User Meetup - Join Us Thursday April 12
Help us keep up the momentum from our last user meetup where we had more than a dozen in attendance and 4 continents represented. We'll be having another community-wide user meetup on Thursday Apr 12 3:30pm GMT and would like to get as many users to attend once again. Please add this invite to your calendar.
In case you missed Srinivasa's presentation from Nirantara - here are the slides. We'd love to have your MFI as a presenter at a future meetup so please get in touch.
This agenda won't be as packed as our last meeting but there is still plenty to cover. The extra time will give you an opportunity to provide feedback and ask more questions.
- User Presentation from George Lteif of Al Majmoua in Lebanon.
- Demonstration of Accounting Proof of Concept from Hugo Technologies
- Discussion on Improving Client Protection in Mifos
- Presentation of Results of the Documentation Survey
- Additional Details on Vinolia I
Since the last user meetup - this is what you might've missed:
Upcoming Vinolia I Release and 2012 Product Roadmap.
Following the announcement we made at the user meeting, we've posted additional details on the forthcoming Vinolia I release and the 2012 Product Roadmap. The Marie we've highlighted for this release is Vinolia, a borrower from Lumana - please get in touch if you'd like to tell a story about one of your borrowers and have a release code-named after her. The goal of the roadmap is to highlight areas of the greatest need in the software and lay out the course of what SolDevelo and the community will be focusing on this upcoming year. We'll do our best to source development through volunteers but encourage MFIs to contract with local Specialists to build features that can be shared with the broader community. This is the most effective and sustainable way to advance the platform - the community benefits from shared and maintained innovation and Specialists can gain a valuable revenue stream in additional to their services and support.
Mifos X - The Next Generation
As we look towards the future and how Mifos can enable you to scale most rapidly and innovation to be added into the product by our community most effectively, we need to build Mifos as a true platform. John and Keith Woodlock, our community architecture leads, have been working on a project called Mifos X. Mifos X is creating the next generation architecture of the Mifos platform that is easy to extend for developers and lightweight and capable of massive scale in a multi-tenant environment. They are working on development of this in parallel to Mifos and are currently focused on individual lending before rolling out additional functionalities. We sat down with them both for an interview to introduce the project to the community. Stay tuned to the mailing lists for a link to a demo site for Mifos X.
Improving Client Protection through Mifos.
Going back to our Grameen roots, we want to be the technology platform that stands apart from other software because of its focus on promoting the social missions of our MFIs. Part of where we can improve is building in better client protection mechanisms in Mifos. Reading a couple posts from CGAP on disclosure and from the Center for Financial Inclusion on the Smart Campaign got me thinking about what we should be building into our software. Read this blog post exploring the topic and let us know how we can help you bring fairer and more transparent service to your clients.
