2014 Google Summer of Code Wrapup – Bigger and Better than Ever

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It’s been just over a month since the 2014 Google Summer of Code program has officially concluded so now that things have settled down it’s due time to recognize our fantastic students, their dedicated mentors, and their long-lasting contributions they have made to the community. Each of our students excelled in their projects and have cemented themselves as anchors in the community, eager to contribute more code and continuing as they’ve done this summer. A huge thank you to Google for allowing us to be a part of GSOC – Carol, Cat, and company have done a remarkable job with the program in its tenth year.

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Mifos to Speak at FinDEVr San Francisco

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We are proud to take the stage as a bronze sponsor at FinDEVr San Francisco this week. Billed as the First Event for Fintech Developers, we’re eager to showcase our game-changing Mifos X platform to the world’s leading players in the fintech space like MasterCard, Visa, and Paypal. Organized by the Finovate Group, “for the first time, FinDEVr will gather together hundreds of the builders – devs, software architects, CTOs, VPs of engineering – that are forging the future of financial, banking and payments technology in a single place.”

James DaileyWe are excited to open their eyes, likely for the first time as well, to the massive opportunity there is to bring financial service to the 2.5 Billlion Unbanked at the Base of the Pyramid. James Dailey will be on the main stage on Day 1 to give a talk introducing our Mifos X platform, and the innovative new business models that our a modern componentized API-driven architecture enables. As the world’s one true open platform for financial inclusion, we give innovators the power to build mobile and cloud-based solutions that scale and respond directly to the rapidly evolving needs of clients worldwide.

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2014 Mifos Summit – Kampala, Uganda

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We’re excited to be hosting our third annual summit and coming to Africa for the first time. Raj Jain and the team at Yako Microfinance will welcome us to Kampala, Uganda for our annual gathering to unite our community across the world who are using, supporting, and building the Mifos X platform to advance technology-enabled financial inclusion. Once again our summit will be four days long from October 14 to October 17.

Apart from the opportunity to network and connect with fellow community members, this year will have an even larger focus on hands-on training for partners and users, collaborative tech sessions for contributors, & educational sessions led by external experts from the fin-tech & financial inclusion sector.

As we look to stimulate and grow our East African community, one entire day of the summit will be focused on building awareness of Mifos X for the local East Africa region including an Expo Hall for our partners to showcase their solutions to local and regional financial institutions.

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Mifos OSCON Recap

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oscon2014_logoIt’s become an annual tradition for our Mifos team to gather in Portland for a week of reaching out to new contributors and immersing ourselves in the latest in open source technology and communities at OSCON. This year we had a busy week with the Community Leadership Summit, our quarterly Mifos Initiative board meeting, an exhibition booth in the non-profit pavilion and a speaking slot on the Business and Javascript tracks at OSCON.

Once again throughout the hallways and in our conference booth, our initiative was very well-received. In general, the sector is  familiar with microfinance and their curiosity is piqued when they discover our initiative, an open source platform for delivering financial services to the poor. This year I noted a larger presence of financial services people more heavily involved in open source, including regulators, payments providers, and those involved in alternative currencies like Bitcoin. We are interested in bringing to bear their skills in both open source technology and financial services.

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Ishan’s GSOC’14 Experience with Mifos

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Story So Far

gsoc-aspirant@mifos: Finding Organisation….[Done]
gsoc-aspirant@mifos: Introduction to Developer Community….[Done]
gsoc-aspirant@mifos: Finding a Project….[Done]
gsoc-aspirant@mifos: Contributing – Iterating – Contributing…………………………………………….[Done]
gsoc-aspirant@mifos: Selected @ Mifos
ishan@mifos: Developing Android Client………………….[Working]

 

androidThis is my first experience as an open source developer for an organisation and undoubtedly it’s been awesome so far. Working alongside experienced developers is always fun, for I love learning from others’ experiences.

Writing code that others can contribute to as well had always been a challenge, until I started with my android-client project. What can give nightmares to others is now a child’s play for me. A cool thing about Mifos is that I just don’t have one mentor, but anyone I ask for help behaves like a kind mentor to me. Always ready to help! Full of zeal and readiness to clear all your doubts! Read more

Paul Maritz

Mifos Initiative Launches Mifos X Platform

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June 11, 2014 – San Francisco, CA

Mifos Initiative Launches Mifos X Platform for Financial Inclusion : Free and Open Source Software for Financial Institutions Bringing Financial Services to the Poor in Developing Countries.

Mifos X was officially launched at a hugely successful event in San Francisco. Over 100 people from the tech industry  and non-profits attended the launch event. The event was graciously hosted by Paul Maritz, our chairman, at the Pivotal Labs in downtown San Francisco (Paul is CEO of Pivotal).

Paul opened the event with exciting remarks about the power of platforms and how Mifos X has been completely rebuilt as a open platform that brings together providers of capital with the poor that can use that capital to lift themselves out of poverty. Paul forecast that as an open platform that encourages innovation in financial services for the poor, Mifos X will be a global force in financial inclusion. Paul sees the next five years as being instrumental for Mifos. Read more

A Light-hearted Look at our 2014 GSOC Interns

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At the start of the program, we gave you a quick look into the professional and academic backgrounds of our intern class. Now we want to take a more personal and lighthearted look into the lives of our interns. We’ve got an interesting class that comes from various backgrounds with some intriguing standout personalities – make sure you get the chance to know them over the summer.
Some common threads in their fun facts – several of them love to eat and one of them loves to drink – it even makes him more productive. They’re all drawn to our project because it’s so unique – not only do we have a technology stack that’s in-demand, we’ve got a diverse and active community that embraces its newcomers, and our social mission tops it all off nicely.

Meet the 2014 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

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gsoc-2014

It’s official. Coding for the 2014 Google Summer of Code has now begun. Once again we’re lucky to have a diverse and talented group of students interning with us this summer. This year we have seven interns from four different countries who will be working under the leadership of our mentors from six different countries.  They’ll be working on a wide spectrum of projects that range from the back-end platform to the front-end community app, on down to mobile apps used directly in the field. By the end of the summer, our community will benefit from a native Android app dedicated to making field staff more efficient, a mobile app for enabling Pay as you Go Solar Energy transactions, a vastly improved user experience for our community app, enhancements to our data migration tool, a batching API that will unlock performance improvements across the entire platform, as well as a powerful ad-hoc reporting tool and evolutions to the client impact portal to a production-ready release. Read more

Mifos at LinuxFest Northwest

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This past month we had the chance to experience LinuxFest Northwest for the first time. Over the years, we’d heard many good things from Adam Monsen and Bill Wright had always stopped by our booth to invite us to come. Their unique northwest logo always captivated us and given it was directly in our backyard, we had no excuses not to intend when we were offered a free booth as a Community Supporter.

This year, Ollie and I hosted a booth in the Exhibitor Hall for two days and got to meet hundreds of potential new supporters and contributors. It turned out to be one of the most well-run conferences we’ve attended and we look forward to returning for many years to come – hopefully we’ll get Vishwas to speak next year!  It’s a shame it took us to the 15th year of LinuxFest Northwest to finally come but LinuxFest Northwest has clearly perfected their conference over all those years and should be proud of their efforts.

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Mifos X On FLOSS Weekly

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Vishwas Babu and I had the pleasure of being guests on FLOSS Weekly on April 9, 2014. FLOSS Weekly is a live talk show hosted by Randal Schwartz that features the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community. This week Randal was out so we had a blast chatting with Aaron Newcomb and Dan Lynch about all great opportunities the Mifos X platform presents for financial inclusion. Check out the video below or download the audio or video to watch later on.


FLOSS Weekly 289 – Mifos X

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