Edward Cable

Reflections on Day 2 of the Summit

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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.
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Edward Cable

2013 Mifos Summit in Jaipur has Begun!

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logo_horizontalA 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.

 

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Gleb

Conservancy and COSM announce the Mifos Initiative

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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.

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Muciojad

Google Summer of Code – We’re Halfway Home

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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.

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Gleb

OSCON’s about to Kick Off!

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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.

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Gleb

mLite – First Community-Built App on the Mifos X Platform

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During our previous user meetup on June 27, Cameron and Sander from Musoni BV demonstrated mLite, the first application built by a community member on top of the Mifos X platform.

Having launched the world’s first “cashless” microfinance institution at Musoni Kenya, they were looking to scale and replicate that innovative process model worldwide. Having chosen the Mifos X platform as the foundation for their MIS, they built a front-end PHP-based web interface with dashboards, custom reporting, a custom user interfaced and carefully streamlined workflows.  It’s been a pleasure to work with the team at Musoni; as winners of the Global Microfinance Achievement Award for Most Innovative Use of Technology in 2011, their input and contributiosn will help push the horizon of innovation on Mifos X.

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Gleb

Take 3 also means Triple the Impact!

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I wanted to give a big thank you to Deanna McCusker and the VMware Foundation for an incredible gift they made this past week. As you know, Deanna, as part of her Take 3 Sabbatical from VMware, has been designing the user experience for our Mifos X platform the past several months. She wrote about her experiences with her community for VMware Foundation’s recent #iServe challenge.  She was selected the winner of a $1000 grant for our project for her exemplary community service. Out of the kindness of her own heart, Deanna also chose to personally donate a $1000 which was also matched by VMware Foundation which means a total of $3000 has been raised for Mifos and The Community for Open Source Microfinance.

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Muciojad

We Call Them our A Team – Here’s Y

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Earlier this week we gave you a brief glimpse into the professional and academic backgrounds of our interns. You’ll certainly be seeing and hearing often from our interns his summer but we wanted to share a few personal details to help you get acquainted. We asked each of them a few questions – their responses show that they’re a fun-loving yet focused group that will make this summer unforgettable.
Keith came with a clever nickname that I couldn’t resist using – the “A Team”. Everyone’s first name begins with “A” except for Yanna. Send us your suggestions on how we can incorporate her name -apart from making the Y silent 🙂

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Muciojad

Meet the 2013 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

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Google Summer of Code is one of the most exciting times for an open source project and community. It’s a chance to inject new energy into a project and help build the next generation of coders and tech entrepreneurs that are ready to contribute to HFOSS.

We’re honored to have been awarded four slots by Google for the 2013 program, the first time the Mifos project has participated since 2010.  With those four slots, we’ve selected an exceptional class of interns that I’m certain will provide tremendous contributions to our community as they themselves grow and learn from the awesome leaders in our community.

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