Which API functions would you like to see?

[Martin Butt]

Hi,

We are starting to plan the next generation of the API. If there are
any features that you would particularly like to see, let me know!

Cheers,
Martin

[Vijay]

Hi,

some ideas that come to mind.

1. while getting members of a team, would it be possible to sort the members list by the date
   they joined the team?  right now, we can only sort by the date the members joined Kiva.
   this way, we don't have to get all the members list, to find new members
2. a method to return overall data? number of loans, number of lenders etc
3. I understand it is usually 30 days from the date of posting, when loans expire.  still, would it
   be possible to add expiry date attribute to fund raising loans?

Thanks,

Vijay.

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[Paul Ericksen]

For #3 that is being implemented as we speak, so that you'll have a "planned_expiration_date". At least to start it will only be present for loans that are currently fundraising and new ones added (relative to the date that it goes live). This will go live with the next release (which is scheduled for next Monday)

Paul

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[Thiemo Fetzer]

Dear all,

I think a good function would be to return the teams that have lent to
a particular loan and how many team members have lent to that loan.
Right now, its virtually impossible to get that data. However, I think
it would be a nice feature for teams.

All the best,

Thiemo

[Vijay]

yes, that would be a useful function.

Also, is there any plan to expose team messages? 
right now, I can see members of a team even if I don't belong to that team (even without logging in)
but can't read the messages (even for open teams).  any reason behind that?

[Paul Ericksen]

Sorry, planned_expiration_date did not get implemented in time for the release that is going out today. It is now done and will be in the next release (2 weeks).

[MPKeefe]

Hi Martin,

I'm curious about three things:

1. Would it be easy to extend the field partner requests to include a
GET /partners/:partner_ids
ie, return public details for a set of partners? Eg, the full partner description and other statistics published on the website that could help a lender decide who to lend to.

2. What is the state of play for oauth? Are there still plans to soon allow secure requests of non-public info?

3. Do you plan on sharing the roadmap through the next 6-12 months or so?

Cheers

[MPKeefe]

Hi Martin,

Thought I had posted this earlier, but apparently it got lost in the
ether. Here goes again!

I'm curious about three things:

1. Would it be easy to extend the field partner requests to include
a
GET /partners/:partner_ids
ie, return public details for a set of partners? Eg, the full
partner description and other statistics published on the website that
could help a lender decide who to lend to.

2. What is the state of play for oauth? Are there still plans to
soon allow secure requests of non-public info?

3. Do you plan on sharing the roadmap through the next 6-12 months or
so?

Cheers

[MPKeefe]

Hi, apologies if any of these are questions have been answered
elsewhere.

* Are there any plans for a GET /partners/:ids to return details about
one or more field partners?

* What is the state of play for oath?

* Do you plan to publish a roadmap of API enhancements over the next
6-12 months?

Cheers

On Jan 24, 6:03 pm, Paul Ericksen <liquidmon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, planned_expiration_date did not get implemented in time for the
> release that is going out today. It is now done and will be in the next
> release (2 weeks).
>

> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Paul Ericksen <liquidmon...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > For #3 that is being implemented as we speak, so that you'll have a
> > "planned_expiration_date". At least to start it will only be present for
> > loans that are currently fundraising and new ones added (relative to the
> > date that it goes live). This will go live with the next release (which is
> > scheduled for next Monday)
>
> > Paul
>

> > On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Vijay <vijayaraghura...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Hi,
>
> >> some ideas that come to mind.
>

> >>    1. while getting members of a team, would it be possible to sort the

> >>    members list by the date
> >>    they joined the team?  right now, we can only sort by the date the
> >>    members joined Kiva.
> >>    this way, we don't have to get all the members list, to find new
> >>    members

> >>    2. a method to return overall data? number of loans, number of
> >>    lenders etc
> >>    3. I understand it is usually 30 days from the date of posting, when

[Noah Balmer]

I don't see why we couldn't add some more detail to partner listings at some point.  I'll file a ticket for it.

OAuth work is progressing, but slowly.  We have to nibble away at it in between working on other projects.

Because of our efforts to always make decisions based on the most recent information we have, plans for future engineering work are always flexible.  While there are areas where we intend to make progress, we often end up with changing roadmaps up until changes are actually released.  In the context of API work, OAuth is currently the next major feature we'd like to ship.  Once we have the bare bones of it working, we'll be looking at what exact methods and data we'll need to be exposing, and start considering transactional methods.  We won't know when these things will launch until they're extremely close to actually launching, so as a rule we don't give release dates for anything.  

Thanks for the input, and apologies for the clogged internet tubes and subsequent spamminess, your future messages should skip the moderation queue.

-Noah

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[MPKeefe]

Hi Noah,

Thanks for filing the ticket on partner detail listings. Does this sound like low hanging fruit?  Was starting to think about screen scraping, but that would be quite inelegant and of course potentially brittle.   

Best 

[Noah Balmer]

How low the fruit hangs depends on the fields of interest.  I don't think that adding descriptions would be particularly problematic, but I'll have to check in with some folks who have a stake in that content before doing so.  Our legal team might have concerns about providing partial information without the full context present on the partner profile pages.
There are some related descriptive fields that would be candidates for inclusion too. 
For other things, like generic country information, we'd want to add some new methods, or we might just encourage getting non-Kiva-specific country information from other public data sources. 

-Noah

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[Alex]

Expanding on the location idea a little, it would be nice to find borrowers based on a gps location and a radius.

[Vaclav]

I'd like the ability to get team members by loan count, but counting
only the loans that actually count towards the team.
For example for the Czech team, there is a page showing the top
lenders with most loans. But as of now, the loan count is the count of
all the loans made by the team member, not the count of loans made
inside the team, as that is to my knoledge curently impossoble.
http://www.taborsky.cz/kiva/ .
Thanks
Vaclav

[Alex]

I would love to have more location-based data available (latitude,
longitude of borrowers/lenders).

[Kevin O'Brien]

We do have geo location that can be used via the api

for example try http://api.kivaws.org/v1/loans/397065.xml

which has 

<location>

<country_code>KH</country_code>

<country>Cambodia</country>

<town>Kampong Cham</town>

<geo>

<level>town</level>

<pairs>12 105.5</pairs>

<type>point</type>

</geo>

For more info, go to http://build.kiva.org

-k

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[Vijay]

Some loans (US ones, for example) have country level lat/long.  The name of the city is
mentioned, so it might be possible to calculate lat/long using Bing or some other API. 

Is it possible to provide more specific lat long?

[Pim Schaaf]

Agreeing with Vaclav, I would like to be able to distinguish loans by loan attribution too.

[Paul Ericksen]

Hey Pim,

While I understand how useful it would be to do this, there are privacy concerns regarding this. While most people probably wouldn't care about exposing which team their loan was attributed to, this information is not currently visible on the site. If you belong to a team, you can see a loan made by another member in the "recent activity", but that's just a summary of recent activity. But there is no way to look at someone's list of loans and know what team it was attributed to. Changing what information we're disclosing involves messaging users and updating our legalese. I know specifically of a few lenders who would probably be livid if we started exposing that. Any time there's a change in what is public, you're going to find that there were people who were expecting it to stay private for some reason.

When you turn on Super Graphs for a user's profile (here's mine: http://www.kiva.org/lender/nuclearspike?super_graphs=1) if you're logged in and looking at your own graphs (scroll to bottom), it will show break-down by team, but this is hidden to other users. Internally, there has been some discussion about adding more privacy options where users could decide their own privacy settings -- maybe you don't want people to see your loan portfolio but you don't want to go fully anonymous (can't post team messages, can't send/receive lender messages). Then we could add features like this and default new users to a more open setting, but keep existing users at their current level of privacy with the option to show more if they wanted. I am not a product manager; I'm just thinking out loud.

To my knowledge this is not on the roadmap at this point, though I'm not on that team anymore.

Paul

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:17 AM, Pim Schaaf <pims...@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree with Vaclav. As for now it seems there is no way to distinguish lender's loans by loan attribution, is there?

On Monday, March 5, 2012 11:37:09 PM UTC+1, Vaclav wrote:

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[Noah Balmer]

As much fun as it would be to see actual locations of borrowers, their precise geographic locations aren't provided for two reasons.  One is legal and ethical. Many of our borrowers probably don't want their exact physical location to be publicly listed, and we have to respect their privacy.  The other is practical. We'd have to ask the loan officers to provide this information, and that's not feasible for many of our field partners.  There may be room, in the future, to be more precise than country coordinates while still obfuscating exact location, but that would be a big project with limited return -- not likely to change any time soon.

[Ian Danforth]

Martin,

 I would like to be able to get the interest rate charged by each partner in the partner details. (This is a primary decision point for me when lending).

Thanks!

Ian

[Paul Ericksen]

Ian, 

I agree. I currently have kivalens.org do screen-scraping to get PY and Profit numbers... not ideal.

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[Pim Schaaf]

Hey Paul,

Thanks for your extensive explanation. I understand the point you make and I'd be the last to want to upset people by changing the disclosure of information against their will.

Still I would like to further discuss the recent loan attribution listed on the site (you mentioned: If you belong to a team, you can see a loan made by another member in the "recent activity"). 

Strictly seen this information is thus not private, although admittedly somewhat tucked away and impermanent. Would it be possible to publish the same impermanent summaries through the API by, for instance, including the loan attribution data in the "GET /lending_actions/recent" method?

Privacy settings would indeed be a great solution to "liberate" the data in Kiva's databases.

Thanks again,

Pim

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:56:10 AM UTC+2, Paul wrote:

Hey Pim,

While I understand how useful it would be to do this, there are privacy concerns regarding this. While most people probably wouldn't care about exposing which team their loan was attributed to, this information is not currently visible on the site. If you belong to a team, you can see a loan made by another member in the "recent activity", but that's just a summary of recent activity. But there is no way to look at someone's list of loans and know what team it was attributed to. Changing what information we're disclosing involves messaging users and updating our legalese. I know specifically of a few lenders who would probably be livid if we started exposing that. Any time there's a change in what is public, you're going to find that there were people who were expecting it to stay private for some reason.

When you turn on Super Graphs for a user's profile (here's mine: http://www.kiva.org/lender/nuclearspike?super_graphs=1) if you're logged in and looking at your own graphs (scroll to bottom), it will show break-down by team, but this is hidden to other users. Internally, there has been some discussion about adding more privacy options where users could decide their own privacy settings -- maybe you don't want people to see your loan portfolio but you don't want to go fully anonymous (can't post team messages, can't send/receive lender messages). Then we could add features like this and default new users to a more open setting, but keep existing users at their current level of privacy with the option to show more if they wanted. I am not a product manager; I'm just thinking out loud.

To my knowledge this is not on the roadmap at this point, though I'm not on that team anymore.

Paul

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:17 AM, Pim Schaaf wrote:

I agree with Vaclav. As for now it seems there is no way to distinguish lender's loans by loan attribution, is there?

On Monday, March 5, 2012 11:37:09 PM UTC+1, Vaclav wrote:

I'd like the ability to get team members by loan count, but counting
only the loans that actually count towards the team.
For example for the Czech team, there is a page showing the top
lenders with most loans. But as of now, the loan count is the count of
all the loans made by the team member, not the count of loans made
inside the team, as that is to my knoledge curently impossoble.
http://www.taborsky.cz/kiva/ .
Thanks
Vaclav

On Jan 17, 6:51 pm, Martin Butt <mar...@kiva.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are starting to plan the next generation of the API. If there are
> any features that you would particularly like to see, let me know!
>
> Cheers,
>     Martin

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[Paul Ericksen]

If I make 40 loans, it will only show one so that one person doesn't overwhelm the activity -- but if the goal is to make some widget for a webpage or something, then that is probably all you'd need since you aren't looking for complete history of transactions for a given period. Also, I'd originally stated that you have to be a member of the team to see the activity, I was incorrect. Recent Activity can be seen by anyone, making it fully "public" info. If you had to be a member of the team to see it, then exposing it via the API would be exposing more via the API than the site. But, since that's not the case, there aren't the privacy concerns.

Paul

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[Martin Butt]

With Oauth on the horizon, "privacy settings" is something that has been discussed. Unfortunately engineers time is limited and for the time being we have opted to expose the data as if everyone had their privacy settings set to maximum.

Martin Butt | Software Engineer

Kiva – Loans that Change Lives
Join us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!

[Pim Schaaf]

Hi Paul and Martin,

If I understand correctly then, considering privacy, latest team activity (loan attribution) could be a viable API method. I for one would love to see it implemented. 

I understand the logic of regulation you posit Paul, both from the perspective of Kiva's frontend and that of app developers. I can settle with that. However, as I am interested in Kiva's data for my master's thesis of sociology I can't deny being very much interested in a complete history of transactions for a given period (and the attribution) ^^.

Hoping this can be implemented (soon). Regardless, thanks for your replies and keep up the good work :)!

Pim

On Saturday, May 19, 2012 1:00:58 AM UTC+2, Martin Butt wrote:

With Oauth on the horizon, "privacy settings" is something that has been discussed. Unfortunately engineers time is limited and for the time being we have opted to expose the data as if everyone had their privacy settings set to maximum.

Martin Butt | Software Engineer

[MPKeefe]

Hi Noah,

Any news on the Partner ticket? Would still love to be able to get some public partner details, to help in deciding what loans to fund.

All the best,
Mark