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.
New Users
Newcomers to the software are eagerly awaiting the continuation of the interactive training sessions started on Day 1. The Conflux team accelerated the completion of a quick-start user guide and are even printing out hard copies to help facilitate this training even more effectively on Day 4.
New users have also been so deeply inquisitive about the policies and processes of their more mature peer MFIs speaking to our need for continued knowledge sharing.
Long-time Mifos users have been staying up late into the night exploring the Mifos X data model and comparing its calculations to Mifos 2.x.
Software Developers
As evident by the determination in the eyes of Specialists during our technical training, they are extremely keen on building out new apps and extending the Mifos X API to meet the needs of their market. With brand new opportunities on the Mifos X platform, Specialists for the first time are eager to want to work on the product. This reinforces how important expanding our Specialist training program will be.
For our seasoned Mifos X developers, they’ve been staying up late into the night, using their collective expertise to work towards solutions to our most commonly requested needs: Michael, Sander, Gurpreet, Udai, Avik and others have formed a crack team that’s cranking out a spec on SMS notifcations in Mifos X.
Pull-requests are getting merged as developers directly hear the requirements of users and make it into a reality. Real-time feedback on the new UI has turned into rapid new UI elements the Conflux team has been building out in the evenings around drill-down navigation and bulk task approval.
