Google Summer of Code 2013 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time

This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time.The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) and it’s Mifos X project will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the third time. Mifos X is an open source technology platform for enabling financial inclusion to the poor. Google Summer of Code is a global program sponsored by Google that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects.  Students accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from June 17 to September 23rd and upon successful evaluation receive a $5000 stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications open April 22! You can apply from our organization page.

We have been extremely pleased with the students we’ve worked with in summers past including Udai and Kojo, who was the first GSoC graduate from all of Africa.  Both Udai and Kojo have spent time on our team as full-time contributors and are now returning as mentors this year. Our community and a stellar team of mentors is eager to help you be a part of our mission of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries.

What is Mifos X?

Mifos X is an open-source cloud-based platform for delivering financial services to the poor. We use open source technology and the power ofcommunity to scale financial inclusion worldwide to achieve our shared vision of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries, a world where each individual has access to the financial services to create a better life for themself and their family. We connect the on-the-ground organizations serving the base of the pyramid with open source contributors building applications on top of the platform to enable financial inclusion to the poor.

Mifos X is our next-generation software providing a completely extensible platform with a full API so anyone can build applications to fight poverty.  Our current software, Mifos 2.6, empowers more than 1.1 million clients who are served by the 45 microfinance institutions who use Mifos as their back-end information system to process, track, manage, and report on the portfolio of financial services they’re delivering to their clients.

Financial inclusion is a proven tool for helping the poor escape the grips of poverty and create a more dignified life for themselves and their families. You may wonder how technology can help a loan officer traveling out on a motorbike collecting payments on a tiny loan to a group of women. You’ll be astounded at the dramatic impact technology can have and as part of our project you have the unique chance to utilize cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing and mobile banking to scale the impact of financial inclusion.

Why We Want You

• Be part of the broader HFOSS community working on projects to advance social good in the world
• Collaborate with a diverse global community of developers, local technologists, and on the ground financial-service providers.
• Develop a fond awareness of the challenges in bringing financial services to the poor and play a key role in helping to overcome them.
• Work on top of a modern technology stack built with leading open source frameworks like Java, Spring, MySQL, RESTful services, and more.
• Flourish professionally and culturally as you communicate and interact with our community and team of rockstar mentors.

What You’ll Work On

• Outbound SMS Integration – when you’re living on less than $2/day visibility into your financial standing is all the more critical – you can help build out functionality to allow microfinance clients to receive balance notifications, payment reminders via SMS
• Simplifying Data Tables – understanding the client is everything in financial service to the poor – you can help build an interface to allow MFIs to capture surveys that will help them deliver better services to their clients.
• Enhancing the core platform – we have a number of projects to help strengthen our Java-based platform and RESTful API – you can help to automate API documentation, enable server-side pagination and improve multi-tenant caching and overall performance of our system
• Reporting and Data Analytics – want to help create the Bloomberg for microfinance? You can help Mifos integrate with XBRL reporting format to allow MFIs to automatically report their data to central bodies like Mix Market. Just like for any enterprise, business intelligence is vital – you can help MFI management perform analysis on their data to design more innovative and responsive financial services.