Muciojad

Google Summer of Code 2013 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time

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gsoc-2013This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time.The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) and it’s Mifos X project will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the third time. Mifos X is an open source technology platform for enabling financial inclusion to the poor. Google Summer of Code is a global program sponsored by Google that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects.  Students accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from June 17 to September 23rd and upon successful evaluation receive a $5000 stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications open April 22! You can apply from our organization page.

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Edward Cable

ThoughtWorks HSP team gives Mifos X community a solid footing to grow from

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I’d like to give a big thank you to the ThoughtWorks HSP team. Their team has only been a part of our community a few weeks but it seems like they’ve been with us for years. They’ve helped us at a critical time in the launch of Mifos X to our developer community. They’re putting the infrastructure in place to guide a smooth transition to our community-driven development model on top of the Mifos X platform.  

Here’s a guest post from Gurpreet on what’s been keeping them busy so far.

Recently, folks from ThoughtWorks started contributing to Mifos X as part of their Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). HSP is a ThoughtWorks initiative to help Humanitarian Open Source projects by channelizing beach and volunteer time of ThoughtWorkers. Gurpreet & Deepali from the HSP team at ThoughtWorks work full-time in connecting ThoughtWorkers to Open Source projects adopted under the HSP Program.

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Muciojad

ThoughtWorks HSP team gives Mifos X community a solid footing to grow from

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I’d like to give a big thank you to the ThoughtWorks HSP team. Their team has only been a part of our community a few weeks but it seems like they’ve been with us for years. They’ve helped us at a critical time in the launch of Mifos X to our developer community. They’re putting the infrastructure in place to guide a smooth transition to our community-driven development model on top of the Mifos X platform.  

Here’s a guest post from Gurpreet on what’s been keeping them busy so far.

Recently, folks from ThoughtWorks started contributing to Mifos X as part of their Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). HSP is a ThoughtWorks initiative to help Humanitarian Open Source projects by channelizing beach and volunteer time of ThoughtWorkers. Gurpreet & Deepali from the HSP team at ThoughtWorks work full-time in connecting ThoughtWorkers to Open Source projects adopted under the HSP Program.

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Muciojad

Optimizing UX for Mifos X – Deanna “Takes 3” to Join our Community

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Deanna_smallOne of the hallmarks of the current Mifos product is its simple and familiar browser-based user interface. As we launch our new Mifos X platform, we want to retain the essence of this user-friendly UI while injecting a modern refresh into the design of the platform.  As a platform, we aim to have one consistent user experience with products and applications that are as usable and accessible to our global community as Mifos has been.

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Ollie Janders

First Mifos X Customers Going Live! – Taking Elevate Africa to New Heights

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2013 will be the year we transition the community over to the new Mifos X platform. We chose to start simple with individual lending support as the scope of our first application built top of the platform. Already this individual lending app is being used by several MFIs in production. Over the coming weeks we’re going to highlight some of our first beta-testers who have been using Mifos X. In this post, we’ll take a look at Elevate Africa, led by Henrik Esbensen – empowering entrepreneurs of West Africa through an in-depth individual lending model. Henrik ran into some challenges in using the current versions of Mifos so he was eager to be a pilot Mifos X user to take advantage of the flexibility it would enable.

elevate_africa_2

Our Development Philosophy

John and Keith Woodlock have followed a requirements-driven development philosophy as they’ve built out the core for Mifos X. They along with several Specialists in the community including Conflux Technologies, Hugo Technologies, and SolDevelo have been working closely with select MFIs to build out applications that will support the various methodologies of bringing financial services to the poor. All development has been based directly on user requirements that we have been rapidly testing and iterating on with these pilot users. We are now rolling out functionalities to fully support group lending methodologies with a target of having Mifos X reach feature parity with Mifos 2.6 by mid-2013.

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Gleb

Mifos 2.6 (Esha K) is Live

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As we close out 2012 and bring in 2013, we are excited to roll out the final major release on top of the Mifos 2.x codebase.  With its fourth major release, SolDevelo has wrapped up Esha K, our Mifos 2.6 release. The theme of Mifos 2.6 was to fill any major outstanding gaps and make Mifos 2.6 be the most polished and well-rounded application for group lending before we transition development to our lighter, more flexible, next-generation platform Mifos X. Major new functionalities include support for daily loans and savings accounts, the ability to upload and attach files to loans and clients, a user interface for modifying the chart of the accounts, a dashboard of key business metrics on the homepage, and enhancements to importing data in Mifos.

Apart from these many new features, more than 45 bugs were also fixed by the SolDevelo team.  We will also soon be shipping as separate releases enhancements to accounting and reporting – Hugo Technologies has completed a range of enhancements to the Mifos-ACC accounting module and Conflux Technologies will be delivering a few additional standard reports to our Business Intelligence Suite. Please join us in thanking Lukasz C, Natalia, Kasia, Kamil, Wojciech, Pawel, Grzegorz, Marcin, Jakub P, Jakub W, Lukasz W and the rest of the SolDevelo team who led the development of these new features and helped to review incoming contributions.

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Ollie Janders

Recapping Random Hacks of Kindness

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Two days. Three continents. Twenty volunteers. One mission – 3 Billion Maries.

rhok_logo_CS4-300x95Earlier this month, volunteers from HP and the broader geekspace  came together to “hack for humanity” as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness. With support from Social Coding 4 Good we united in various worldwide locations to take on three different challenges we had presented to strengthen the Mifos X platform.  In Bangalore, Dublin, San Francisco, and via a remote bonus team in Chennai, we set out  to build solutions to our three problem definitions along with volunteers from  HP Social Innovation – 1) Mobile App for Mifos X, 2) Integration of SMS communications, and 3) Creation of a WYSIWYG document generator. Across all three sites our volunteers gravitated towards working on the mobile app for Mifos X, tackling it from all different angles of smartphone solutions including native apps for Android and iOS as well as cross-platform apps via Titanium and PhoneGap. We made some solid progress on the actual apps that is nicely summarized on our HackPad which tracked the weekend’s activity. We now have a working iPhone app that supports logging in, retrieving a list of clients and displaying a summary of their loan accounts (watch the demo!). On top of that we have a native Android app that supports on and offline authentication and syncing down office data.  All these apps serve as great starting points as full-fledged mobile applications on top of Mifos X.

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Ollie Janders

Hacking for a Cause – Mifos at Random Hacks of Kindness

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I am totally psyched to be headed to San Francisco this weekend to experience Random Hacks of Kindness for the first time. We are ready to RHoK out with Mifos as one of the featured problems for December 2012.  The sheer enormity of this global collaboration puts me in awe – i really don’t know what to expect but am excited to lead our project and am sure great things are on the way.

Random Hacks

We have been wanting to do RHoK for a while now and luckily all things have quickly come together thanks to Celine Takatsuno from Benetech and Social Coding 4 Good. We are privileged and grateful to be partnering with Social Coding 4 Good who have given us this opportunity to be a featured problem and work with HP Social Innovation teams across three global locations.

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Ollie Janders

Excitement is in the Air – 2012 Mifos Summit Recap

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This past month, we concluded our first-ever global gathering of the Mifos community at our 2012 Mifos Summit in Bangalore, India. It was a huge success with 42 people in attendance from a dozen countries including 11 Specialists,  20 microfinance practitioners, and 11 contributors and strategic partners. I was thrilled to meet community members new and old for the first time and to finally put faces to all the names/voices behind the Skype calls. I was proud to see all the interactions and camaraderie that was shared throughout the grounds of the venue in Bangalore.

First off we want to graciously thank Paul Maritz for proposing and funding the summit; without him none of it would have been possible. A big thank you as well to Cat Allman and Google’s Open Source Programs office who pitched in last minute support to allow us to offer travel scholarships to several more individuals flying in from Africa. Please also extend your gratitude to Suresh, Arun, Praveen, and Rao from Grameen Koota for hosting the summit and conducting site visits along with Nirantara. Finally, a huge thank you to Vishwas, Nayan, and Ashok from Conflux Technologies who went out of their way to ensure smooth logistics and coordinate activities on the ground in Bangalore.

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Muciojad

Specialist Spotlight – SolDevelo

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We like to focus in on our Specialists every once a while, recognizing their contributions and providing a more personal glimpse into their organization and team. This time around we’re taking a closer look at SolDevelo. SolDevelo has been playing a crucial role as the technical stewards of the Mifos 2.0 codebase. Head over to the COSM blog to read about each member of the team and what their plans are for Mifos in 2013 including continued expansion of their hosted service, MifCloud.