In efforts to speed the elimination of poverty through financial inclusion, we here at the Mifos Initiative simply cannot do it alone. It takes a community of like-minded individuals who share the same vision for the future: financial inclusion and accessibility for all. Since the Mifos Initiative is a global community, it can sometimes be difficult to feel connected. To help eliminate this feeling of disconnect, we would like to invite you to join our Mifos Slack as a way of improving community engagement and communication around the initiative! 

This Mifos Slack space is a great and simple way to get involved with the Mifos community. By no means does it eliminate our other communication tools like developer mailing lists, but we see it as a way for Mifos users to more effectively communicate with one another in a more synchronous and real-time manner. 

Below are some of the benefits that you can expect from Mifos Slack which we hope will become a home for the global Fintech for Good developer community. 

Community Engagement

As a member of the Mifos Slack space, you will be a part of a worldwide community of Mifos users, partners, volunteers, interns, employees, and even general people interested in the Mifos Initiative. The Mifos Slack community is not restricted to everyday contributors, and is welcome to anyone interested in learning more about Mifos and open source. Within our Slack space, you will find different channels relating to different markets and topics. There is also a general Slack channel where you can find a wide variety of fintech and open source related material. Joining these different Mifos Slack channels of your interest is a great way to better connect with the global Mifos community.

Questions and Answers

Another benefit of Slack is the ability to ask and answer questions in a quick manner. Members of the Mifos community use our slack space to ask a variety of questions that relate to the Mifos software. Users are always willing to help with any questions or confusions you might have with the Mifos platform and usually respond within a timely matter since the community consists of people around the world. If you have any general or more technical questions, don’t hesitate to post and reach out to the community, and someone is more likely than not to give you the answer you are looking for. 

General Interest

The Mifos Slack space is not solely for Mifos contributors or partners, but is also intended for the general open source community and fintech for good. If you have little to no knowledge of open source and the Mifos Initiative, our Slack space is still a great way to learn more so you can get involved in the future. It’s also a fantastic place to share anything you find intriguing in the world relating to open source banking or fintech for good. Feel free to pose questions, polls, and comments to spark conversation and get the community talking. The Mifos Initiative is driven from our community, and an active community makes for better and brighter ideas for the future.

If you want to stay connected and up to date with the community, we here at the Mifos Initiative strongly encourage you to join us on Slack. It’s easy to join and the amount of engagement is up to you!

Mifos Slack Space Orientation

Here is a little bit of an orientation on the various channels in our slack space. 

Slack is meant to complement our existing developer mailing lists and discourse forums to provide a free-flowing space for real-time collaboration, discussing development, brainstorming new ideas and solutions, getting help, following the latest trends, and more.

We have channels for each main part of our tech stack:

• #fineract (core banking platform for customer, account/wallet, loan and savings management [gen 2])
• #fineract-cn (cloud-native application framework for digital financial services [gen 3])
• #payment-hub (payments orchestration – real-time payments, mobile money)
• #web-app (staff web UI for Fineract)
• #mobile-field-ops (staff mobile apps for Fineract) 
• #mobile-wallet (mobile wallet apps)
• #mobile-banking (mobile banking apps)

You can find all this source code in our Mifos repos or Apache repos. 

You could also join one of our working groups:

• #ai-ml
• #devops
• #open-banking
• #product-management
• #savings

We also have some other channels for general collaboration

• Need to a consultant for development on top of Fineract, hiring fintech developers for your team, implementing Mifos and need support. Post what you’re looking for in #jobs
• Need some help or general support with building, implementing, or simply using Mifos and Fineract. Post your question in #help
• Are you a proud user of Mifos or Fineract or a solution powered by our APIs? We’d love to know what you’ve built and what use cases you’re supporting by showcasing what you’ve done in #powered-by-mifos
• Come across an interesting article or report? Want to discuss the latest trends in financial inclusion or fintech for good? Let the creativity flow in #mindmeld