Google Summer of Code 2018 – 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 seventh time. You’ll have the have the chance to build web and mobile apps for digital financial services or contribute to our award-winning Mifos X open source technology platform powered by Apache Fineract or brand new Apache Fineract CN application framework for digital financial services. 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 14th to August 14th 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 March 12 now through March 27! You can apply from our organization page.

Want to learn more? Browse our ideas page for projects and links to all our code repositories. Click below to view the screencast from our Ask Me Anything held on Thursday March 15 at 1200GMT.

View the Screencast from our Google Summer of Code AMA

In 2017, we worked with twelve stellar interns who came to us from across the globe and made vital contributions including brand new client-facing mobile banking apps and mobile wallets, critical improvements to the platform, dramatically enhancing the usability of our web apps, and improving the technical foundation of our platform. 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 7 million poor clients are being lifted out of poverty by the 300+ 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 and opening up our brand new Generation 3 software, Apache Fineract CN, to external contribution.

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

If you join our community for the summer, you’ll be hooked for the rest of your careers, as part of a project and community, you’ll:

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. 2017 interns, Rajan, Kumaranath, and Nikhil have all gone on to work for numerous partners and fintech startups in our community.

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.
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. We’re seeking students who are deeply passionate about our social mission and want to be long-term members of our community.

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

Fineract CN

We just released Generation 3 of our open source software for financial services to the poor. Fineract CN is a cloud-native microservices-based application framework for digital financial services to the poor. You’ll be some of the first developers to contribute to this groundbreaking new architecture.

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

Fineract CN Live REST API Documentation – this project will focus on using Spring REST Docs to deliver live API documentation that does not need to be maintained manually allowing front-end/mobile developers to easily contribute
Fineract CN SMS & Email Notifications – for this project, you’ll develop a brand new microservice enabling clients to get notified about events occurring on their accounts.
Fineract CN Mobile 2.0 – last year marked during GSOC marked the development of the first mobile field operations app on Fineract CN. This year we’ll extend it to support new features and architectural enhancements.
Web UI for Microfinance Institutions on Fineract CN – the current Generation Mifos X/Apache Fineract solution focuses on group-based lending methdologies. The initial web UI of Fineract CN is for teller-based operations. This project would built out a web UI similar to that of Mifos X.

Fineract/Mifos X

Our award-winning Generation 2 Apache Fineract platform and Mifos X distribution is in use by more than 300 financial institutions worldwide serving more than 7 million clients.

Web Apps

AngularJS Web App Enhancements – Building off of our 2017 GSOC project which revamped our web app with improved workflows and wizard UIs, weant to continue refining the design and usability of the app.
Browser-Based Offline Access – you’ll help to bring to completion our 2016 project on extending HTML 5 offline support throughout our web app.
Online Banking App 2.0 – Using our self-service APIs, you’ll build on top of the first version of our AngularJS online banking app providing an omnichannel banking experience to the underbanked.
Self-Service Admin Portal – now that we have self-service APIs and more client-facing apps like mobile wallets and mobile banking apps, the web UI for staff needs to be more comprehensive to manage interactions with these self service users including improved user management, configuration of look and feel of client-facing apps, management of tasks, and customer support/communications.
Notifications Framework – you’ll continue to extend the notifications framework worked on in 2016 and 2017 by adding more default notifications to the system.
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 5.0 – Our mobile field operations was originally built by a GSOC intern and ever since has been maintained and continually updated through GSOC. This year, both new features and architectural improvements will be the focus of 5.0.
Mobile Banking App 3.0 – Last GSOC, we built out a solid mobile banking app, Mifos Mobile, which we’ll now be extending with connections to external payment systems, improved data visualizations and in-built chat/support.
Mobile Wallet 2.0 – in 2017, we implemented a lightweight mobile wallet framework and some initial applications on top of it. This project will add additional wallet capabilities and build out consumer and merchant-facing wallet use cases for various markets.

Modules

Mifos Payment Gateway – you’ll continue extending the mobile money integration project from 2016 and 2017 to provide a bridge to seamlessly connect with any mobile money provider.
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.
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

Mojaloop Integration with Fineract – for this project you’ll configure and deploy a lab environment that integrates Fineract as a digital financial service provider system with the Mojaloop open payments platform and protocol APIs to demonstrate what a modern payments ecosystem can look like.
Credit Bureau Integration Phase 3 – continuing the 2016 and 2017 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.

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.
Static Analysis of Apache Fineract CN – 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.

For a full list, browse our 2018 Google Summer of Code Ideas page.

What are you waiting for? Join us this summer in fighting poverty with financial inclusion. Introduce yourself on our mailing lists, chat in Gitter, and get started contributing. Applications open up on March 12.