Hacking for a Cause – Mifos at Random Hacks of Kindness

I am totally psyched to be headed to San Francisco this weekend to experience Random Hacks of Kindness for the first time. We are ready to RHoK out with Mifos as one of the featured problems for December 2012.  The sheer enormity of this global collaboration puts me in awe – i really don’t know what to expect but am excited to lead our project and am sure great things are on the way.

It’s a terrific experience to spend a weekend hacking for social good. Knowing that you’re working with literally thousands of others worldwide makes it simply awe-inspiring.

That’s why we love Random Hacks of Kindness Global: 2 days + 30 countries + 3000 geeks working on making the world a better, safer place. Its mission is strongly aligned with our own at SocialCoding4Good: build awareness of technology serving humanity, engage technical volunteers to contribute their time and talents to design and develop it, and foster cross-sector collaboration to amplify its impact.

At RHoK Global in June 2012, we joined the RHoK Sustainability Project, and invited participants to build solutions addressing challenges in accessibility or human rights, two core program areas at Benetech. One solution would be selected to receive technical development leadership, and guidance toward application and organizational sustainability. We were deeply impressed by the creativity of the teams and their projects, and after a challenging decision process, selected Amnesty International’s Invisible Victims project, which seeks to leverage digital services to support migrants, making the invisible crimes against them visible, without putting migrants, their families, and networks, at further risk. Our partnership, launched shortly after RHoK June 2012, continues forward with a focus on data and digital security.

As December’s RHoK Global event quickly approaches, we are thrilled to be participating once again. We realized that our humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) partners had important roadmap projects with tremendous potential, but in many cases lacked the resources to design, prototype, and develop them. Each of these partners has established deployments and an active community, and a demonstrated history of creating transformative impact. RHoK Global presented a perfect opportunity to support the sustainability of an existing partner, and in so doing, connect individual developers and corporate teams around the globe with the chance to apply their energy, enthusiasm, and experience for social benefit.

We’ve teamed up with Mifos, The Community for Open Source Microfinance, an open source platform currently being used in 20 countries to deliver financial services to more than a million people, and HP Social Innovation, a Random Hacks of Kindness Core Partner as well as our own. Mifos is building a world where each person has the access to financial resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their family – truly demonstrating the power of technology to empower peoples’ lives every day. Mifos, HP, and SocialCoding4Good will have subject matter experts, technical leads, and developer teams at RHoK Bangalore, Dublin, and San Francisco, focusing on three key projects:

• Creating a mobile version of Mifos X, enabling information flows, processes, and transactions to be completed via mobile.
• Developing SMS communication capability, providing a simple yet powerful way for individuals to interact with Mifos via their SMS-enabled phone.
• Making Mifos more transparent by empowering staff to more easily use client information for document generation and reporting.

The contributions of global RHoK participants during the course of the weekend – and beyond – will strengthen Mifos’ efforts to scale towards a vision of enabling 3 Million Maries to create a world without poverty. Transformative impact, indeed. Won’t you join us?

Are you ready to RHoK with Mifos? Learn more at and sign up for your local event on the Random Hacks of Kindness website. We’re excited to collaborate with you!