Mentors Meet in Mountain View, Manifest Mastery of Mentoring

Jeff Brewster and I had a great time at the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009 Mentor Summit. We were royally welcomed, well-fed, and given a great springboard for mind-melding with the other GSoC mentors.

The summit was decidedly unconference style: meeting ideas were shared beforehand but the sessions themselves scheduled and run on-the-fly. I wanted to learn more about project hosting since we recently worked the Mifos project through some issues with hosting at java.net (and ended up moving to SourceForge), so I co-hosted a session called Project Hosting Horrors. The session filled up a room and we got useful feedback from lots of projects about what works with hosting, what doesn’t, and ideas on different approaches.

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Mifos wants to Hear your Voice

We’ve recently published our listing in the CGAP Software Listings Product Dashboard – the microfinance industry’s centralized place to learn about all the management information systems available for microfinance.Check out our listing for screenshots and an overview of the Mifos functionality. Our full review will be published in January 2010 as part of the second round of CGAP Software reviews.

We’ve also launched UserVoice for Mifos – a tool to collect feedback on our product and our community – send us your ideas now!

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Widespread Reach of Open Source Community

Polly_JitegemeaThe beauty of open source community lies in the open participation and freedom of contribution that it enables. For technology to both reach and be relevant in the regions where microfinance institutions are serving the poor, open source is the means of enabling that accessibility. Within our Mifos community, through open minds and open technology we can deliver technology that accelerates growth across the industry.

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