RDVF alumni (Thomas George and Tom Munnecke) 9/29/2004

Thomas George, RDVF '03, stopped by the office after Dr. Shariq's seminar. A mutual friend, Kate, had introduced Thomas to me via e-mail after they met at a conference a month ago. So we knew there was a common interest. Thomas is working in Kenya on a project to improve the effectiveness of the marketplace for rural producers. He listened to my pitch on microcredit, and agreed that it was important, but only one aspect of a complex problem that enabled his interest group to participate on equal footing in the market. In addition, they also need: education, information (about market prices), and laws that offer protection. His current project is attempting to develop all of these in concert.

He wondered whether I should not stop with just the IT infrastructure for the bank, but rather create a full bank myself. Right now that seems very intimidating, but being able to have full control over the design and not need to worry about legacy data does have a certain appeal....

Tom Munnecke, also RDVF '03, hosted a meeting of people interested in the Omidyar Network. Although I was not able to attend the talk, he stuck around afterwards, and we went to dinner with one other attendee, Nini. Our dinner conversation wandered over a range of topics:

• IT Platform for MFI: Is it reasonable to assume that MFI's have a PC? Nini's assumption was that even the larger MFI's (10,000 borrowers) were distributed among village branches (perhaps 20) with 500 borrowers each. I think that the branches are "virtual": really just a loan officer that visits weekly, and he or she carries data/money back to the central office for subsequent data input. But it will be interesting to check my assumptions in a couple of real world institutions.
  
• Uplift scholars: Tom had started a site called the Uplift Academy. It was dedicated to the notion that any one person can make a difference. He ran into tech trouble about the same time that Omidyar.net was starting up with the same vision. So he joined the Omidyar effort. But he thought that it would be interesting to start a program called "Uplift Scholars", essentially a fellowship of people around the world dedicated to making things better. He compared it to Ashoka Fellows, but on a much broader scale (hundreds of thousands of people) but not as much financial support (probably none at all).
  
• Omidyar.net: A related function of the network is to surface worthy projects. People can attach "magnets" to ideas that they think are good. People essentially use their reputations to recommend articles to the readership at large. If people disagree with the editorial choice, they give negative feedback, reducing the influence of the recommender. This notion of selection can be applied to development projects deserving of funding as well.
  
• Feedback and network effects: Tom commented that his high reputation score would be hard to achieve if he were joining the network today. There's something of a "rich get richer" effect in the reputation process (since he is highly rated, more of his comments get read and rated). He also noted that the reputation algorithm has been intentionally obscured so that (supposedly) only Pierre Omidyar knows how it works so people can't game the system.
  
• Medical profession, hospice care: Tom reflected on some of the perverse incentives of the current US health industry. They have little financial interest in seeing people stay healthy: they're paid when people have doctor visits, hospital stays, and require medication. Even errors that cause complications are (assuming not severe enough for malpractice/negligence law suits) beneficial to the bottom line. Tom's background included some large, long-term projects implementing medical information systems. Hospitals are also incented to perform procedures which lengthen the span of life, even if the result is a lower quality life.
  
• Improv: In one of his posts, Tom mentioned that he was interested in how improv ties in to notions of collaboration and uplift. I'm also a big improv fan (and sometime performer) so we chatted a bit about some of the concepts of "Yes, and" and the like. He felt that a facilitator who laid out some of the improv guidelines had done a good job, but not gone far enough to get the full value out of it.