Tag Archive for: community

OSCON and the Growing Influence of Open Source Technology

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Hello Mifos Community!

I’m back again with another post about yet another conference.

Over this past weekend, I was blessed with the ability to go to OSCON, an Open Source conference centered on the power that open source technology can have over a variety of industries, countries, and methodologies. From healthcare reform to open source cloud computing, this conference had an amazing variety of industries that were positively impacted by open source technology. To give you a glimpse of our weekend, I would like to both highlight a few of my favorite moments and give some insight into how the Mifos Initiative has both been a beneficiary and contributor to the open source movement.

OSCON general

Unlike most years, this year OSCON was held at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Personally, I thought it was very powerful holding the conference in Austin, (a vastly different city than its predecessor Portland) as it shows how open source is now truly a national movement and is being embraced across the country, even in areas that are historically more resistant to change. With the new venue came a host of new organizations and new speakers, all with new views and stories on how open source has helped advance their respective fields in one way or another. Below are a few of our favorites:

Performance Case Study: Capital One’s quick shift from closed source to open source

This session was especially intriguing to me, as a large bank (Capital One) is finally starting to embrace the open source movement that we at the Mifos Initiative have been a part of since 2006. After the first few minutes of the session, it was easy to see the commonalities between the big banks and our open source initiative. One common thread was the idea that banks must be a technology company first. In other words, in order to be a successful organization, the bank had to produce a banking platform that was easily scalable, user-friendly, and customizable to suit client needs. Sound familiar? All of these features are what we at the Mifos Initiative hang our hat on and are what makes the open source movement so powerful. In our age of agility, scalability, and customization, big banks are beginning to realize the power that the smaller open source initiatives, like the Mifos Initiative, are starting to have on a global scale.

Modern JavaScript Architectures: Clients, microservices, and containers

This session was more technical than the other sessions I went to but nevertheless fit very well with the third generation of our Mifos platform. For those of you that don’t know, the third generation of our platform encompasses taking our current MifosX platform and converting it to a series of microservices that we will containerize and navigate using a variety of cloud-based apps. So, as you can already tell, this talk directly correlated to the work we are doing in the conversion from our current Mifos X platform to the third generation of our open source platform. While I am currently on the business side of the Mifos Initiative, this talk helped me visualize how our platform will be set up at the developmental level. It was a great way to learn more about the inner workings of our platform and see how and why we are following the popular trend towards microservices and cloud-based apps.

Want students who are ready to contribute? Here’s what they should know.

As a student at the University of Washington, this session also struck very close to home for me. I’m lucky to have gotten the opportunity to intern for a great organization that works in the open source community, but not everyone is as fortunate as I am. For those that do not get exposed to the power of open source technology, how do we, as teachers and industry professionals help mold the future developers of the world? As a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization, the Mifos Initiative deals with this issue quite often. While we hope to get interns that are well equipped to take on any project we give them, we realize that not everyone is set up for success coming out of college. In order to maximize the production of these interns, we realize that we have to utilize the techniques given in the session to make sure all our students are ready to contribute right away so our projects will get done faster and more developers will be getting necessary experience to help them start their open source development careers.

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OSCON booth

In addition to the new speakers and exhibitor crowd, we were happy to see that a few members from our Mifos community made the trek from Cameroon to learn more about our organization and our industry. Among them was Nyah Check, a good friend of Ayuk the head of Skylabase Solutions, our partner organization in Cameroon working on creating a customized Mobile Wallet/Mobile Money application integration with Mifos. Nyahis currently in the States trying to learn as much as he can about open source technology from the various conferences he’s attended. He hopes to bring this knowledge back to Cameroon so he can build on top of the Mifos banking platform to give needed support to his community back home. He is truly an inspiration to everyone at Mifos and is living proof of just one of the millions of people that we have reached through our open source banking platform.

To wrap up, I would just like to say a quick thank you to our very own director Director of Community Programs, Ed Cable. It was a pleasure running the booth with you and I had a great OSCON experience. I look forward to many more exciting adventures with the Mifos Initiaitive over the summer!

Signing off,

Drew Fass

4th Generation Mifos Intern

2015 Winter Outreachy Intern Wrapup

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As we look towards bringing on a full class of Google Summer of Code interns, let’s reflect on our recent group of interns who completed our Winter 2015 Outreachy program with Mifos for the first time.  Outreachy was a journey for both our interns and our mentors as it brought home many lessons in communications and collaboration across an open source community as  our three interns collectively worked on our Android field operations app. After their contributions we now have a refactored and redesigned app, a wide range of new functionalities for field officers, and a mobile UI for capturing surveys.  Join us in giving a big thank you to Olya, Nelly, and Nasim, and their mentors, Ishan, Gaurav, and Markus. Read on to learn more about what they built and what their most lasting experiences from their internship were.

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Announcing Mifos X 16.01: Loan Rescheduling, Loan Loss Provisioning, Floating Interest Rates, Variable Installments & Self-Service APIs

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We’re delighted to formally announce the new functionality that’s been made available in Mifos X over the past several release cycles culminating in the Mifos 16.01 release shipped on January 12, 2016. We’ve added major new features which expand the breadth of our loan product offerings, improve risk management and monitoring of your portfolio, and enable your clients to take control of their financial services through self-service channels.

Read on below for a glimpse into the major new features including:

  • Loan Rescheduling
  • Loan Loss Provisioning
  • Floating interest rate loans
  • Variable Installment Loans
  • Self-Service APIs
  • OAuth/HTTPs toggling

In case you missed our 2016 Roadmap Webinar, check it out to learn more about what’s scheduled for development in 2016. For few details on the all the bugs and enhancements from this and the 15.12 releases, view the release notes.

Many thanks go out to all the contributors who made this release possible – especially our core team, partners like Musoni Services, as well as a number of new features that were worked on by volunteers in the community.
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Introducing our Winter 2015 Outreachy Interns

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We’re honored to be participating for the first time in Outreachy after invitations from Marina and other organizers of the program the past couple of years. Our mission of 3 Billion Maries aligns deeply with Outreachy’s goal to helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. Outreachy is the successor to the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) which was inspired by Google Summer of Code and how few women applied for it. Outreachy is now led by the GNOME Foundation and Software Freedom Conservancy.

37 interns are participating in December 2015 – March 2016 round of Outreachy. We are fortunate enough to take on three brilliant interns from across the world – Nelly Kiboi from Kenya, Olya Fomenko from Ukraine, and Nasim Banu from Canada. We are directly sponsoring one as an Includer-level sponsor and through the generous support of the Outreachy General fund were able to take on two additional interns.

We’re delighted to participate in this program that connects talented and passionate newcomers with people working in free and open source software. Our mentors will help these participants learn how exciting and valuable work on software freedom can be, while helping us to build a more inclusive community.

Visit http://gnome.org/outreachy or follow @outreachy on Twitter to learn more.

Meet our Winter 2015 Mifos Interns

All three of our interns are Android developers and we’ve got them focused on projects that will deliver tremendous value as more and more financial institutions go digital and mobilize their field operations. Nelly will be focusing on building out Version 2 of our Android field app providing new core functionalities needed by staff out in the field. Olya will be providing a refresh to the user experience on the Android field app by implementing Material Design and adding long-awaited offline functionality to the app. Nasim will be building out a mobile interface for our brand new surveys framework including the PPI in addition to optimizing our AngularJS Community App.

Mentoring our interns will be Ishan Khanna, Satya Narayan, and Gaurav Saini. Special thanks to Ishan and Gaurav who have been an instrumental part of the intern onboarding process.

Join in congratulating them on the mailing lists and saying hello! They’ll be sharing progress on their work throughout the coming months.

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2014 Mifos Annual Report

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2014 was a breakthrough year for our community as the Mifos X platform established a foothold around the globe and we proved that a platform-centric and partner-driven approach can achieve tremendous scale and impact. Take a few moments to look back at the major milestones from the past year and all the community members who made these accomplishments possible.

At a glance in 2014

  • 2.6 million clients were reached by 110 financial institutions supported by 40 local tech partners across 33 different countries.
  • 80,000,000 transactions were processed on the platform with more than $791,000,000 in loans being managed.
  • 11,630 downloads of our software from 150 countries

Announcing Mifos X 15.03: Mandatory Savings, Individual Collection Sheets, OAuth 2 Support, Context-Sensitive Help

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On April 06, 2015 we shipped our first major release for 2015, Mifos X 15.03. With the release, we’ve adopted the new release numbering framework identified by the year-month of the date of the scheduled release. Mifos X 15.03 contained a great deal of new technical and security enhancements, functional improvements to the loans and accounting module, as well as some improved usability. OAuth 2 Support as well as stricter password configuration policies will provide more robust authentication mechanisms. Bulk Collection Sheet Entry for Individual Loans as well as Mandatory Savings accounts are not supported. The loans module now allows for fixed loan product parameters, configurable working days, multiple options for interest calculation on pre-closure, greater flexibility during the approval and disbursal process for multi-tranche loans, and improved rounding off rules for EMI repayments. For the accounting module, one can now migrate opening balances as well as configure fees to be mapped to liability accounts. Last but not least, Mifos X 15.03 now has a significant amount of context-sensitive help including tooltips and dynamic help menu links.  Please view the Mifos X 15.03 release notes for full details.

UPDATE: On May 18, 2015, we shipped the first service pack or hotfix release, Mifos 15.03.1. This released contained new functionality such as a loan products that support a compounding period that is independent from the rest frequency period, improved filtering and searchability on client/groups/center listings, and nearly three dozen bug fixes and UI enhancements. Please view the Mifos X 15.03.1 release notes for full details.

Many thanks go out to all the contributors who made this release possible – especially our core team, partners like Conflux Technologies and Musoni Services, as well as a number of new features that were worked on the high school students who participated in our Google Code-In projects.

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2014-2015 Global Mifos Summit Recap

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My fellow colleagues and community members have shared a number of posts about their personal experiences at our Global Summit in Sharjah, UAE but I’m certain you’ve been waiting for the official recap. It’s hard to believe that already a month has passed since the dust settled from our time together in the UAE. There have been so many opportunities to follow up on and so much forward progress being made with the initiative that I haven’t had the chance to do the formal recap till now.

Once again our gratitude goes out to Paul Maritz, the lead sponsor of the summit as well as our silver-level sponsors, Google Open Source Programs, the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program, and Liberty Mutual whose financial sponsorships made it possible for a record number of delegates to attend the event. Education/travel stipends from GSOC also made it possible for four of last year’s GSOC graduates to attend. While we didn’t have a local host to guide the event like we had in the past, Amit Jain stepped up in immeasurable ways to help with on-the-ground coordination, supplies, and most importantly securing visas for our foreign delegates.

Global Mifos Summit – Growing & Evolving Community

  • 2014-2015 Summit

  • 2013 Summit

  • 2012 Summit

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The road leading up to this year’s summit threw a fair share of obstacles our way – after two venue and schedule changes detouring us from East Africa we finally were able to come together in a globally central location. While we weren’t able to incorporate a field visit into the summit, we were able to have the most diverse and geographically widespread participation of our all summits to date. Here are some statistics at a glance:

  • 80 delegates from 22 countries including representation first-time attendees from the following countries: Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Denmark, Burkina Faso, Germany, UAE, Nepal, Uruguay, and Belize.
  • More than 70% were attending for the first time including:
    • 22 first-time attendees from financial institutions,
    • 12 rookie platform solution partners, in attendance
    • 13 first-time delegates from deployment partners
    • 5 new volunteers, and 4 first-time board and staff

This fresh crop of summit attendees is a testament to the continued growth and evolution of our community – while the core remains in place, we continue to reach new regions and new segments of the sector.

Wrap-Up

 

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How the Silk Road turns into a path to meet Friends

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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?

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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. Read more

Global Mifos Summit Wrap-Ups

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Our Global Mifos Summit in Sharjah has come and gone in a flash yet once again it was an incredibly invigorating time and exciting to see all the new opportunities and momentum that is building across the community.

We’ll be posting photos, notes, and major takeaways from each of the sessions but we thought the best way to share the summit with those who weren’t able to attend is through a firsthand look from the attendees of our summit. We’ll start with a series of blog posts from our staff but welcome any community members to write a blog post and share.
In the meantime, if you did attend the summit and haven’t filled out your feedback form, please click here to do it now. It will only take a few minutes and help us to make our future events more valuable and effective for all in attendance.
We don’t want all the wonderful ideas or fruitful discussion to get lost so please post your notes to the Summit Hackpad.
If you took photos, please share them on our Google+ event page.

Announcing Mifos X 1.26: Improved Guarantor Management, Teller Cash Management, Configurable Account Prefixes and more

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Just in time for the new year, we shipped the latest release, Mifos X 1.26.0, on December 23 which provides a range of new functionalities across our suite of lending and savings products as well as a number of usability enhancements and bug fixes. Major new features include support for capturing guarantee requirements for loans and blocking/holding funds on guarantor accounts, a beta version of our teller cash management module, new statuses for client life cycle, the ability to map liability accounts to fees, ability to update deposit amounts for active recurring deposits, support for capture client images from a linked webcam, and functionality to configure account prefixes on client, loan and savings accounts. With the range of bug fixes and UI enhancements, there are more than 75 tickets fixed in this release. Download Mifos X 1.26 now or request a trial instance to try it out for your organization. Read more