Google Summer of Code 2017 – 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 Mifos Initiative will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the sixth time. Mifos X is an open source technology platform power by Apache Fineract 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 May 30 to August 29th and upon successful evaluation, receive a stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications are open from now through April 03! You can apply from our organization page.

In 2016, we graduated six stellar interns who came to us from across the globe and made vital contributions on top of the platform including mobile apps, enhancements to our web apps and brand new modules. Throughout the summer and beyond, they’ve grown into long-term community contributors to the community making an everlasting impact by maintaining our mobile and web apps, serving as GCI Mentors, evangelizing the community worldwide, and even getting recognized as our star contributors.

What is Mifos X?

Mifos X is our open source, cloud-based, core banking system for financial inclusion built on top of the Apache Fineract platform. It consists of a web app, a mobile app for field officers, and a mobile app for clients, along with additional modules for data migration, SMS integration, mobile money integration, and more.  We use open source technology and the power of community 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 the second generation of our software and is being used by financial institutions of all forms and sizes worldwide. Collectively between Mifos 2 and Mifos X more than 6.5 million poor clients are being lifted out of poverty by the 250+ institutions using our software to run their operations. We’re excited to work with interns this year in building out new innovations and enhancements to this mature platform as we build towards the launch of our Generation 3 software in late 2017.

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.

Who We’re Looking For

We’re looking for students who are not only going to come and make a big impact over the summer but most importantly grow into a regular contributor that is a part of our community long into the future. Since 2009, we’ve had a history of deeply embedding our interns into our community – Udai and Kojo both went out to serve as mentors for several years, 2013 graduate Avik has worked for several partners in our community and is serving as a mentor this year, 2014 graduates Ishan and Gaurav have become our lead maintainers of our mobile and web apps and have mentored for a number of years for GSOC and GCI. Our most recent 2016 graduates, Rajan and Mohit, have gone on to become app maintainers and GCI mentors along with Daniel. 2016 graduate, Nikhil, is a GSOC mentor for this year.

So when we bring you on for the summer, we’re looking to invest in you for the long term, so you can be part of achieving our mission for many years to come.

Keys to a Successful Application

• Immerse yourself in the community – introduce yourself, participate actively on the mailing lists, online and in our community meetups. We want to know what it’d be like to work with you so during the bonding and application period make sure we get to know you and how you fit into our community.
• Submit code – in addition to being an active participant to show how you’ll interact in the community, each student who wants to be seriously considered as an intern should submit at least one pull request via our repositories on GitHub.
  • Get started with the platform and learn how to contribute:
  • Get started with the front-end.
  • Understand how the software works.
  • Fix an issue with the label gsoc in the web app.
  • Fix an issue with the Volunteer tag in Apache Fineract.
  • Fix an issue in the Android Field Client
  • Fix an issue in the Android Self-Service App
• In-depth and thought-out application – show you’ve taken the time to understand financial inclusion and the challenges yet enormous potential of technology for our customers.

Pro Tips from GSOC Alumnus, Ishan Khanna

You can also read this great post that Ishan made on Medium titled 7 things you need to know, to ace your GSoC Proposal.

What You’ll Work On

Here’s just a few of projects we’re looking to work on:

Web Apps

• AngularJS Web App Enhancements – Building off of our 2016 GSOC project which refactored and re-skinned our web app, we want to redesign many of the screens to improve usability and enforce a consistent style guide.
• Browser-Based Offline Access – you’ll help to bring to completion our 2016 project on extending HTML 5 offline support throughout our web app.
• Self-Service Web App – Using our self-service APIs, you’ll build a client-facing online banking web app allowing clients to log in, see their own accounts, view transactions, apply for loans, and make repayments and transfers between accounts.
• Notifications Framework – you’ll continue to extend the notifications framework worked on in 2016 by adding more default notifications to the system and adding in publisher-subscriber model support.
• Configuration Wizard – Mifos X is an enterprise-level core banking system and for those organizations with a local partner to assist them with configuration, it can be rather complex, this project focuses on building a self-guided configuration wizard to help cloud-based users go live with the software independently.

Mobile Apps

• Android Field Client Version 4.0 – As more and more operations go mobile, we need to improve the feature set of our mobile field officer app. This project will add support for bulk collection of savings and loans, improving data scoping and role-based permissioning, and extending offline capabilities, redesigning working flows, and integrating our notifications framework.
• Android Self Service App Version 2.0 – building off of the alpha version of self-service app, this project will center around increasing usability, adding in new functionalities, and building in mobile wallet capabilities.

Modules

• Extend Mifos Data Import Tool –  one of our most critical tools for being able to start using Mifos is migrating data from one’s previous system – this project would integrate our data import tool into the platform, support the import of additional data, and improve performance through enabling office-level imports and bulk APIs.
• Collateral Management Module – as financial institutions grow to offer more sophisticated individual lending products, better ability to track collateral and its value is needed.
• Accounting Module Enhancements – Mifos X is often both the core banking system and accounting system for an organization – this project would deliver improved end of period processing, bank reconciliation, and support for recurring journal entries.
• Insurance Claims Module – More and more financial institutions are offering insurance to their clients – this module would allow the collection of premiums and handling of claims by integrating with an open source insurance system like OpenUnderwriter.
• CRM/Complaints Handling Module – Understanding their client and delivering the highest level of service is fundamental to financial inclusion – we need to add in basic CRM capabilities for  tracking of complaints and logging customer servic requests.
• Two-Factor Authentication – Privacy and integrity of the sensitive financial data in Mifos X is a must – this project centers around adding support for two-factor authentication for staff logging in so that a OTP is generated and sent via SMS.
• Ad Hoc Reporting Module – Insight and Analytics derived from Mifos X are critical to maximizing the impact of financial inclusion on the poor – Mifos X ships with dozens of standard reports built on the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite but organizations need the ability to for non-technical users to build custom reports on the fly and easily slice and dice their data.

Integrations

• FINOCIAL.AI Integration – working with the UpScale team you’ll help to integrate machine learning build and product models and algorithms to help better manage risk and predict fraud.
• FINOCIAL.CHAIN Integration – working with the UpScale team, youll help build a private open source blockchain for enabling widespread digital transactions.
• Credit Bureau Integration Phase 2 – continuing the 2016 GSOC project, you’ll add in support for credit bureaus beyond India and improve the data and reporting that flows in and out of Mifos.
• Mobile Money Integration Phase 2 – you’ll continue to build out the mobile money integration module started in 2016 by adding support for APIs from additional countries and genericizing the module.

Platform Enhancements

• Scalability & Performance to Support Millions of Clients – As Mifos X has matured, we now have financial institutions serving hundreds of thousands and even millions of clients, we need to make enhancements to the back-end platform for optimal scale and performance.
• Rest API Live Documentation – innovation is key to the growth and impact of our platform and community – we need to make the API easier to use for front-end and mobile developers looking to contribute.
• Static Analysis of Apache Fineract –  as an enterprise-grade core banking system, security is paramount – this project would rigorously test our platform against standard security vulnerabilities and address the findings made.