Introducing the Mifos Partner Council

When we launched the new Mifos Initiative, one of our biggest goals was to give the community more ownership and accountability for the direction of the platform and growth of the community. It’s my pleasure to formally introduce our Mifos Partner Council, a formal advisory council to the Mifos Initiative staff and board.

Comprised of members of the Mifos Partner community, its role is to provide recommendations for creating a sustainable Mifos user community by building a better Mifos platform and a stronger partner community. Specifically, the Partner Council is intended to provide input in areas including, but not limited to the following areas documented in the Partner Council Terms of Reference:

Mifos Product

• Product Planning
• Product Standards and Quality Assurance Processes

Mifos Partner Community

• Partner Program Criteria
• Partner Training and Certification
• Global Marketing and Business Development Activities
• Partner Branding / Co-branding

While advisory in nature, the Partner Council is also intended to be a working council, with council members assisting the Mifos staff with drafting and reviewing documents to help grow the Mifos product and partner community.

The Partner Council is made up of all our gold-level partners and because we want to have a council that broadly represent the diverse needs of our community, we also have three positions for partners from each of the other certification levels – silver, bronze, and contributor.

Our Gold Partners have been convening for the past several months on a monthly basis and we recently just added two members to the Partner Council as they give feedback on the candidate product roadmap for 2015.

Partner Council Members

Join us in welcoming the our Mifos Partner Council comprised of our gold partners:

• Conflux Technologies from India, represented by Binny Gopinath Sreevas and Nayan Ambali
• hewe from Burundi represented by Jean Pierre Gashami and Auguste Niragira
• Musoni Services out of Amsterdam, represented by Cameron Goldie-Scot and Sander Van Der Heyden

They are joined by our other partners:

• Miagstan Solutions out of Ghana, represented by Ernest Simpe-Asante
• Pison Solutions out of Ghana, represented by Patrick Asare-Frimpong

The Partner Council has been busily reviewing both the 2015 Product Roadmap as well as our Branding Guidelines which we’ll soon be circulating for feedback.

Partner Roundtables

One of the most valuable assets in our community is the power of our collective mind and the knowledge and lessons learned we can share together. Nayan and Sander thought it would be beneficial to have a regular community-wide call for partners to discuss challenges they’re facing with implementations, product gaps, sales, business development, and more. To that end, the Partner Council will host a bi-monthly Partner Roundtable via GoToTraining that will cover a new topic area each session.

Our first Partner Roundtable will be this Thursday November 20 at 1400GMT and we’ll be discussing pricing strategies. Striking the right balance between value to the customer and covering your costs is of critical importance. As partners bring solutions on the Mifos X platform to market across various geographies, there are many shared lessons and obstacles we’ve overcome. This meeting will be an interactive discussion to collectively identify best practices for pricing solutions, services, and support of the Mifos X platform.