Meet the 2010 Google Summer of Code Mifos Interns

This year we’re excited to announce a class of 7 rock star Google Summer of Code interns who will be part of the Mifos team this summer. In now our second year participating in Google Summer of Code, we look to build off the successes of Udai Gupta and Johan Hilding, last year’s interns, by taking on a larger team that will help us to bring participation to a new level.

Our 7 students from around the world bring a diverse set of skills, interests, and perspectives that will help to extend the Mifos platform. Once again we had an incredibly impressive pool of applicants making it difficult to narrow them down to this group. We’d like to thank all for applying and the dedication you’ve shown in wanting to help end poverty through writing code.

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Mifos Earns High Ratings in CGAP Software Review

Grameen Foundation today announced that Mifos®, its open source technology solution, has earned high marks in its first rating on the Microfinance Software Listings and Reviews published by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The leading resource for information on microfinance software products, it gave Mifos maximum points for technical capabilities and for its suite of professional services. The reviews are conducted by independent evaluators with feedback from users.

Launched in 2006, Mifos provides microfinance institutions (MFIs) with both a centralized, web-enabled platform and an online hosted model (“Mifos Cloud”).  Its high-level security features, connectivity, flexibility and overall architecture earned Mifos the highest marks for technical capabilities.  Additionally, it received 4 out of 4 stars for the comprehensive implementation, training and support provided by Grameen Foundation and its specialists in the various regions.

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Mifos Earns High Ratings in CGAP Software Review

Grameen Foundation today announced that Mifos®, its open source technology solution, has earned high marks in its first rating on the Microfinance Software Listings and Reviews published by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The leading resource for information on microfinance software products, it gave Mifos maximum points for technical capabilities and for its suite of professional services. The reviews are conducted by independent evaluators with feedback from users.

Launched in 2006, Mifos provides microfinance institutions (MFIs) with both a centralized, web-enabled platform and an online hosted model (“Mifos Cloud”).  Its high-level security features, connectivity, flexibility and overall architecture earned Mifos the highest marks for technical capabilities.  Additionally, it received 4 out of 4 stars for the comprehensive implementation, training and support provided by Grameen Foundation and its specialists in the various regions.

Visit the Grameen Foundation pressroom to read the full press release.  See below for full details of the review.

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End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

UPDATE: 2010 Google Summer of Code Students Announced

Seven students have been accepted for Mifos projects this year. Join us in wishing them the best of luck this upcoming summer.

Visit the Google Summer of Code Website to see a listing and map of our accepted students and where they’ll be contributing from. Click here to see the full list of more than 600 accepted students participating in this year’s Summer of Code.

We had an overwhelming number of extremely qualified applicants with stellar proposals so it was a very selective process this year. To all those who applied and weren’t selected, we encourage you to apply again in the future and welcome your contributions to our community if there’s a volunteer project or other way you’d like to get involved. We’re always in need of others to help us build technology to fight poverty!
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Mifos FLOSS User Manual Sprint

Want to help fight poverty? Grameen Foundation is updating the user manual for its Mifos software, an open source management information system (MIS) that helps microfinance institutions more efficiently deliver loans and other financial services to poor women around the world. The actual content of the new user manual is almost complete but there’s tons to do to get it published in FLOSS Manuals. We need your help! This one-day sprint will be dedicated towards formatting, proofreading, and standardizing the text towards agreed-upon writing conventions. Read on to learn more!

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Star Contributor of the Month for February – SunGard

Each month we’re going to honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world. Volunteers commit countless hours of their time, energy, and knowledge into building and extending the Mifos platform to make it accessible to microfinance institutions serving the poor. For the month of Feburary, we’re showcasing the entire team at SunGard Technology Services in Bangalore, India who have been working closely with the Mifos team for the past year helping to strengthen the core Mifos platform, dramatically increase the performance of Mifos for our customers, and providing direct implementation services to our community.

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Building a Local Technology Ecosystem

This is a follow-on post to our original post on the widespread reach of open source community back on November 11, 2009.

In that post we explored the participation that open source community enables by allowing our customers, support providers, and technology developers all to communicate in one place to advance a common vision. This time, we’d like to highlight another powerful force that our open source platform and community enables: a local technology ecosystem of Mifos Specialists who can build a market-driven business bringing our software platform to microfinance institutions, implementing and supporting Mifos, and extending it to fit their unique and specific needs.

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Star Contributor of the Month for December – Michael Vorburger

michael-vorburger
Each month we’re going to honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world.  Volunteers commit countless hours of their time, energy, and knowledge into building and extending the Mifos platform to make it accessible to microfinance institutions serving the poor.    For the month of December, we’re showcasing Michael Vorburger who recently joined the Mifos community to make valuable contributions migrating our issue tracker over to JIRA.

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Mentors Meet in Mountain View, Manifest Mastery of Mentoring

Jeff Brewster and I had a great time at the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009 Mentor Summit. We were royally welcomed, well-fed, and given a great springboard for mind-melding with the other GSoC mentors.

The summit was decidedly unconference style: meeting ideas were shared beforehand but the sessions themselves scheduled and run on-the-fly. I wanted to learn more about project hosting since we recently worked the Mifos project through some issues with hosting at java.net (and ended up moving to SourceForge), so I co-hosted a session called Project Hosting Horrors. The session filled up a room and we got useful feedback from lots of projects about what works with hosting, what doesn’t, and ideas on different approaches.

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Mifos wants to Hear your Voice

We’ve recently published our listing in the CGAP Software Listings Product Dashboard – the microfinance industry’s centralized place to learn about all the management information systems available for microfinance.Check out our listing for screenshots and an overview of the Mifos functionality. Our full review will be published in January 2010 as part of the second round of CGAP Software reviews.

We’ve also launched UserVoice for Mifos – a tool to collect feedback on our product and our community – send us your ideas now!

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