Kiva Light

Big news! Kiva was featured in a PBS Frontline special on October 31st. Interest from the show was so great that it brought the site to its knees. Kiva regrouped and is now running a reduced content site that channels visitors to a limited number of actions. Its kind of like what we suggested they do with their site in East Africa during the project, to avoid lengthy wait times for their partners. We called it 'Kiva light'.

Although I haven’t seen the program other than Kiva's 16 minutes I would say that they steal the show. The full program will be available tomorrow here, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/video
_index.html. For now though you can see the Kiva segment at,
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=d49a36dd0a9
e20af1bd2ec7a53c56abd.1100479. Lucky for us the Miracle Mobile Solution that came out of this project has a bit part. Matt is shown using the phone right towards the end as the program segues into a short celebration of Matt's commitment to technology.

Other than news of the show to fill in the blank since we last posted the final report was completed and will be available as soon as the site receives a makeover. We are hoping to leave the site as a stand alone representation of the project from beginning to end and continue to use the blog as a place to report any developments. For now those developments include my graduation and one conference paper submitted and another in the works. The first paper concentrates on the collaborative aspects of our project including the role of the user and developer in defining the ultimate solution.

Although the project is over and Jon and I have moved on to other work we find ourselves still hovering quite close to many of the themes of this project. We would like to continue to add some content to the blog including news of any developments or stories that are related to the project but the blog feels like its run over a tack. I guess that is the nature of a project blog when the project winds down. Must be hard to be a full time blogger.

Back to the bush

Jon and I had been waiting for the day when we could get back out to the bush with David from WEEC in Kenya and test the MMS with him. He was the test case for journal updating from the field. More than just being the credit officer operating in the most remote location he was also one of the least familiar with the digital camera and the computer. His two room office in Isinya has no technology.

He advised against a trip back out to the same clients that we had visited on our first trip because of the distance and cost of a cab and instead we went only as far as what might be considered peri-rural.

Beyond a few interface questions that whole process was very easy for him to complete and the time to find coverage was around 10 minutes in some cases. What is nice is that once he had pressed send we could leave to the visit the next client while the phone searched for coverage.

By the third visit to one of his clients he had sent a journal successfully without even notifying us so that we could capture it on video. We have some excellent video of the post in action. Between sentences he is batting away a pesky cow trying to get to the water faucet that he is seated on. All this under a vast Kenyan sky. Our access to the internet was once again poor in Kenya and we will try to post that video soon to the website.

As far as the ease of use and the coverage are concerned David was a milestone.

We celebrated a successful testing phase with few days in Mombasa.

5 in one blow

Yesterday was a bit like Christmas, gifts for all. Jon and I got confirmation that the MMS can indeed deliver journal updates to the Kiva site directly. So that means its all downhill from here. Kiva got lots of journal updates from the LiA credit officers and the lenders received those updates as well.

During the entire 7 weeks that we spent during our previous visits to the organizations that we have been working with there was not a single instance where we were able to witness the entire process of updating a journal entry from beginning to end. No matter how hard we pushed to see the entire sequence uninterrupted there was always some complication that stood in our way. Power and connectivity were by far the biggest impediments. Yesterday we saw the entire process five times in two hours.

I gotta say it was a good day.

intocontext invites you to join their new 'hotblog'

So in the same way that the multi-media message service (MMS) is supposed to help the Kiva partners post journals to the Kiva site without power and connectivity issues, we are going to try it ourselves with this blog. We will continue to post when the conditions are favorable but when they aren't we have created a new blog format. Blogger is allowing posts to be made via MMS but the service doesnt extend outside of the US so I established a new hotmail account and access to the account is listed below. We will be sending blog entries to this email where you will be able to read them.

username: intocontext
password: hotblog

When we left East Africa at the end of July one of the service providers was charging 300 Uganda shillings for the service, about 15 cents. Now that we are back we learned that another provider seems to be running a bit of a pilot on the service and is offering to send the messages FREE of charge. To Jon and I that sounds like a dare. I haven't run a check on this new blog system but I will send the first blog soon. I'm hoping to fill up that account. We will see with what consistency they actually arrive to the address.

1,2,3

Friday was a big one. We hustled down to Palo Alto to meet up with Meg Lee at the D school at Stanford for a chat. It looks like a model that I expect to see more of. Bring multidisciplinary groups together from different departments on campus introduce them to design methods and take on interesting problems that have some interest for all. For Jon and I this struck a chord with us considering that after a few days, of presentations and reporting on project developments, the Microsoft conference concluded with a call for a more human centered approach to technology in ICT for development projects. I wasn't there but I feel like the comment identifies the dichotomy between those projects that go with an answer and those that go with a question.

We presented our question to IDEO over lunch for a crowd of 20+. So happy Aaron could reschedule our presentation after a minor communications mishap on Wednesday. It was good to a see that there were plenty of folks interested in the topic. It feels like the design committed are always interested to see how design performs in new contexts.

Christina from Life in Africa was already at home in the Kiva office by the time we arrived. We discussed our plans for testing when we get back in August. She will be out of town until the 10th which will give us a good chance to work directly with her staff. Before leaving Premal let us all know that the phones we were hoping to secure were confirmed. So Christina found out that we will pilot our project with her and she stood up and waved her arms. She is a great ally and continues to support our work with her. I cant wait to run this thing with the LiA folks they respond quite freely, and Christina would have it no other way. We should be able to get plenty of results from our time with them.

#20 Jeremy Frazao

Jon picked up a book from the Microsoft conference that featured the greatest programmers of all time. I think that it is a bit biased but nevertheless we are doing our best to confirm Jeremy the #20 spot. He is developing an application based on the results of our research that will allow the credit officers to send journal updates from the field after they make visits to the borrowers. We are calling it the Miracle Mobile Solution. Blogger is already allowing its users to do this but only from within the US. Although that feature is very exciting for the avid on the go blogger the feature seems custom made for the needs of the credit officer who needs to overcome crippling infrastructure issues. The phones that we saw were always powered, which was a sharp contrast from the one day off one day on power situation. Secondly, access to the internet can be an all day affair. What the MMS does is create a channel for uploading content to the web through the mobile phone without paying to go to the internet, which is roughly 10 times as expensive.

Jeremy will go down as the guy who opened up Multimedia messaging (MMS) to the masses. From the little I understand about coding it looks like its a job of rearranging existing chunks of code that are built to accomplish certain tasks into a new permutation that accomplishes a new task. All that is done within an architecture that puts certain additional constraints on the arrangement. Jeremy?

The MMS consists of two parts, the text and a second medium; audio, photo, video. At the moment the text has been resolved but the image is being a bit stubborn. Whether we get the image to appear in the journal space or not we can still test and gather plenty of results during August. So now its time to create the plan for testing so that we can prove without a doubt that what we have developed is more than just a Mediocre Mobile Solution.

The meeting

I suppose this is what happens when you are working as a consultant for free and the person paying the bills stays quiet until the end of the project. You can’t go wrong, or rather everything seems to go right.
Kiva is an organization that is understaffed and underfunded as many non profits are. They have a to-do list a mile long and the prioritization seems to shift depending on where the fire breaks out. Fortunately Jon and I had some fireworks and were able to draw plenty of attention to ourselves while here and we got the entire Kiva crew locked down for a day long into(context) extravaganza. There were 6 Kivans and 2 interns present.

We confirmed our suspicion that the blog is an excellent design tool for communicating the results of design research by providing a connection between the context research team, the design group as well as the client. In our case we represent the first two teams. The Kiva members present had been following us since we arrived in East Africa and they were familiar with both our approach and some of our initial findings. The result was informed questions and an obvious involvement. They were familiar with quite a lot of the details that we would highlight in the presentation and it left us to concentrate on weaving those elements together to create a cohesive whole and justify our conclusions.

We set things up so that the first half of the day was a pretty much a “sit and listen.” There was quite a bit of material to go through and for us the difficulty was to narrow it all down, as almost all of it is of interest to Kiva. Jon had the presentation running of his computer and midway it went on standby and shut down so we got to have a very fitting East Africa electricity failure moment. Before we broke for lunch we covered our final conclusions. This took the shape of a set of briefs for designing an appropriate solution for the MFI’s.

We decided that with the amount of time that we have with Kiva our best bet was to present those ideas that we had been steadily creating over the past few weeks rather than start from scratch with brainstorming. The briefs were reiterated after lunch and helped the Kiva crew to critique the ideas that we presented. As hoped they helped to create a set of principles for designing an “appropriate” technology solution. Our ideas built upon or confirmed points raised in the ongoing dialog that occurs at the Kiva office and the briefs, as well as limited Kiva capacity, helped us to quickly decide on which ideas to pursue. I was particularly happy to see Jeremy defend the choice of one idea over another by using the briefs list that was projected on the wall during our discussion.

We were very much on the same page with Kiva and quickly nailed down a plan of attack for the month. Jon and I can use our time to develop a Kiva manual while the Kiva staff creates the software to support the idea of a Kiva Miracle Mobile Solution (Kiva MMS). This will be a mobile based journal updating solution for the credit officers who operate in the field with the beneficiaries. Together they may take the form of a mail out kit that can be delivered to the individual MFIs.

After the presentation we got some nice feedback on the critical side as well as the celebratory side. Whether he was joking or not CEO “Matt Flannery” tagged our presentation as “unimprovable” and said “guys before you realize someone (at Kiva) will work overnight and develop (programming) those ideas”

By the way intocontext website has been updated with the context research results have a look!