Projects

Location: Not accessible

Created: November 2007

Supporting Technology: PHP, CSS, FBML, MySQL, XML

The Giving Tree was an application developed on the Facebook platform as part of a Stanford course on developing web applications. The main goal of the course was to create two Facebook applications in teams of three - one focused on virality and using metrics as a part of the development process, and one focused on some aspect of education. My team chose to use The Giving Tree in addressing each of these assignments.

Our application was created to raise awareness of an organization called Kiva (http://www.kiva.org), located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kiva is a non-profit that facilitates microlending to entrepreneurs in developing countries by others through PayPal. Although Kiva could not give us the resources to fully integrate with their servers, we were able to strip data off of their XML feed to bootstrap our application together. The development team consisted of three class members in addition to myself - Jaime Koh, Raghav Himatsingka, and Kalvin Wang.

In particular, The Giving Tree was an application that allowed Facebook users to view the profiles of Kiva entrepreneurs and "support" those businesses. Supporting meant that the Kiva profile was displayed on that user's Facebook profile page. Once 25 Facebook users support a business, we used funds that were donated to our application to give a $25 loan to that business.

Over the course of about 4 weeks, we donated approximately $1,000 to various entrepreneurs on Kiva's website thanks to a heavily engaged user base numbering around 2,000. Although we did not expressly meet the goals of the course, we felt that using a platform like Facebook to inspire social change was very important. This application received a warm reception at presentations for BayCHI (http://www.baychi.org) at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and for about 500 people who came to Stanford for an application expo of all the projects from the Facebook course. Unfortunately, the application is no longer working, as we ran out of both financial and development resources to continue maintenance.