Tag Archive for: community

Enabling Social Change through Software Development

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The Mifos community would like to extend our congratulations to Ken Banks, the 2011 Pizzigati Prize recipient, for his leadership and innovation in Mobiles for Development through FrontlineSMS. We would also like to recognize Adam Monsen, Mifos software engineer and open source evangelist who we nominated for the award for his fervent passion for open source software and his selfless commitment to empowering users and developers in our community to contribute.  

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The Tides Foundation announced this morning that it had awarded the 2011 Pizzigati Prize for outstanding contribution in public interest software development to Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS. A tip of the hat to Ken for being a true pioneer in the Mobiles for Development space.  Ken’s commitment to openness and user-based design is a brilliant example of what it takes to build a vibrant community. The strong team he’s built, the active community he’s cultivated, and the widespread adoption along with specialized adaptation of FrontlineSMS serve as a blueprint for other open source projects.

Although he wasn’t victorious, we would like to give a pat on the back to Adam Monsen who truly embodies the characteristics of Antonio Pizzigati in helping others realize their dreams through software development.  Adam always has the interest of others at heart and is a true advocate of open source software for non profits, proof that developers can enable social change through software.  Adam breathes life and energy into our communty that makes it hum – whether it’s donning his track suit for a documentation sprint or responding thoroughly to mailing lists posts as our informal Lord of the Listserv, and as we learned today – baking a great loaf of bread ;).

Here are a few snippets from Adam Monsen’s nomination form:

What is the role of software developers in social change?

What if Farmville, an online game with tens of millions of active users, were used to drive social change rather than simply entertain?

The role of software developers in the social change movement is to bring it to scale. Developers have specialized skills and knowledge: they can build tools that unite, organize, and facilitate positive social change at a scale impossible without software.

Consider poverty, and Mifos. Say you are a microfinance bank serving ten thousand poor clients. Your business is growing, and your clients are doing well. You can prove that your bank is helping the poor to rise out of poverty. You want to grow! To get to one million clients, you need software that can efficiently track loans and savings accounts for these clients: calculating interest, reporting on progress, and integrating with other aspects of your business such as accounting so your service at one million clients is better than your service at ten thousand. 

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How has the nominee demonstrated leadership in public interest computing?

Adam Monsen is a dedicated advocate of open source software for the public good. His energy as a lifelong OS evangelist and contributor is visible in his effort to ensure openness and transparency in Mifos development. Looking back on the growth in participation in the community, it wouldn’t have been possible without Adam. He is the grease that makes the community run smoothly. Adam is always involved – activism, documentation, ease of collaboration, improving our software, even helping to resolve legal issues. He is the most active voice on the mailing list; first to welcome a new volunteer and always quick to respond on #mifos IRC.  Every time I search for information, it’s easily found because he has put in place a tool so that all documentation, discussion, and decisions are open, indexed, and available. Adam helps to grow the community too – he initiated participation with Google Summer of Code, led talks at OSCON and on FLOSS weekly, and collaborates with HFOSS projects like OpenMRS. The Mifos software wouldn’t be where it is today without Adam – as the team re-architects Mifos, he makes it’s a priority to incorporates best-in-class open source components to ensure it is robust and actively maintained. 

Ken is in good company with previous winners of the Pizzigati Prize which include our peers, Yaw Anokwa of OpenDataKit and Darius Jazayeri of OpenMRS. We look forward to hopefully joining them in 2012.

Mifos User Meeting – a Big Success!

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imagesLast week we held our first ever online Mifos user meeting and it was a big success with 44 people from 12 countries in attendance. Despite some hiccups with the logistics of GoToWebinar, the turnout and participation was fantastic.  The mix of people attending was just what we were looking for – existing Mifos users as well as new potential Mifos users, Specialists supporting MFIs implementing Mifos, and contributors strengthening the Mifos platform. We got to hear some detailed feedback from new users like I.Can Capital Microfinance in the Philppines and valuable insight on product architecture from long-time Mifos veterans like Terry Wong, who is still following our project even after volunteering 5 years ago.

It was the perfect time to share what’s been going on, take a closer look at the new features in our most recent releases, and unveil a huge step forward, the Mifos Business Intelligence Suite.  The questions and feedback were invaluable.  We are definitely going to have user webinars like this again and do it more often, covering more topics that you want to learn about. While planning is underway for a global developer summit in India this summer, we’re also looking to potentially host a global Mifos user conference in a year.  We’d love to know if you’d like to attend in the comments.

Check out the presentation below and our 4 main takeaways from the meeting after the jump!

4 Take-aways

Looking back the user meeting, there were four big take-aways:

Show what we’re building.

Our product team is doing a lot of great work and shipping a ton of new functionality. You, our community,ppi
need to understand and see how that technology works. We showed some screenshots and did a live demo during the user meeting but we need to be more visual and demonstrative about what’s new in the product. It’s easy to read over a list of features and not fully grasp the power of what’s inside and what you can do with Mifos. With Questions Groups, we’ve really opened up the potential to collect rich data and information about your clients; we now have integrated social performance measurement through PPI, and our M-PESA integration is coming just in time as Safaricom looks to roll this out across Africa. Business Intelligence is a major focus for the product going forward; our Mifos Business Intelligence Suite 1.0 is only just the tip of the iceberg. The demo we gave prompted a lot of questions and we’ll soon share more about the new standard reports, the data warehouse, and the exciting capabilities of Pentaho like dashboards and ad-hoc reporting that are on the horizon.

Listen to what you need.

listenDuring the user meeting, we were overwhelmed with questions and feedback across all subject areas. From mobile data entry to accounting integration to offline capabilities to Know Your Customer requirements for India, you had great feedback about where you want the product to go. We really need to listen to what our users need and be agile in building out the product to respond promptly to evolving market conditions. The refactoring of the code into a more modular framework is positioning us to release new features faster. A more layered architecture and framework for plug-ins also means that you, external contributors, can build new functionality more quickly as well. It’s only through a combination of listening, capturing feedback, and a platform that enables our team to develop quickly and external developers to work effectively, that we can evolve our product to keep pace with the microfinance sector. We’re working to build out better mechanisms to capture feedback but for now, read this page on requesting new features and stay tuned to our roadmap for updates.

Get technical.

During the user meeting, we also had a lot of questions about using the product, configuring the product, andhelp
customizing the product. We encourage you to voice these questions on our developer and user mailing lists. There you can get a quick response from our team or any one of our worldiwde users or contributors in the Mifos community. We also have great documentation. Technical and systems admininstration documentation is on our wiki on MifosForge. User documentation and how to configure the product is on payments.mifos.org. Processes and tools for deploying mifos can be found  in our deployment toolkit along with live case studies in our deployment project pages.  If you can’t what you’re looking for, let us know how we can make it more accessible or what you want to see. With that said, you can only get so much help online or through email and nothing beats talking through a problem with a real human being. We’ll try to have more of these user webinars covering different topics based on your feedback – some will be more technical, others more strategic and business-focused.

Share what you’re doing.

Picture Downloas 2.6.10 136From the sheer number of people who were on the call to the growing number of deployments, there’s alot of activity going on in the Mifos community. Unfortunately, most of you probably don’t know about it. During the user meeting, Nayan from Conflux Technologies in India gave an impromptu demonstration of the Offline Collection Sheet Entry module he was building.  It was moving to see how impressed and gracious Duffy, representing Lumana in Ghana, was after learning about this new discovery and connection in the community. For the community to grow, it needs to be aware of this activity; we need to build these connections, which will increase the sense of community and in turn enable more collaboration. If you haven’t, check out some of the social features on payments.mifos.org like our regional user groups and user profiles that we’re using to build community. For the latest news, follow @mifos on twitter, subscribe to this newslog and sign up for our newsletter. We’re also ramping up our presence on other sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Here’s just a small snapshot of some recent community activity:

Listen photo courtesy of ky_olsen via Flickr | Question photo courtesy of matt.hutchinson via Flickr.

Mifos Specialist pushes forth in Mozambique

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Miguel Jóia representing Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique recently presented Mifos at the 10th anniversary celebration of ICC Mozambique.

A Toast to the Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique

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Building on the 10th anniversary of the ICC Mozambique, members of the Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique presented on the 8th of December their Mifos-related services for various Microfinance Operators, regulators and funders.

The Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique has been in the market since February 2010 and completed in September its first Portuguese Mifos deployment for a Mozambican MFI. Mifos partners, SBS (Miguel Jóia), ICC (Henriqueta Hunguana) and Afrisis (Natu Lauchande) represent this Mifos Specialist providing value-added services for the Mifos platform and expressed their commitment to disseminate and implement the Mifos system in Mozambique and other Portuguese speaking countries.

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Star Contributor of the Month – Translatewiki.net Community

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Translatewiki.net

For the months of October and November, we’re showcasing the Translatewiki.net Community, who’ve supplied us a robust new infrastructure for translating Mifos and an active community of translators to maintain and extend the languages Mifos is available in.

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  This time around we’re doing a group recognition for several key members of the Translatewiki.net community. Transitioning the Mifos user interface to FreeMarker pages meant we needed to re-translate our entire software.  This could have been a nightmare but it’s been a blessing. Making the switch from Pootle to Translatewiki.net, we’ve benefited from a stable and actively maintained translation infrastructure that smoothly syncs with our Git repository.  Coupled with an enthusiastic community of translators, we’ve been able to maintain our existing Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese translations with the new UI framework and are beginning to translate Mifos into languages like Bengali, Tagalog, Telugu, Tamil, and more.

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Leila E Translations – the Final Push!

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halfdomeCode freeze for Leila E has come and gone but we’re still not finished with our translations. We need to have all our translations completed.  Help us ship Mifos with versions for French, Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese.

Our Translation Sprint two weeks ago provided a great spurt and needed boost to our efforts.  Thanks to all the members of the Translatewiki.net and Mifos communities for participating. We had over 1000 messages translated that weekend and more than 3500 messages translated in total since. We’ve also yielded some good traction on new languages like Bengali, Burmese, Tegulu, Tagalog, Interlingua, German, Breton, Norwegian, Macedonian, and Dutch.
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Star Contributor of the Month – Stanley Kwok

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For the month of September, we’re showcasing Stanley Kwok, a volunteer who’s stepped into the role of i18n (Internationalization) champion for Mifos as we migrate our UI to FTL pages. 

Stanley Kwok - Vancouver

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Stanley recently joined our community in June but has made a big impact in that short time. Since joining, he’s fixed a number of bugs related to the Mifos User Interface, reviewed incoming patches from community members, and gained active commit privileges to the Mifos source code.  Recently he’s become our Internationalization (i18n) Champion, stepping up to lead efforts translating Mifos through translatewiki.net as we migrate to a new UI framework on FreeMarker.

 

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Star Contributor of the Month – Gayl Kennedy

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For the month of August, we’re showcasing Gayl Kennedy who while leading the deployment of Mifos at Fantsuam Foundation in Nigeria, has provided a critical and discerning voice to help us improve the Mifos product.

Gayl Kennedy - Ireland/Nigeria

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Gayl is our first member of the Mifos implementer community to be recognized as our Star Contributor of the Month.  Since joining our community, she’s been an active participant on the mailing lists, helping to locate bugs and identify design and usability improvements through new feature requests. 

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Star Contributor of the Month – Jim Stamper

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For the month of July, we’re showcasing Jim Stamper who’s lent his Drupal expertise to help improve the Mifos web presence.

Jim Stamper - Seattle, WA

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Jim is not our typical contributor, working directly on the Mifos codebase.  He’s been flexing his Drupal and PHP muscle to help us get a solid working community infrastructure in place by project managing the redesign of the payments.mifos.org community site on Drupal.   

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Mifos FLOSS User Manual Sprint

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Want to help fight poverty? Grameen Foundation is updating the user manual for its Mifos software, an open source management information system (MIS) that helps microfinance institutions more efficiently deliver loans and other financial services to poor women around the world. The actual content of the new user manual is almost complete but there’s tons to do to get it published in FLOSS Manuals. We need your help! This one-day sprint will be dedicated towards formatting, proofreading, and standardizing the text towards agreed-upon writing conventions. Read on to learn more!

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Star Contributor of the Month for February – SunGard

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Each month we’re going to honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world. Volunteers commit countless hours of their time, energy, and knowledge into building and extending the Mifos platform to make it accessible to microfinance institutions serving the poor. For the month of Feburary, we’re showcasing the entire team at SunGard Technology Services in Bangalore, India who have been working closely with the Mifos team for the past year helping to strengthen the core Mifos platform, dramatically increase the performance of Mifos for our customers, and providing direct implementation services to our community.

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