I miss a good old fashioned hackathon. So imagine my joy when I heard that my favorite professional organization in Portland — PDXWIT — and Kiva — which has a Portland office — were collaborating on a hackathon to explore interesting and creative ways to make use of the data that Kiva has available through its unique microloan platform. And I got even more excited when, like every good hackathon, I heard that folks were getting to show off what they built.
Kiva is a social impact organization with a mission to expand financial access to help underserved individuals and communities thrive. In partnership with local lending institutions over the past 15 years, we’ve crowdfunded microloans to over 3.5 million borrowers in more than 90 countries around the world. We also build secure, open-source infrastructure connecting government identity systems with financial services and payments infrastructure.
We are hosting this pilot annual hackathon to bring together students, companies, and social impact leaders to focus on how we might better use technology to scale access to capital for small businesses, farmers, students, and entrepreneurs around the world.
Yesterday, they revealed the projects that had bubbled to the top as favorites.
Third place: Kiva lending map
Second place: Kiva communities
First place: Kiva achievements
For all of the projects that came out of the hackathon, visit the Kiva Hackathon on Devpost.
[Full disclosure: PDXWIT served as mentors in residence for PIE. I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE.]
