Google Summer of Code – We’re Halfway Home

Put on your socks and lace up your shoes. Our Google Summer of Code interns are racing along and making amazing progress. We just passed the midterm evaluation point and all our projects are well on-target for completion. Since you all aren’t a part of our weekly check-ins or daily status updates we wanted to give you a glimpse into each project and what the interns are readying by the end of the summer. We also got a nice shout-out on the Google Open Source blog.

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OSCON’s about to Kick Off!

I’m eager to get to Portland to kick off an exhilarating week at OSCON with the Community Leadership Summit but am stuck at the airport with a delay. CLS is always a blast and this year our Executive Director, Craig Chelius, will be joining me. Looking forward to discussing fundraising, launching local chapters, engaging non-technical users, and stimulating application development in our ecosystem among the many topics in community development.

Continuing into the week, OSCON will be a reunion of sorts and a chance to harness the power of our collective minds. Two of our board members, Zaheda Bhorat and Dave Neary will be in town along with advisor, Steve Thomson. I’m eager to make strong headway in charting our community forward heading towards our 2013 summit in Jaipur.

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mLite – First Community-Built App on the Mifos X Platform

During our previous user meetup on June 27, Cameron and Sander from Musoni BV demonstrated mLite, the first application built by a community member on top of the Mifos X platform.

Having launched the world’s first “cashless” microfinance institution at Musoni Kenya, they were looking to scale and replicate that innovative process model worldwide. Having chosen the Mifos X platform as the foundation for their MIS, they built a front-end PHP-based web interface with dashboards, custom reporting, a custom user interfaced and carefully streamlined workflows.  It’s been a pleasure to work with the team at Musoni; as winners of the Global Microfinance Achievement Award for Most Innovative Use of Technology in 2011, their input and contributiosn will help push the horizon of innovation on Mifos X.

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Take 3 also means Triple the Impact!

I wanted to give a big thank you to Deanna McCusker and the VMware Foundation for an incredible gift they made this past week. As you know, Deanna, as part of her Take 3 Sabbatical from VMware, has been designing the user experience for our Mifos X platform the past several months. She wrote about her experiences with her community for VMware Foundation’s recent #iServe challenge.  She was selected the winner of a $1000 grant for our project for her exemplary community service. Out of the kindness of her own heart, Deanna also chose to personally donate a $1000 which was also matched by VMware Foundation which means a total of $3000 has been raised for Mifos and The Community for Open Source Microfinance.

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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 🙂

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Meet the 2013 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

Google Summer of Code is one of the most exciting times for an open source project and community. It’s a chance to inject new energy into a project and help build the next generation of coders and tech entrepreneurs that are ready to contribute to HFOSS.

We’re honored to have been awarded four slots by Google for the 2013 program, the first time the Mifos project has participated since 2010.  With those four slots, we’ve selected an exceptional class of interns that I’m certain will provide tremendous contributions to our community as they themselves grow and learn from the awesome leaders in our community.

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COSM ships Mifos X Platform 1.0

Mifos X Platform 1.0 is the first official release of the completely re-architected and re-written codebase that the Community for Open Source Microfinance has been working on since the transition of Mifos from the Grameen Foundation. As the next generation of the Mifos software, we are building off of everything we learned as the industry’s first web-based and open source software. We’re pleased to release the first open source platform for technology-enabled financial inclusion.

The Mifos X Platform is at the forefront of COSM’s strategy to scale Mifos through a community-driven development model and a network of local Specialists all contributing to a global cycle of innovation.

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Google Summer of Code 2013 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time

gsoc-2013This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time.The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) and it’s Mifos X project will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the third time. Mifos X is an open source technology platform for enabling financial inclusion to the poor. 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 June 17 to September 23rd and upon successful evaluation receive a $5000 stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications open April 22! You can apply from our organization page.

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ThoughtWorks HSP team gives Mifos X community a solid footing to grow from

I’d like to give a big thank you to the ThoughtWorks HSP team. Their team has only been a part of our community a few weeks but it seems like they’ve been with us for years. They’ve helped us at a critical time in the launch of Mifos X to our developer community. They’re putting the infrastructure in place to guide a smooth transition to our community-driven development model on top of the Mifos X platform.  

Here’s a guest post from Gurpreet on what’s been keeping them busy so far.

Recently, folks from ThoughtWorks started contributing to Mifos X as part of their Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). HSP is a ThoughtWorks initiative to help Humanitarian Open Source projects by channelizing beach and volunteer time of ThoughtWorkers. Gurpreet & Deepali from the HSP team at ThoughtWorks work full-time in connecting ThoughtWorkers to Open Source projects adopted under the HSP Program.

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ThoughtWorks HSP team gives Mifos X community a solid footing to grow from

I’d like to give a big thank you to the ThoughtWorks HSP team. Their team has only been a part of our community a few weeks but it seems like they’ve been with us for years. They’ve helped us at a critical time in the launch of Mifos X to our developer community. They’re putting the infrastructure in place to guide a smooth transition to our community-driven development model on top of the Mifos X platform.  

Here’s a guest post from Gurpreet on what’s been keeping them busy so far.

Recently, folks from ThoughtWorks started contributing to Mifos X as part of their Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). HSP is a ThoughtWorks initiative to help Humanitarian Open Source projects by channelizing beach and volunteer time of ThoughtWorkers. Gurpreet & Deepali from the HSP team at ThoughtWorks work full-time in connecting ThoughtWorkers to Open Source projects adopted under the HSP Program.

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