Kiva.org microlending

My sister-in-law, Alison, gave me a gift certificate to Kiva last Christmas, and I've enjoyed it a lot. If you haven't heard of Kiva, here's my plug.

Kiva is a charitable microfinance organization. You put, say, $25 into the system, and choose a borrower to lend it to. A bunch of other people throw in some money too, until together you reach the amount the borrower asks for. A few months later, the borrower has invested the money, seen a return, and pays you and your co-lenders back. Sweet!

I've been doing this all year, and it seems to work great. I've already made 3 loans, mostly with the initial gift certificate moolah. In fact, it works so great, that I decided to start a lending team! And you can join!

If I were to send you an email inviting you to join, this is what it would say:

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Quickstart, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

I wouldn't try to replace conventional giving with this (some people don't have the wherewithal to pay you back, even though they still need help), but I love being part of it. Join Team Quickstart, and start loaning money today! Like, now!

Messy simplicity in Craigslist

Good (longish) article from Wired on Craigslist: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess.

It's enduringly strange to me that people want to "improve" Craigslist. Here's a news flash to everybody involved in the Web except for Craig Newmark: People basically want something simple that works without having to learn anything new.

We don't necessarily want something beautiful that works. We definitely don't want something complex that only works if you understand the mindset of the programmer who coded it, and if you're willing to put up with a couple of things that don't work very well. Here's the order we want things:

1. Works
2. Simple
3. Other stuff you might think is neat

Craigslist is notably unconcerned with anything past 2 on that list.

A quote from the article:

It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its 1999-era Web design. The reason is that craigslist's users are not asking for such changes.

"I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

I frequently get crap from people for my pseudo-Luddite ways -- as though I prefer to do things the hard way. That is the entire opposite of what I want. What I want is a thing that works like I expect it to work, and some built-in accountability in case it doesn't. And I want to maintain some control over the process, and be able to extract myself from it when I'm done. The number of "simplifiers" that actually complicate is so much larger than people want to believe.

I hear people bitch about how their iPhone doesn't work like they want it to. I never hear anyone complain about an iPhone they don't even have. That seems deeply simple to me. And maybe to Craig Newmark?

Update: See the related article in the same issue of Wired, The Good Enough Revolution.

Buy Nothing Day 2008

It's the magical time of year again! The time when you're tempted to spend too much money on things that people don't need! That's right, it's almost Black Friday!

Which coincides with the annual Adbusters Buy Nothing Day. In their tiresomely earnest way, they (and I) encourage all good boys and girls to buy nothing on November 28, 2008.

Maybe you'll learn something. Maybe you'll retain personal wealth for one day longer than you otherwise would have. Maybe, just maybe, you will contribute to the righteous cause of having less stupid crap in the world. It is a magical time of year, after all.

Black Friday

Thanksgiving Day is good, but I'm really thankful for the day after T'give, when people go back to their lairs and lie around quietly.

As is my yearly tradition, I almost-but-not-quite participated in Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving. For the unacquainted, here's the Wikipedia entry, and here's the Adbusters page on it.

Back in the day, I used to print BND posters, hang them in my cube, and talk it up among my friends. Theseadays, I just try to quietly observe it myself.

Regardless, in most years I wind up going out to eat on BND, and spend at least a little money. I tap on the anti-consumerism drum all year long, so I'm comfortable with a little blackness on this Friday.

Lunchtime

Craigslist does not make as much money as it could. Like, $475M less than it could, sez the Wall Street Journal.

This article is from a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to put together what I had to say.

In Mr. Buckmaster's view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street's demands for continually "goosing profitability" and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster's view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we've retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there's a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: "It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. "Now, there's something wrong in the reasoning there," he admits. "You can't run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company" -- more points for understatement. "But still, it's a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible." As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist -- and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me -- sometimes seem to come close.

The article says Craigslist employs about 21 people, and makes $25M a year. It's safe to assume that money isn't split evenly among all the employees, but I bet nobody's doing badly either.

The idea that you look to be helpful, and make plenty of money (the Buckmasters live in a nice house, after all) but not as much as you could, is very like what I was talking about when I said we make the economy, the economy does not make us.

You don't take money just because you can. You take a generous amount and leave the rest, because there's just no good reason to have more.

Here's the new scheme: Rather than concentrate the money in a vicious oligarchy, a business takes a fair amount and leaves the rest for other businesses who are also taking a fair amount and leaving the rest. This increases the overall pool of viable businesses, which generates more work for more people, and lower costs on the goods and services that already exist (due both to suppliers taking less than they could, and increased demand).

It wouldn't even be communism. Capitalism would thrive because there would be less punishment for failure. You could recover from a business failure in a fraction of the time it takes currently. It seems counter-intuitive to capitalism as we know it that this would work, but it easily could.

The reason it won't is that a significant number of us won't buy into it. We don't even ALL have to buy into it. Some miserable number of us can still be greedy bastards. Maybe even a miserable majority can continue. As long as a significant minority are willing to run this way, we'll see the rewards.

There might not be any free lunches. But expensive lunches are entirely optional.