kiva with Martin Burt from Fundación Paraguaya about how microfinance is working in Paraguay and how Kiva is affecting that. He started off with a question his team has been investigating lately which is “Why does microfiannce work?” He pointed out that many simple things have struggled to succeed such as education, food programs, and housing projects. So he asked why does microfinance, a very complex concept that is nontrivial to implement, work where so many other projects in the same region have failed. His theory is that microfinance works because it assumes poor people are smart.

Burt suggests that most charitable programs are structured in a way that assumes that the poor are needy because they are less capable of solving their problems that those offering the solution. So education, medical care, or food is given to people in a way that, although not intentional, takes from their dignity. He offered an interesting contrast to the theory of giving that sets microfinance apart form other kinds of aid. He said many people think that by offering someone a $100 loan and asking for $118 (loan+interest) in return, you’ve taken $18 from that person. In fact, at Fundación Paraguaya, they see things very differently – instead you have entrusted $118 of value to the intelligence and integrity of this person. By contrast, a client who is given 5 pieces of bread is being taken from by every loaf. The gift often assumes he is not capable of finding a way to feed himself and thus steals from his dignity. It creates an imbalance of power, a sense of something owed by the recipient of aid, and, eventually, works in streaks of racism. The loan, on the otherhand, assumes the borrower (though poor) is smart and worthy of trust and investment.

He went on to explain that his team is working on other programs that preserve this basic assumption of microfinance - that the poor are smart and able to help solve their own problems. They are applying this to education and they are seeing fantastic improvements to graduation rates compared to free programs based on government or other funding. These solutions often have a genesis with a loan. After loans, the person is no longer poor. They need food, they can buy food. They need medicine, they can buy medicine. They want education, so they begin to invest in it. The programs preserve the dignity of the people trying to bring necessary change to their lives.

I had imagined that after brining loans to the poor, one of the next steps for Kiva might be to bring their products to the lenders (eg, coffee from an entrepreneur sold to Americans via the web) – to close the loop in the give and the take. While this isn’t necessarily a bad idea it might be the wrong approach to helping the people advance themselves as a society. Maybe what is needed are more choices for people beyond loans, more opportunities for them to invest in their own quality of life. In that sense, we’d be bringing more high-quality and affordable products to them, offering more tools from which to choose to solve the problems they face. I’ve always heard it said that microfinance is traditional finance turned on its head – offering money to those most deserving (read: in need, yet responsible) rather than those offering the lowest financial risk. It is exciting to think about how other problems in developing regions could be solved by a similar inversion of the traditional approach.

In September, I became an official employee at Kiva. People have asked me almost every day since then, “How is going? Was the transition from a big company hard? What’s it like being at a, well, non-profit now?”

The answer is, things are awesome. It’s not necessary about the specific cause or the product, and it certainly has nothing to do with PHP or a 3-year-old legacy code base (which for, yes, I’m partially responsible). It’s because of this:

http://www.fredr1c.com/kiva_in_cambodia_comic/Comic.html

People. People like Sopha who are worth discovering but are otherwise isolated in the most remote and poorest places in the world. People like Zvi and Matt who can’t stop smiling every day they come in the office. People like John who quit their job after 10 years to pack up, ship out to Cambodia for months, and revel in applying their talents to connecting lenders to borrowers.

Once you know people and their stories, your motivation to evoke change becomes an unstoppable human response.

Way to go John. Welcome to the Kiva family.

After a year and a half of development, BrowserPlus is released into the hands of web developers worldwide promising to change the future of client-side web development, as the new motto states, “on the fly.” A whole host of new services are come with the release, not the least of which are Motion (a service that exposes accelerator data from the local device as input) and Uploader (which completes the Drag-and-Drop upload dream by facilitating file upload for any site, not media just to Flickr). As a user-submitted spreadsheet shows, BrowserPlus does a great job of complementing features provided by Gears, not competing with them.

However, with all this webdev excitement coming early this Christmas, there’s plenty of mystery to prepare us for Halloween. A trip over to the BrowserPlus site communicates a simple and unexplained off-the-air promise to “be back shortly…” In fact, not even the old demos like PhotoDrop and JSONRequest are available.

It’s hardly reasonable to think the site shut down for performance reasons given that almost all of the BrowserPlus content is static. So what could be causing the delay? A late breaking security flaw? Inadvertently offensive misuse of religious text? Cold feet on the big day?

Here’s hoping that Yahoo! resolves the issue soon and the rest of us can get our hands on the goods….

UPDATE Steve informed me Friday that the undisclosed issues were resolved and BrowserPlus is open for download or development as of Halloween (the original planned launch date). Congrats to all my peeps in virtual Sunnyvale!

Wow. It’s pretty cool to see so much excitement about BrowserPlus just a day after putting it into public view. Truly, its humbling. Already many folks seem eager to go beyond experiencing it and actually start tinkering, building - and some have. It requires a bit of tenacity to uncover but actually, everything you need to get started is at your fingertips. Let’s look at what it takes to start hacking.

First, there’s the core BrowserPlus javascript API. The latest copy is at http://bp.yahooapis.com/2.0.4/browserplus.js

In this file are all the functions outlined in the code samples along with a full under-the-hood look at what is going on in many of the calls. The two key functions you’d need to know are init() and require(). (See the linked samples for usage.) Putting this together we can create a simple local file, test.html:

<html><body></body>
<script class="javascript"
   src="http://bp.yahooapis.com/2.0.4/browserplus.js">
</script>
<script class="javascript">
  YAHOO.bp.init(function(res) {
    var greeting;
    if(res.success) {greeting = "BrowserPlus says, Hello World.";}
    else {greeting = "BrowserPlus is hiding.";}

    document.body.appendChild(document.createTextNode(greeting));
  });
</script>
</html>

This is a simple document that will attempt to initialize BrowserPlus. If it succeeds, it writes “Hello World” to the document body. If you run this sample in your BrowserPlus-enabled browser it will fail. Why? Currently, BrowserPlus is restricted to Yahoo! sites; that includes restrictions for running local files. A simple addition to our test file exposes the error:

  else {greeting = "BrowserPlus is hiding. ("+res.verboseError+")";}

The error BP_EC_UNAPPROVED_DOMAIN confirms the local domain (file://) isn’t permitted. That means it’s time to dig into the BP configuration files. On Mac these are in

  /Users/[you]/Library/Application Support/Yahoo!/BrowserPlus/

On Windows XP, you’ll find them in something akin to

  c:\\Documents And Settings\[you]\Local Settings\Application Data\Yahoo!\BrowserPlus\

and on Windows Vista…

  c:\Users\[you]\AppData\Local\Yahoo!\BrowserPlus\

In the Permissions folder is a file similarly named which is what we’re looking for. Opening it up we see:

    "whitelist" : [
	"^http(s?)://(.*)\\.yahoo\\.com$",
        "^http(s?)://(.*)\\.yahoo\\.com:[0-9]+$"
    ],

The intuitive addition to this list is:

    "whitelist" : [
	"^http(s?)://(.*)\\.yahoo\\.com$",
        "^http(s?)://(.*)\\.yahoo\\.com:[0-9]+$",
        "^file://$"
    ],

The file is modified, but BrowserPlus hasn’t picked up the changes yet. The clean way to force this is to close all open browser windows. (BrowserPlus shuts down when no pages are using it.) The dirty way to do this is to search for BrowserPlusCore in your process list and kill it using your favorite platform-available tool. Either way, after opening test.html back up we should see our “Hello World.” Sweet - now we’re ready to start playing.

There is one final catch. BrowserPlus is fairly proactive about security so it helps to know that the permissions file will be overwritten on a regular basis. The savvy way around this would be a simple build script or at least a handy copy of our modified permissions file that we can use to reapply the changes in between development sessions. We might also test for BP_EC_UNAPPROVED_DOMAIN somewhere in our init callback to scream if the temporary development environment is disrupted.

That’s a lot of under-the-hood detail, but the takeaway is that BrowserPlus was more-or-less designed to be hacked. Not hacked in the “I want to steal innocent users data and delete their files” sort of way, but in a manner that allows experimentation and freedom without compromising the security of pedestrian users. There’s more there to be mined, but enabling local development is a good place to start. Good luck and cheers to all the curious and creative souls.

After 3 years of hiding out in the campuses of Yahoo! it’s good to finally have something external to show for it. Most exciting is the release of BrowserPlus, a software and software distribution framework that allows device developers (desktop, mobile, etc.) to seamlessly bridge the browser programming environment (DHTML, JS) to any component they can dream up (VoIP, image manipulation, data caching, etc.). Some time ago we created a platform team to focus on device software at Yahoo! and this is what has emerged amidst the quickly shifting strategy of the mothership. The 1.0 release of BrowserPlus is intended only for use by Yahoo! sites to enhance customer experiences; however, in the coming months, developers might expect the ability to use components on their own sites. (If you’re interested in this, send us feedback). In the meantime, you can hack the framework on your own system after you’ve installed it to start experimenting. You can experience BrowserPlus currently through the PhotoDropper module on Mash, though direct installs are available for mac or pc. A hearty three cheers for the guys that made it happen - Lloyd, Gordon, Dave, and Steve.

Also this week was the official external launch of Fire Eagle, a platform for sharing your physical location in the world, to developers. This is the second public-facing project to launch from the team we started in San Francisco back in late May, Brickhouse. (The first was BravoNation.) Dopplr is one of the first sites to make use of Fire Eagle, updating your location to Fire Eagle once a trip begins or ends. You can expect wider exposure of Fire Eagle in the coming weeks as more developers ready their apps for the service, creating a complete ecosystem of location-sharing apps - from geo-friend-finders and SMS location updaters to location savvy search tools. Finally, location apps don’t have to be a closed system solutions. The whole team (Jeannie, Sam, Kevron, Rabble, Simon, Seth, Phil, Marc, Mor, and Salim) will be celebrating and evangelizing in SXSW this week, though a special congratulation is in order to Tom who carried the product from skunk works to research prototype, and delivered it at public launch this morning.

An interesting parallel between these projects, aside from their timing or my contributions, is that both employ Ruby in significant ways - significant, not necessarily to the scope of the app, but to the future of the language itself. Fire Eagle is the first Ruby on Rails application to be publicly launched at Yahoo! (a technical stunt on all fronts, indeed), and has the potential to be the most significant test of scale for the Rails platform on the Internet. BrowserPlus is making use of Ruby through an runtime engine component that allows for other components to be written in Ruby rather than compiled OS-native languages. That is, load the Ruby Engine component into BrowserPlus, then write your own component in Ruby that leverages any gem on the planet to offer up new functionality to your applications in the browser. It’s all super easy to do, but we are getting ahead of ourselves in suggesting you write your own at this point. Still, it’s all exciting for the world of Ruby.

Both BrowserPlus and Fire Eagle will be easier to get your hands on in the coming weeks, but if you want to play with one of them now it’s best to go through Mash for BrowserPlus and Dopplr for FireEagle - so you have a chance to see each platform working in practice. If you need an invite to any of the above, just post a comment to this article with your email address (no worries, it won’t be exposed).

I’m popping open the RSS reader less as of late, but today I caught that Matt logged a post thanking Clinton on his unsolicited evangelism of Kiva. Reading through Clinton’s recent interview on MSNBC I can’t help but feel an astounding glow about what’s going on.

Over 12 years ago I worked for Clinton in the West Wing. I didn’t think much of him then - I’m not sure why (perhaps its always easy to dislike politicians) - I was mostly excited about working with this evolving thing called ‘the web’ in the context and influence of the executive office. Still, it was immensely humbling to be in his presence. Of the two times I met him, I couldn’t get much more out that quick pitch for supporting overseas educational exchange programs. He listened, responded earnestly. You had some sort of feeling that you were in the presence of a gentle giant.

I’d say with every year since the passing of the last election, my respect for him has grown (and for Gore too, for that matter). Watching these men retire from their DC personas and redirect their fame and fund raising capacity to speed the snowball of work for global social change and bolster the realized potential of the tiny organizations with bright ideas in this space - well, it’s simply magical. It embraces a hope that were not just experiencing a fad or being exploited by clever marketers - the culture that is emerging is one that will care for the world and see through to solving of the problems with which we’ve been challenged.

More specifically, it is utterly mind blowing that this man who is, for all practical purposes, unaccessible to most of the population yet has seen the world and its macro-problems more completely that I ever will, completely understands the Kiva model down to the finest detail and endorses it as scalable and capable of fatally impacting the enormous problem of re-dispersing the world’s wealth. He respects my dearest friends and our labors more than I’ve ever extended the same to him. It just makes me stop and thank God for letting me be a tiny part of something so beautiful.

Two weeks ago I stopped by a friend’s gallery opening entitled Conditions are Perfect. Admittedly, I made the detour in my Friday evening because of the intrigue aroused from love of the Conchords. However, the show was great and George’s collection on display was fantastic. Perhaps even more impressive was the explanation they put together on how this classic quip from Business Time related to the objective of their collective artworks. Supplementing this essay was a brief statement by Chason Matthams explaining his collection specifically. It resonated well with me in addition to larger theme itself, even though I found his edgy organic late-Guston-esque work less accessible.

your day to day, the pattern, can be a prison you must design for yourself in order to deal with not pursuing the triumph of real joy. not addressing what you truly want creates a terror so large that an entire existence of numbed out living is created in order to mask it. the prospect of joy so grand that the fear of not attaining it makes the work that must be done to do so seem daunting and impossible. instead we opt for the meaningless that we then put all value upon, seemingly easier work and living, moments of happiness increasingly fleeting. a system that branches out sucking away more than it will ever reward you, both of those directly associating with you and of yourself. the result is joyless.

– Chason Matthams

Though I hadn’t planned on it, I suppose this is a more fitting time than any to comment that I’m doing something new now. For the past 3 months or so I’ve been working as a part of the Brickhouse in San Francisco. After 5 years of working at Yahoo! it was time for a change, though I never expected to still be tethered (however loosely) to the mothership in Sunnyvale. Especially in light of this quote, the first few months have been fantastic. Every day is different and certainly I’m full of more joy than I have had in a long time. In my yesterday I can sympathize with ignoring a notion of routine to break from downtown by bike and celebrate with Kiva on their 100,000 user. The city itself has a healthy rumble of unpredictability that sustains our own disorder which itself is well-greased by a welcome rabble of Anarchists, rebels, and freethinkers comprising our majority; and, our organization by design is buzzing with a sea of ideas and projects - both formal and informal. The result is an environment that while not always sensible or comfortable, is truly a delight to be in. Though I’m sure this, and even more so - my life, is many journeys away from the artist’s ideal it is propitious change that it is hard not to wish I had made earlier.

Last Wednesday was one of the happiest days of my life. There were many good things about Wednesday, but the dominating glow came from seeing Kiva on the Front Page of Yahoo!. Ever since Daily Kos spiked traffic to wipe Kiva clean of inventory, I’ve been waiting to see the day when the impact of Kiva justified a place in the most visible real estate of the Internet, and when we were able to handle the load such attention would present.
Perhaps more importantly, years of anticipation were fulfilled in seeing two of the most influential spheres in my life run tangent at the most significant of points. I’ve been begging groups at Yahoo! to do something meaningful with the audience, cause, or even spirit of Kiva for well over year. Only in our wildest dreams did we think that Yahoo! would give Kiva real estate on the front page (and certainly not the feature story). As it turns out it is more rewarding to see that the eventual intersection had nothing to do with my interactions in Sunnyvale and everything to do with the work that is going on in the Mission and in the partner countries. There were no favors done, no presentations acted on, and no compromises made on either side. Kiva was presented before the largest of all populaces solely on account of you, the viewers and the lenders. You voted with your clicks and love won.

I haven’t been writing much recently (perhaps because the number of would-be updates are overwhelming), but some things must be shouted about to whomever will hear them. (bonus points when the events border on the traditional definition of historic.)

Ian writes on Internet radio silence taking place today in protest of rate hikes for the broadcast of music. He does a fantastic job at explaining how this whole situation unfolded; if you plan to be following news on this, his write up will be a fair and balanced guide to navigating the “he said” - “she said” to transpire. Ian loves music (specifically the parts prime for recording and distribution) more than anyone I know personally. His life is devoted to it. The fact that he (now being the GM of Yahoo! Music) is accused as employing resistance to the new legislation as a front for securing “high profit margins” on radio is fantastic fodder for some early Tuesday morning laughter. I mean, to claim that any part of Yahoo! Music is turning fantastic profits is humorous enough, but to imagine Ian as a sleazy two-face money-hoarding executive is somewhat akin to painting Howard Zinn as secretly funding strongholds of racial discrimination and persecution to secure the quality of material needed for another bestseller.

Stepping back, this is all very tragically beautiful to me. Radio advertising is starting to implode. As Ian explains, the answer is

…painfully simple: we’re still in a crossroads where old businesses and policy makers simply don’t understand or believe the realities of a new and growing business.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that audiences have already chosen a path forward, the advertisers were running too far behind to see which way the listeners went, and the rights owners are still dumbfounded that there’s even an intersection in the middle of their golden expressway. Napster was disruption. It was supposed to be the alarm clock for the earthquake. This, however, is the first crack in the crust. Royalty collectors can’t collect fast enough from new media so they are their tightening the hold on what they have and are strangling Lewis & Clark in the process. But don’t blame them or the audiences - it is the advertising industry’s fault.

I’ve never thought of it this way, but somewhere along the years (though certainly in the 80s) we made advertising such an unappealing and distasteful industry to the innovators and social revolutionaries that a disproportionate number of would-be entrepreneurs has ignored the profoundly profitable problems to solve caused by respective shifts in the technology of media consumption. We’ve been so creative in the numerous ways we’ve made it more stimulating and convenient to consume our movies and music that we (the innovators) forgot it is an ecosystem critically fueled by sponsored persuasive messaging. That’s not to say such sponsorship is therefore intrinsically symbiotic to content, but we were all quite naive in thinking we could decouple them now without an economic implosion (both of finance and of content). And so, without advertising infrastructure that is innovative enough to connect us (the audiences) with the advertisers in ways that are as deep and controlled as the relationships we have with our new media, business deteriorates eventually to give way to rapid crumbling.

It is for this reason that I’ve come to appreciate the thinkers who were too cool for search algorithms and spectrum analyzers, and instead began to dream up keyword auctions and real-time content-to-ad binding. Bravo to Overture, AdWords, and all of the small minorities doing creative thinking in the advertising space. “Bravo” in the most cliché of deliveries because though the efforts have been valiant, our infrastructure is still so primitive and broken that we might as well have put USAID in charge of it.

I’ve been saving the more pleasant imagery for last. The metaphors in my head birthed by the word “crossroads” got me to thinking - reminiscing even? - over what advertisements were like in the Wild West. What ever happened when the cities lost their populations to 40 acres and the 49ers? Certainly Fairway wasn’t ready to post billboards on wagon trails. Between saloon post pinups, traveling sideshows, and streetwise salesmen advertising must have been pretty durn entertainin’ (if my Hollywood stereotypes are to be believed), not to mention interactive and well-targeted. It would be interesting to know if there is a story there - and something to learn. Still, it helps me imagine a world where persuasive messaging is welcomed as helpful, efficient, and easily debunked when malicious or deceptive. Then, perhaps, I’ll let it wrap its fingers around my content again - or at least that for which I’m not keen on paying.

In the meantime, sit back, relax, and watch the music industry crumble. Go get popcorn, come back, and watch print and video follow naively in its footsteps as if a rehearsed comedy. Meanwhile if you want interactive Internet Radio to listen to through it all, don’t forget to write your representative.