User Meetup - Join Us Thursday April 26

Update: We had a great turnout for our April 26 user meetup - a dozen people turned out to catch the demo of the Mifos-ACC accounting module led by Shiva from Hugo Technologies.  We had several new meetup participants from our Africa community so happy to see you there and look forward to you attending again in the future. Notes from the meeting have been added to the wiki and if you'd like to see how Mifos-ACC works, check out the video demonstration. 

Thank again to those who attend our last User Meetup on April 12. George Lteif from Al Majmoua shared a nice presentation that helped to connect the community over similar challenges being faced. Here's a link to George's presentation and the notes from the meeting if you weren't able to attend. 

We'll be having another upcoming community-wide user meet-up on Thursday Apr 26 3:30pm GMT and would like to get as many users to attend once again. Here's an invite you can add to your calendar.
 
We want these meetings to be a time to share these common challenges and build bonds as we all take on technology together. These meetings occur every 2 weeks and are a forum for you to connect with other users and implementers of Mifos to get help with issues you're facing and share feedback about the product. 
 
Here's the agenda so far:
  • User Presentation from an MFI in India. 
  • Demonstration of Accounting Proof of Concept from Hugo Technologies and FinA
  • Introduction of Mifos X Individual Lending functionality
  • Discussion of Volunteer Opportunities 
  • Discussion on Improving Client Protection in Mifos
  • Outreach on the Ground Blog Series

Here are a few posts we've made to the blog since our last meeting that we'd like to highlight:

Mifos on Mashable.com - Microfinance: Why Open Source Means Bigger Impact

Mifos and The Community for Open Source Microfinance had the chance to be featured as part of Mashable and GE's World at Work series. This series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. I did a brief interview which they captured in this post, Microfinance: Why Open Source Means Bigger Impact. The pieces give a tight simple overview of what we do and our vision for the future. The Mashable community is a great audience to bring more visibility to our project - young, tech-savvy, and socially motivated. More than 1000 people have shared our story on social media. 
 

Demonstration of Mifos X - Test it Out Now!

This past week John and Keith Woodlock shared the first cut of Mifos X, the individual lending module. As outlined in their interview on our blog, Mifos X, represents the future vision for Mifos and our next generation platform.  It's being built in parallel to Mifos and will have functionality incrementally added to it over time.  We have started with individual lending and you can test it out on the demo server or view this YouTube video demonstration of Mifos X Individual Lending.  We could really use your help in testing this out and telling us how we can improve it. If you primarily practice individual lending, they're looking to bring more MFIs on board and would eagerly welcome you as a pilot user. They'll work with you individually to shape the functionality that you need. Read their post to the users mailing for full details on logging into the demo server.

Regional Community Champions - Lead your local Mifos Community

In celebration of National Volunteer Week, we shared a post outlining the many ways to get involved as a volunteer.  One new way that we're looking for support from our implementers is in the role of Regional Community Champion. A major goal for this upcoming year is to increase the level of local collaboration by bringing community members together face to face in each region. In many regions from India to East Africa to Southeast Asia, we have got some hotspots of activity bubbling up. We're seeking individuals in the community who can cultivate some of these on-the-ground activities and plant the seeds of regional Mifos community hubs - it'll start with serving as the main contact person for your region, helping to make sure mailing list posts in your region get responded to, capturing requirements and then will hopefully grow into organizing workshops and meetups to bring people together.  If you're interested in being the Regional Community Champion for your region, let me know!

Outreach on the Ground Blog Series - Share your Story!

One of the biggest benefits of our community is the sense of belonging and our unified commitment to our vision of 3 Billion Maries. We can strengthen those bonds that hold us together and deepen the connection our developers have to MFIs and borrowers on the ground by seeing how you all are using Mifos on a day to day basis. We launched a new series on our blog, Outreach on the Ground, to focus on our MFIs and the work they do each day. This time we shared some updates from African users, Nuru International and Lumana. We can only tell your story if you share it with us - this blog series is a compilation of the blog posts, newsletter stories, and updates you share about your organization.  Please send them along so we can highlight them in this series and post them on Facebook. 
 

Congratulations to Chetan Bekkinkeri - Mifos Star Contributor of the Month 

You've probably had a conversation with him discussing what you want to see in the product or you've seen him on the mailing lists or one of his many posts to the wiki.  Chetan Bekkinkeri from SunGard heads up the Community Product Management team. He's been working to take all your feedback and business needs for the product and package these up as functional specifications so our developers can build and deliver these features to you. Chetan is a critical link connecting our users and developer community. Join us in thanking him as we recognize him as the Mifos Star Contributor of the Month.   
2 Comments
Posted by edcable on April 24, 2012 at 11:56am