How the Silk Road turns into a path to meet Friends

Contributing the first post in our summit wrap-up blog series is Markus Geiss, who attended his first Mifos Summit, and will soon be joining the team full time as Chief Architect. Read on to hear Markus’ tale of his time in Sharjah.

On Monday March 9th I boarded the plane to fly to Sharjah and meet with the Mifos Community at our annual summit. I was all alone and didn’t know what to expect. As I left Sharjah on Friday March 13th my heart was filled with impressions and new friends.  What happened?

It all started immediately upon my arrival in Sharjah. I met the Conflux Gang right at the airport. As we reached the hotel a crowd of people from all over the world already awaited us and gave us a hearty and warm welcome. During the course of the following three days it simply felt like meeting good old friends who we have not seen for a while.

We had a bunch of different sessions every day both business and technology related. The Community felt at home with the things on our agenda and contributed a lot of new, never before thought of ideas to push our initiative even further.

The needed transformation of the platform serving only microfinance into an open ecosystem for all kind of financial services to create a Core Banking System for Financial Inclusion was well received. Some Innovators felt a relief that we are evolving the platform into a broader ecosystem and allow them to even do greater things with it (a tip of the hat to Javier from $ERO Dinero Electronico).

Everywhere we had side conversations and I simply was overwhelmed how much the work of the Community is appreciated. Sharing the same goal to create the top notch open ecosystem for Financial Inclusion simply felt awesome.

Everybody was willing to help if we reached a point where we simply had to adjust a few things. Unfortunately Vishwas was not able to make it but with the help of our friends we made a seamless experience for all. I’d like to thank Michael Vorburger for helping out with the Hands on API talk (you are an extraordinary speaker and I’ve learned so much) and taking on the responsibility for our Hackathon.

What really blew my mind was the fact that over 80 (!) people from more than 20 (!) countries attended the Summit and showed to everybody that nationality and cultural background mean nothing if you share one vision. We simply had a good time being together and created one spirit of a huge family. It must have felt like a vibrating and buzzing beehive for outsiders. We had such a great energy and wonderful conversations, it was amazing.