Tag Archive for: Team

Welcome to Seattle – SolDevelo!

Hello Everyone!

This past weekend, one of our premier early partners, SolDevelo (http://www.soldevelo.com), opened their Seattle office, expanding all the way from Poland. To celebrate the event, they were kind enough to invite some former members from the Grameen Foundation and the Mifos team to attend their opening celebration. I, Drew Fass, was lucky enough to be the Mifos guest of honor.

The Mifos Initiative began as an open source project under the Grameen Foundation. The Grameen Foundation was formed by Alex Counts, to further the mission of Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering efforts in microfinance. HiIMG_0063s method of Grameen Joint Style Liability lending, in which all the women in a community were jointly responsible for everyone else paying off their loan, is what our first generation of Mifos software supported. SolDevelo was a key contributor in our shift out of the Grameen Foundation into our own non-profit. They were also pivotal players in the ongoing evolution of Mifos 2, our first generation of our open source platform. Since then, they’ve continued to work closely with the Grameen Foundation and other international development NGOs on the West Coast.

After arriving at their office, I was welcomed by a group of other SolDevelo supporters, including some key Mifos contributors from back when the project was under the tutelage of the Grameen Foundation. These members included Adam Monsen, Software Engineer and Kay Chau, Technical Program Manager. It was great to see that even 5 years from our departure from the Grameen Foundation that it’s original members are still able to connect over common ground.

All in all, it was a wonderful day at SolDevelo’s new headquarters. We would like to thank Krystian and Jakub for their hospitality and we wish them the best of luck in future endeavors.  

Welcome to Seattle!

2013 Mifos Graduating Class for Google Summer of Code

I’m proud to now call our interns, affectionately known as A Team – Here’s Ygraduates of the 2013 Google Summer of Code program. The three months of coding flew by in an instant so I marvel at the amazing work our interns made across all areas of the platform. Hats off to our students and a huge thank you to Google for inviting us to be a part of Summer of Code once again. Apart from the dedicated efforts of our students themselves, the biggest gratitude must go to our team of mentors, Gurpreet, Michael, Udai, and Kojo who selflessly guided our interns on their journey throughout the summer. Michael Vorburger put this summer in perspective in the most beautiful and perfect of ways:

“How amazing is it that GSoC gets four students – from Germany, from China, from Sri Lanka and from India, coached by mentors from India, Ghana, and, Switzerland – to collaborate purely in cyberspace together on adding features to a microfinance platform… the world truly is flat”

 

Read more

We Call Them our A Team – Here’s Y

Earlier this week we gave you a brief glimpse into the professional and academic backgrounds of our interns. You’ll certainly be seeing and hearing often from our interns his summer but we wanted to share a few personal details to help you get acquainted. We asked each of them a few questions – their responses show that they’re a fun-loving yet focused group that will make this summer unforgettable.
Keith came with a clever nickname that I couldn’t resist using – the “A Team”. Everyone’s first name begins with “A” except for Yanna. Send us your suggestions on how we can incorporate her name -apart from making the Y silent 🙂

Read more

SolDevelo: Nimble Java Ninjas Fighting Poverty from Poland

soldevelo_1200We want to take the chance to highlight one of the top contributors to our community, SolDevelo, based in Gdynia, Poland. They are a telling example that no matter where you are located in the world, you can play your part towards creating a world of 3 Billion Maries.

Finding talented Java developers is always a challenge, especially given the complex business requirements that Mifos supports. Yet our team is always impressed that whatever project we send to SolDevelo, they quickly and thoroughly deliver a solution of superb quality.  Their nimble team is always up to the challenge, ready and willing to work on new features, fixing bugs, building reports, quality assurance – whatever our users need for a better product. Many thanks to Jakub for writing this post to highlight his team and the work they’ve done on the Mifos project.

Read more

Uncovering the DNA of a Great Team

Mifos & ThoughtWorks teams discover the keys to successful global collaboration.

bootcamp_art_2Recently the Tech for Microfinance team has been going through the McCarthy Bootcamp, a teamwork laboratory, to help bring our team into alignment and closer to greatness. BootCamp is transforming us into a high-performance team, fully aligned around a shared vision so we can ship a great Mifos product faster to our customers.

Thus far, our team has completed two BootCamps; one with our US-based staff and then a second follow-on BootCamp with our software engineers and professional services staff from around the world. This past May we held our 3rd BootCamp with the newest member of the team Joe McNulty, and four participants from our newest strategic technology partner, ThoughtWorks. Bringing together the ThoughtWorks team from Bangalore with our Seattle staff we aimed to form a strong team that would eliminate the time zone and geographical distances. The following is a highlight of their achievements throughout their 3 day BootCamp:

Read more