Star Contributor of the Month – Translatewiki.net Community

Translatewiki.net

For the months of October and November, we’re showcasing the Translatewiki.net Community, who’ve supplied us a robust new infrastructure for translating Mifos and an active community of translators to maintain and extend the languages Mifos is available in.

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  This time around we’re doing a group recognition for several key members of the Translatewiki.net community. Transitioning the Mifos user interface to FreeMarker pages meant we needed to re-translate our entire software.  This could have been a nightmare but it’s been a blessing. Making the switch from Pootle to Translatewiki.net, we’ve benefited from a stable and actively maintained translation infrastructure that smoothly syncs with our Git repository.  Coupled with an enthusiastic community of translators, we’ve been able to maintain our existing Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese translations with the new UI framework and are beginning to translate Mifos into languages like Bengali, Tagalog, Telugu, Tamil, and more.

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Leila E Translations – the Final Push!

halfdomeCode freeze for Leila E has come and gone but we’re still not finished with our translations. We need to have all our translations completed.  Help us ship Mifos with versions for French, Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese.

Our Translation Sprint two weeks ago provided a great spurt and needed boost to our efforts.  Thanks to all the members of the Translatewiki.net and Mifos communities for participating. We had over 1000 messages translated that weekend and more than 3500 messages translated in total since. We’ve also yielded some good traction on new languages like Bengali, Burmese, Tegulu, Tagalog, Interlingua, German, Breton, Norwegian, Macedonian, and Dutch.
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GSOC Mentor Summit 2010

For the second year, Adam Monsen and I attended the Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. This year’s summit was held on October 23 and 24, at Google Headquarters.

We knew more what to expect this year, and maybe that’s why I felt I even got more out of this year’s meetings. Last year, I kind of stood back and attended a few of the sessions I was interested in. This year, in addition to attending some cool sessions, I hosted two sessions:  “GSOC in Africa” (http://openetherpad.org/gsoc-in-africa), and “Audio and Video for Distributed Teams” (http://openetherpad.org/AudioVideoDistributedTeams) .

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Star Contributor of the Month – Stanley Kwok

For the month of September, we’re showcasing Stanley Kwok, a volunteer who’s stepped into the role of i18n (Internationalization) champion for Mifos as we migrate our UI to FTL pages. 

Stanley Kwok - Vancouver

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Stanley recently joined our community in June but has made a big impact in that short time. Since joining, he’s fixed a number of bugs related to the Mifos User Interface, reviewed incoming patches from community members, and gained active commit privileges to the Mifos source code.  Recently he’s become our Internationalization (i18n) Champion, stepping up to lead efforts translating Mifos through translatewiki.net as we migrate to a new UI framework on FreeMarker.

 

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Summer of Code 2010 – A Journey Well-Traveled

In this post, we want to take the opportunity to thank our 2010 Google Summer of Code interns for dedicating their summers to helping end poverty.

2010_300x267px When summer comes around, the Mifos team looks forward to an energetic group of Google Summer of Code interns who are ready to dive into our project and help us push towards our vision of 3 Billion Maries.

This summer was no different as we had five interns hard at work, helping us transition the Mifos platform to its next generation architecture. From the back-end to the front-end, the contributions of our interns will bring forth a more robust product to our customers and a platform that is much quicker, lightweight, and easier for our contributors to build on.

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Star Contributor of the Month – Gayl Kennedy

For the month of August, we’re showcasing Gayl Kennedy who while leading the deployment of Mifos at Fantsuam Foundation in Nigeria, has provided a critical and discerning voice to help us improve the Mifos product.

Gayl Kennedy - Ireland/Nigeria

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Gayl is our first member of the Mifos implementer community to be recognized as our Star Contributor of the Month.  Since joining our community, she’s been an active participant on the mailing lists, helping to locate bugs and identify design and usability improvements through new feature requests

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Star Contributor of the Month – Jim Stamper

For the month of July, we’re showcasing Jim Stamper who’s lent his Drupal expertise to help improve the Mifos web presence.

Jim Stamper - Seattle, WA

Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Jim is not our typical contributor, working directly on the Mifos codebase.  He’s been flexing his Drupal and PHP muscle to help us get a solid working community infrastructure in place by project managing the redesign of the Mifos.org community site on Drupal.   

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Adam Feuer Interviewed by PayPal X Developer Network

Mifos Director of Engineering, Adam Feuer discusses our goal to end poverty, and software’s place in achieving that goal.

20100809_article.mifos_.interview.photo_.Adam-FeuerRecently, Adam Feuer, had the chance to sit down with Matthew Russell of the PayPal X Developer Network for a casual conversation discussing Mifos and how developers around the world can work towards ending poverty by contributing to our software.

Visit the PayPal X site for an edited transcript of the interview or listen to the full conversation in this .mp3 file.

Adam covers a wide range of topics including:

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Uncovering the DNA of a Great Team

Mifos & ThoughtWorks teams discover the keys to successful global collaboration.

bootcamp_art_2Recently the Tech for Microfinance team has been going through the McCarthy Bootcamp, a teamwork laboratory, to help bring our team into alignment and closer to greatness. BootCamp is transforming us into a high-performance team, fully aligned around a shared vision so we can ship a great Mifos product faster to our customers.

Thus far, our team has completed two BootCamps; one with our US-based staff and then a second follow-on BootCamp with our software engineers and professional services staff from around the world. This past May we held our 3rd BootCamp with the newest member of the team Joe McNulty, and four participants from our newest strategic technology partner, ThoughtWorks. Bringing together the ThoughtWorks team from Bangalore with our Seattle staff we aimed to form a strong team that would eliminate the time zone and geographical distances. The following is a highlight of their achievements throughout their 3 day BootCamp:

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Star Contributor of the Month for June – Keith Woodlock

Keith WoodlockFor the month of June, we’re showcasing Keith Woodlock, who came on as one of our most productive volunteers this past summer and then joined the Mifos team as a contractor.  He’s been an instrumental contributor helping to refactor the Mifos platform so it can be easier for other contributors to participate and build on top of Mifos.

 

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