Edward Cable

Meet the 2018 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

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Google Summer of Codegsoc2016-sun-373x373 2018 is well underway so this blog post is admittedly a bit late. GSOC is now in its 13th year and we’re proud to be participating in GSOC once again for the fiftth time as the Mifos Initiative and the seventh year overall. 1264 students from 62 countries are working with a record 206 open source organizations this summer. This year will be our biggest year to date. We were able to select thirteen interns through the Mifos Initiative who are working alongside four interns from the Apache Software Foundation. Our students are working on mobile apps, web apps as well as back-end innovation and new modules on top of Fineract and Fineract CN. As the voice for the financial inclusion community within Apache Fineract, the Mifos Initiative looks forward to participating in GSOC for many years to come to deeply engage with the high number of students interested in Fintech and captivated by our mission.

This year, our interns are coming from five different countries with both India and Cameroon heavily represented and interns from Singapore and Mauritius for the first time. We have six interns working on mobile apps, three interns working on web apps, four interns working on new modules or the back-end for Fineract, and four interns working on the Fineract CN framework.

For our suite of Mifos X Mobile Apps on Fineract, we have three students continuing to extend them. Aksh Gautam, under the mentorship of Tarun Mudgal, will be extending our Android Field Operations App to Version 5.0, adding in additional offline capablities, new features, and enhancing the user experience. Saksham Handu, under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya, will be building out Version 3.0 of our mobile banking app, Mifos Mobile, adding chat/messaging support and additional functionalities. Lastly, Ankur Sharma, under mentorship of Puneet Kohli and Naman Dwivedi, is extending the two applications on top of our mobile wallet framework.

As Fineract CN begins to reach a point of stability, we’re focusing on building out client and user-facing mobile apps. Dilpreet Singh and Mohak Puri are both working with Rajan Maurya to build out Version 2.o of Fineract CN Mobile. Manish Kumar is working on the first client-facing mobile applicaition on top of Fineract CN.

On the back-end for Fineract, we’re looking to wrap up some eagerly awaited projects and release some new Mifos X innovation,Sanyam Goel is completing our much-anticipated Mifos payment gateway providing mobile money integration, under the mentorship of Steve Conrad and Rahul Goel. Kumaranath Fernando with the expertise of Avik Ganguly is tackling scalability enhancements to enable better performance for high client volumes. Dingfan Zhou is experimenting with some bleeding edge fintech applications by building out a chatbot and adapter for Fineract under the guidance of Aleks Vidakovic and Thynn Win. Likewise, Lalit Mohan, is helping us explore Machine Learning for the first time guided by Nayan Ambalia, Avik, and Mark Reynolds.

For the first time, we have students through both Mifos and Apache working with the core Fineract CN framework for the first time. Ebenezer Graham is building out a brand new SMS/email microservice with the mentorship of Isaac Kamga and Myrle Krantz. Courage Angeh is helping enable the rapid deployment of Fineract CN in the cloud through her containerization project with support of Victor Romero & Viswa Ramamoorthy. Ruphine Kengne and Pembe Miriam are developing out group lending and management features in Fineract CN at both the back and front-end with support from Awasum Yannick.

As we do each year, here’s a brief intro on each of our interns and stay tuned for a follow-up post with some fun facts on each of them.

Mobile Apps – Mifos X (Fineract)

Saksham Handu – India

 

 

 

 

  • Mifos Mobile 3.0
  • Mentor: Rajan Maurya & Ed Cable
 Ankur Sharma – India

 

 

 

 

  • Mobile Wallet 2.0
  • Mentor: Puneet Kohli & Naman Dwivedi
 Aksh Gautam – India 

 

 

 

 

  • Android Field Operations App 5.0
  • Mentor: Tarun Mudgal & Ishan Khanna
  

Mobile Apps – Fineract CN

Dilpreet Singh – India

 

 

 

 

  • Mifos Mobile 3.0
  • Mentor: Rajan Maurya
 Mohak Puri – India

 

 

 

 

  • Mobile Wallet 2.0
  • Mentor: Rajan Maurya
 Manish Kumar – India 

 

 

 

 

  • Mobile Banking App 1.0
  • Mentor: Rajan Maurya & Ed Cable
  

Mifos X Web Apps

Anwesh Nayak – India

 

 

 

 

  • Web App Rewrite to Angular 6
  • Mentor: Gaurav Saini & Pranjal Goswami
 Ankit Ojha – India 

 

 

 

 

  • Online Banking App 2.0
  • Mentor: Raunak Sett
 Abhay Chawla – India 

 

 

 

 

  • Self-Service User Admin Portal & Web App Rewrite to Angular 6
  • Mentor: Gaurav Saini & Maulik Soneji
  

Fineract & Mifos X Modules

Sanyam Goel – India 

 

 

 

 

  • Mifos Payment Gateway
  • Mentor: Steve Conrad & Rahul Goel
 Dingfan Zhou – Singapore

 

 

 

 

  • Mifos Chatbot
  • Mentor: Aleks Vidakovic & Thynn Win
 Kumaranth Fernando – Sri Lanka

 

 

 

 

  • Mifos X Scalability & Performance Enhancements
  • Mentor: Avik Ganguly
 Lalit Mohan – India

 

 

 

 

  • Static Analysis of Apache Fineract
  • Mentor: Nayan Ambali & Avik Ganguly
 

Fineract CN

Courage Angeh – Cameroon 

 

 

 

 

  • Containerization & Deployment Using Docker
  • Mentor: Victor Romero & Visa Ramamoorthy
 Ebenezer Graham – Mauritius

 

 

 

 

  • SMS/Email Microservice
  • Mentor: Isaac Kamga & Myrle Krantz
 Ruphine Kengne – Cameroon

 

 

 

 

  • Group Loan Management Service
  • Mentor: Awasum Yannick & Ed Cable
 Pembe Miriam – Cameroon

 

 

 

 

  • New Web UI for Fineract CN
  • Mentor: Awasum Yannick & Gaurav Saini

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rbrown

Support Mifos and Score Amazing Deals on Amazon

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Want to support Mifos while shopping exclusive deals on Amazon?

Amazon’s fourth-annual Prime Day kicks off on July 16th at 3 pm (ET), and features 36 hours of one-of-a-kind deals just for Prime Members. But it gets better–while you participate in one of the biggest shopping days of the year, you can effortlessly make an positive impact by shopping through smile.amazon.com! When you shop via Amazon Smile and select The Mifos Initiative as your charity of choice, Amazon will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to Mifos. Deals for you and donations for us; sounds like a win-win!

P.S. Your impact can last beyond Prime Day. When you go through Amazon Smile for all your future online purchases, Amazon will continue to donate to Mifos. Just by shopping you are helping us create a world with better technology to fight poverty and improve financial inclusion.

rbrown

Star Contributor of the Month – Sundari Swami

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We are recognizing Sundari Swami from Los Angeles as our newest Star Contributor! Sundari has more than 8 years of experience of working in marketing and dealing with big-data SaaS products; she currently serves as a Technical Product Manager at DataScience.com. Sundari has been with Mifos for several years now, playing a crucial role in the development of the Mobile Wallet 2.0 Framework. Since last year, Sundari has been helping write and gather requirements for the Mobile Wallet 2.0, and we cannot thank her enough for her continuous hard work! We commend Sundari for her persistence in continuing to volunteer with Mifos even after a gap between projects she was assisting on. She can always be counted on to be thorough and highly attentive to detail so we get our use cases right. Sundari’s commitment to serving those in need along with her tech and product management expertise makes her a triple threat that we could not be happier to have as a part of our Mifos community.

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rbrown

Mifos Selected as Finalist for PayTech for Good Award

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The Mifos Initiative is excited to announce that we have been selected as one of the finalists for the 2018 PayTech Awards! After entering in the Paytech for Good division, we are among the likes of DCR Strategies Inc, GoodBox, and NetSpend for the winning spot, which will be announced on July 13th in London.

The PayTech Awards, led by Fintech Futures and its renowned Paybefore brand, are used to recognize excellence and innovation in the use of IT in the finance and payment industry worldwide. So that being said, we could not be more thrilled to be short-listed for such a fantastic program!

The specific award that Mifos is up for, PayTech for Good, aims to honor a financial service or technology organization for its outstanding contribution to the community it serves. Just like Mifos, this award celebrates the use of collaboration, connection, and community to make a positive impact in the world.

While we strive to make financial inclusion more efficient and effective through our open source platform, our focus on innovation is what sets us apart from other finalists. We not only provide a world-class solution, but through taking advantage of open source technology, we can invite members of the community to innovate and stack on top of our platform. This way, instead of just creating one amazing solution by ourselves, we can harness the power of our greater community to innovate hundreds of incredible solutions. The unbeatable combination of technology and community creates such a meaningful impact, which then allows us to do as much good in the world as possible.

With an expert panel of judges selecting the winners soon, we can’t wait to see how it turns out! Thank you to the PayTech Awards, Fintech Futures, and Comms for Good for this wonderful opportunity!

Edward Cable

Announcing Mifos X 18.03: Two-Factor Authentication, Data Import Tool Integration, Notifications, Wizard UI

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We’re pleased to announce the release of Mifos X 18.03 release powered by Apache Fineract 1.1. This release includes several features and enhancements completed by our Google Summer of Code students in 2017. It also contains numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements led by Nazeer as well as members of the community.

At the Fineract platform level major new features include support for two-factor authentication, enhancement and integration of the data import tool, enhancement and integration of the notifications framework for staff notifications, support for adding notes to savings deposits and withdrawal transactions, UI for making ad-hoc reporting queries, and additional self-service APIs to support our mobile and online banking apps and extend our SMS campaigns module.

Full release notes can be found at: https://goo.gl/Y6cYMT

At the Mifos X Web App UI level, it contains all the UI screens for the above features as well as the work that Gopala did during GSOC in enhancing the UI including wizard layouts for product and account configuration, wizard views to support workflows via entity checks for data tables, and more.

Thanks to the many contributors that made this release possible. Thank you to Alex Ivanov and the mentorship of Avik Ganguly for the two-factor authentication work, to Kumaranath Fernando for the data import tool work with support of Kyriakos, Avik, and Nayan, to Courage Angeh and Adhyan Srivastava and the mentorship of Pranjal for the work on the notifications framework, to Nazeer for the many bug fixes, reviews, and small improvements he made, to Robert Ippez for the work on adding notes to savings withdrawals and deposits, to Nathan of Mentors International for sponsoring the UI for ad-hoc reporting queries, to Santosh for all his QA work, to Avik for review and prepping of the Fineract release, and to Madhukar for prepping the Mifos X release.

Read on for screenshots and an overview of each new feature.

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Edward Cable

Fintech Forum: Loan Origination

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For our latest round of the Fintech Forum, we’re combining several topics. At heart of this post is a guest blog from Gururag Kalanidhi of Habile Technologies looking at the Latest trends in Loan Origination. His post dovetails well with some of the research briefs that several of our GCI students did on digital credit. 

This research and the guest blog post nicely complement a couple ongoing conversations we’re having across the community related to the product roadmap as a whole for Fineract CN and how our ecosystem is leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to make faster and better credit decisions while also delivering more impactful products and services.

To give your feedback on what you’d like to see in Fineract CN in general but also specifically as it relates to loan origination, please fill out this quick survey. 

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Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Steve Conrad

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We are recognizing Steve Conrad, a full-stack developer at Dassault Systems in Minnesota, as our newest Mifos Star Contributor. Steve only came to our community in early January of this year but in that short time has become an anchor of the community and been adding vital support to the Fineract platform when we need it the most. He fixed a number of critical bugs in the most recent release, made Fineract compatible with MySQL 5.7 and is now leading efforts to integrate the Payment Gateway project into Fineract and build a lab environment integrating Fineract with Mojaloop. Steve’s passion and commitment to poverty alleviation along with his deep expertise has been on full display. He’s one of those transformative volunteers that can have a tremendous impact on our project and we look forward to his leadership in the community as a recently added Apache Fineract committer.
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Edward Cable

2017 Google Code-In: A Closer Look

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This year’s participation in Google Code-In was so overwhelming that we’ve split our recap into two posts. Last week we showcased the stellar work that are students delivered across all facets of our project and community. This week, we’re going to give you a closer look at the great minds behind all that work – the priceless young talent that will be shaping our planet for future generations to come. We’ve been lucky to work with them for seven weeks and hope to continue collaboration with them long into the future. 

In their own words, here’s their GCI experience and what they’ll be up to now that they’re not completing tasks for Mifos with great fervor. Our 2 grand prize finalists, Chirag Gupta and Matthew Katz, will be traveling to San Francisco with their parents for four day sin June for their prize. They will be joined by Sanyam Goel, who will be representing the Mifos mentors.

 

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Edward Cable

Google Summer of Code 2018 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

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gsoc2016-sun-373x373This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time. The Mifos Initiative will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the seventh time. You’ll have the have the chance to build web and mobile apps for digital financial services or contribute to our award-winning Mifos X open source technology platform powered by Apache Fineract or brand new Apache Fineract CN application framework for digital financial services. 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 May 14th to August 14th and upon successful evaluation, receive a stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications are open from March 12  now through March 27! You can apply from our organization page.

Want to learn more? Browse our ideas page for projects and links to all our code repositories.  Click below to view the screencast from our Ask Me Anything held on Thursday March 15 at 1200GMT.

View the Screencast from our Google Summer of Code AMA

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Edward Cable

2017 Mifos Google Code-In Wrapup

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It’s now time for our official wrap-up blog post for the 2017 Google Code-In, our third year of participation. This year’s program was so fast-paced and frenetic that I’ve needed to catch my breath before recapping. Coming up for air and reviewing all the completed tasks, I’m blown away by how much our students were able to get done and how valuable their work is for our community. As a whole across the entire program, participation in Google Code-In from pre-university students, grew by 265% versus last year with 3555 students from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks. For the Mifos Initiative, individually, our growth was even greater with participation growing by 362% with 123 students completing 458 tasks, nearly three times as many as the 159 that were completed in the competition last year. A huge thank you to all of our mentors, many of them former GSOC students and even some former GCI participants for helping us handle this huge volume of contribution.

We’ll  do two blog posts to commemorate the awesome energy and passion for open source that we have catalyzed in these students. Today’s post will highlight the impressive contributions that were made across all five categories – code, documentation, QA, user interface, and outreach/research while our second one will give a closer personal look at our top five finalists – grand prize winners, Chirag Gupta with 66 tasks completed and Matthew Katz, and remaining finalists Janice Kim,  Muhammad Rafly Andrianza, and  Shivam Kumar Singh.

The level of detail and commitment to these tasks demonstrated by not just our grand prize finalists but our top fifteen students was astounding. They contributed numerous code fixes to the platform, our web and mobile apps including completion of all the remaining work for our Swagger API documentation. Some great bug reports and a helpful guide on submitting a good report came through on the QA front. On the UI/UX side, a number of nice mockups for our mobile and web apps were shared as well as beautiful designs for t-shirts, logos, and graphics that we’ve already been using in our marketing communications. We received strong contributions to improve our technical and user-facing documentation including detailed tutorial videos. Lastly, the students worked on incredibly thorough and detailed research including profiles on innovation labs, financial inclusion landscape studies, libraries of creative common images, catalogs of events and conferences to attend, FAQs and research briefs on topics like chatbots, competitive analysis, and more.

For all of this exemplary work, we’re trying to put it in practice and share it with the broader community so stay tuned to the code being shipped, seeing your design get implemented, reading your research on our wiki, or watching your video tutorial. A tremendous thank you to all 123 students that completed a task – your work is greatly valued and you futures are extremely bright!

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