2013 Mifos Summit Recap
Amid the hustle and bustle of the summit, we shared a couple of posts recapping the vigor and vitality of the opening days of the summit. Now that we’ve all settled back into our day-to-day routines, we want to look back on the 2013 Summit, rekindle that energy, and map out what lies ahead for 2014.
First off, a tremendous thank you to Paul Maritz, the lead sponsor of the summit as well asGoogle’s Open Source Programs and the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program who came on as silver-level sponsors. Their financial contributions made possible the scholarships to bring so many delegates to the summit and the selection of such a world-class city and venue in Jaipur. A huge thank you to Amit Jain, and all the staff of Digamber Finance for welcoming us to Jaipur as the local host guiding all the preparations and assistance during the summit that made it such a memorable event.
2013 Mifos Graduating Class for Google Summer of Code
I’m proud to now call our interns, affectionately known as A Team – Here’s Y, graduates of the 2013 Google Summer of Code program. The three months of coding flew by in an instant so I marvel at the amazing work our interns made across all areas of the platform. Hats off to our students and a huge thank you to Google for inviting us to be a part of Summer of Code once again. Apart from the dedicated efforts of our students themselves, the biggest gratitude must go to our team of mentors, Gurpreet, Michael, Udai, and Kojo who selflessly guided our interns on their journey throughout the summer. Michael Vorburger put this summer in perspective in the most beautiful and perfect of ways:
“How amazing is it that GSoC gets four students – from Germany, from China, from Sri Lanka and from India, coached by mentors from India, Ghana, and, Switzerland – to collaborate purely in cyberspace together on adding features to a microfinance platform… the world truly is flat”
Ready for New Heights at the FI2020 Global Forum
Fresh off an invigorating and breathtaking summit that united our community from around the world, Craig Chelius is off to represent the Mifos Initiative at the Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum in London. We are gracious and honored to be one of a select group of Innovators who have been invited to attend the summit, which kicked off today. As we launch the first true open platform for financial inclusion, we’re eager and ready to partner with hundreds of delegates who will be at the summit. Mifos is a game-changing catalyst for technology-enabled business models and we’re delighted for the chance to help the industry as a whole, re-discover the new Mifos Initiative.
Reflections on Day 2 of the Summit
One striking takeaway, I’ve seen at this year’s summit which shows the evolution of the project moving towards a true community is how hands-on and engrossed all audiences at the summit have been with the Mifos X product and platform itself.
Being together face to face has helped to heighten this participation even more. This all speaks to how valuable this gathering is and how important our local chapters will be for enabling this at a regional level on a more frequent basis. Training. Training. Training – we need to double down on it for users, Specialists, and Developers alike.
2013 Mifos Summit in Jaipur has Begun!
A quick post to let the community know the summit has begun. We’re only one day in but already we’ve grown incredibly from our inaugural summit in Bangalore last year. Amit has helped us pick an amazing world-class venue that we’ve filled to capacity – the comfort, cuisine, and hospitality are unmatched. We’ve nearly doubled the number of attendees with more than 75 including so many first time attendees and brand new members of the community. We have also more than doubled the amount of content in our agenda – and even stayed on schedule for the most part of Day 1 until the final day’s session ran long.
Conservancy and COSM announce the Mifos Initiative
The Community for Open Source Microfinance (“COSM”), in conjunction with Software Freedom Conservancy, is proud to announce that COSM will assume full stewardship of Mifos®, an award-winning free and open source software platform for microfinance, effective immediately. Conservancy, a non-profit fiscal sponsor for Free Software projects and the previous non-profit home of the Mifos project, will assist in COSM in the transition and will donate all the Mifos copyrights, trademarks, and domain names to COSM.
In turn, COSM plans to reunite the project and brand under the name, Mifos Initiative, and will serve as both the new non-profit home for the Mifos project and as the community hub for developers, microfinance institutions, vendors, development consultants, and users that together comprise the Mifos community.
Google Summer of Code – We’re Halfway Home
Put on your socks and lace up your shoes. Our Google Summer of Code interns are racing along and making amazing progress. We just passed the midterm evaluation point and all our projects are well on-target for completion. Since you all aren’t a part of our weekly check-ins or daily status updates we wanted to give you a glimpse into each project and what the interns are readying by the end of the summer. We also got a nice shout-out on the Google Open Source blog.
OSCON’s about to Kick Off!
I’m eager to get to Portland to kick off an exhilarating week at OSCON with the Community Leadership Summit but am stuck at the airport with a delay. CLS is always a blast and this year our Executive Director, Craig Chelius, will be joining me. Looking forward to discussing fundraising, launching local chapters, engaging non-technical users, and stimulating application development in our ecosystem among the many topics in community development.
Continuing into the week, OSCON will be a reunion of sorts and a chance to harness the power of our collective minds. Two of our board members, Zaheda Bhorat and Dave Neary will be in town along with advisor, Steve Thomson. I’m eager to make strong headway in charting our community forward heading towards our 2013 summit in Jaipur.
