News and Updates for Technology for Microfinance Initiative

Star Contributor of the Month for June - Keith Woodlock

Star Contributor of the Month for June: Keith Woodlock of Ireland

Keith Woodlock – Ireland

Brief Bio (in the words of Keith): Having graduated at University of Limerick, Ireland, I have spent most of my professional life working on Java/Spring, web-based systems. So far my work has taken me from Ireland to UK and Australia working in application domains such as telecommunications, transportation, directory search and now microfinance.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Web technologies, TDD/BDD, Agile/XP

Discovering Mifos: Having taken an interest in Software Craftsmanship and the agile approach of ‘..uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.’, I was looking for an open source project to get involved in and Mifos and microfinance seemed like a good fit.

Grameen Foundation and ThoughtWorks Partner to Extend Microfinance Technology Platform to Global Communities

ThoughtWorks Establishes Agile Engineering Initiative for Grameen Foundation’s Mifos®

ThoughtWorks, Inc., the global leader in Agile methods of software development, today announced a global initiative to provide software engineering services for Grameen Foundation’s Mifos platform.

ThoughtWorks has established a dedicated team to advance the next-generation Mifos technology architecture using the latest open source technologies. The project will extend Mifos’ capabilities to meet the changing demands of the microfinance industry. These efforts represent ThoughtWorks’ commitment to use its technical expertise towards alleviation of world poverty through microfinance.

Visit the Grameen Foundation pressroom to read the full press release. Stay tuned for a recap of when the ThoughtWorks team visited Seattle back in May.

Continue reading »»»

IT For Microfinance Workshop Series & Upcoming Virtual Webinar

Check out the Grameen Foundation blog for a guest post from Charlene Balick, Technical Program Officer for our Technology for Microfinance team based in Seattle, Washington. She spent the last six months working with CGAP to organize a series of regional IT workshops. Next week on July 7 and 8 there will be a virtual webinar hosted on the CGAP blog. See below for some highlights from the post.

Partnering with CGAP, we invited technology thought leaders from three regions: East Africa, South Asia and Latin America to hold small workshops in:

October: Washington D.C.
February: Nairobi, Kenya
April: Hyderabad, India
June: Lima, Peru

We brought together stakeholders from each of these regions with extensive experience working with back-end technology platforms – MFIs, software vendors, donors and investors, government agencies, Technical Assistance Providers, and networks & associations. We all know the key to growth and to lowered interest rates in MFIs throughout the world is the ability to employ and maintain a strong back-end system. Our objective was to gather them all into one room so that we could first talk about the challenges but then, more importantly, come up with the ideas for actions that each player can take. You can find the proceedings, action matrices and other key information related to our workshops on the CGAP technology website.

We invite anyone who is interested to join us in our final two-day event: a virtual webinar next week on July 7 and 8, 2010. We will explore questions posed in the workshop including skills development for both MFIs and the vendor and exploration of the paradigm shift in the information system conversation. Please mark your calendars and visit the CGAP technology blog for the discussion.

Star Contributor of the Month for May - Sam Birney

Star Contributor of the Month for May: Sam Birney of San Francisco, California

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 May, we’re showcasing Sam Birney, a longstanding member of our community who has been a part of the Mifos family in a number of ways. Sam first came onto the Mifos team as our Engineer Manager. Since moving on from that post, he’s worked as a contractor to deploy Mifos at our consortium customer, Al Majmoua in Beirut, Lebanon. On the side, he’s continued to volunteer his time to fix bugs and keep Mifos code at its highest quality. Most recently, Sam identified a concurrent user bug in our Mifos 1.5 release; within one day he had submitted a patch to fix the issue and resolve the problem for Al Majmoua.

Sam Birney – San Francisco, CA (Currently in Beirut, Lebanon)

Brief Bio (in the words of Sam): After graduating from Stanford in 1998 with a degree in Computer Science, I worked as a software developer and architect in various Silicon Valley startups. I was a cofounder of Merced Systems and managed engineering teams and software releases there as Director of Technology. I became interested in Open Source and joined JasperSoft, working on Business Intelligence software. From there, looking to find a socially meaningful application for my skills, I joined Grameen Foundation as Engineering Manager of Mifos. After working full time on the Mifos product for a while, I ended up becoming a contractor, which brought me to my current project of deploying Mifos at an MFI in Lebanon.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: My skills are mostly related to software engineering and project management. Aside from Mifos, the main OS projects I have worked on are JasperServer and Mondrian.

Discovering Mifos: I discovered Mifos through a job posting for Grameen Foundation

Industry News - June 14, 2010

Periodically, we’re going to highlight some notable news from around the industry involving microfinance, technology, and brief updates from our team and other initiatives at Grameen Foundation. Follow our @mifos Twitter feed to keep up with the latest news for our community.

Grameen Foundation releases new report on microfinance’s impact: Grameen Foundation released a new report that takes a fresh look at recent studies on microfinance’s effectiveness in alleviating poverty. Titled, Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Another Look, it notes that studies have shown that microfinance helps poor people better cope with financial shocks that often upend their lives. It also points out the difficulties in isolating microfinance’s impact from the myriad forces at play in poor people’s lives.

Written by Kathleen Odell, assistant professor of economics at Dominican University’s Brennan School of Business, Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Another Look is one of the most comprehensive reviews of microfinance impact studies that have been conducted since 2005. It updates a 2005 Grameen Foundation paper by Nathanael Goldberg (Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Stock of What We Know) which reviewed almost 100 studies which were conducted between 1970 and 2005.

Click here to download the 2010 report, Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Another Look (.pdf)

Vote for Grameen Foundation in AMEX Members Project. With just one click, you can help Grameen Foundation receive $200,000 to support our work to end global poverty. American Express selected Grameen Foundation to participate in Members Project® For the next twelve weeks until August 22nd, Grameen Foundation will be competing against nine other organizations in the Community Development category. You can vote once per week. Currently as of June 14, 2010, we’re in 1st place. Voting is open to all US residents aged 18 and older.

Click here to vote; follow these simple instructions to take action.

Continue reading »»»

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.

Continue reading »»»

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.

The community bonding period is underway with our interns kicking work off on May 24. We wanted to share with you a brief look at each of our interns – who they are, where they’re from, and what they’ll be doing.

Stay tuned, I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more of each one on our mailing lists and IRC throughout summer. Welcome them to the team and let’s get prepared for another Endless Summer of Code, helping to build open source technology that accelerates microfinance. Continue reading »»»

Grameen Foundation launches Mifos 1.5

This past Thursday our team successfully released Mifos 1.5, the next version of our open source technology platform for microfinance. This release contained a mix of brand new functionality as well as continued underlying architectural improvements to improve the scale and performance of our software. Mifos now supports multi-currency for both loan products and loan fees, provides a new interface for more robust system administration, and contains greater performance and flexibility around batch job processing, collection sheet entry, and customer schedules. Special thanks go to Jakub Slawinski, our Star Contributor for the month of January, who continued to find time outside of his day job at SolDevelo to continue fixing bugs and building new features for our community.

We’d also like to give a preview of Shamim D, our upcoming release, the first of our releases code-named for a borrower at one of our MFI customers. This release naming is part of our Mifos Shared Vision of 3,000,000,000 Maries, and will help bring this vision of creating a better life for each of the billions living in poverty into our software development. Shamim D will contain some often-requested features and a major scalability milestone, including mobile money integration with m-pesa for our Kenyan customers, moratoriums and branch-level holidays, and the capacity to handle up to one million clients. Continue reading »»»

Star Contributor of the Month for March - Graeme Ruthven

Star Contributor of the Month for March: Graeme Ruthven of Wellington, New Zealand

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 March, we’re showcasing Graeme Ruthven, a longstanding member of our community who is always ready to offer his advice and knowledge on our mailing lists. Over the past couple of years he’s shared his knowledge of operational and implementation topics to help develop best practices and guides on VPN, security, and on installing and running Mifos on Debian-based distributions.

Graeme Ruthven – Wellington, New Zealand

Brief Bio (in the words of Graeme): After a brief stint as a teacher of physics, mathematics and general science, Graeme started in the world of computers in 1976. This has covered a wide range of jobs, including teaching COBOL programming, training operators, and so on, mainframe operating system dump analysis and patch writing, X.25, SNA, and other network design, implementation and support, various sales and marketing role, pre-sales support, managing bids and providing technical input. Most recently he has been a project manager, working mostly on infrastructure projects including system deployments and upgrades and, increasingly, virtualization of existing workloads.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Graeme has worked at a technical level with a number of operating systems including ICL’s GEORGE and VME mainframe systems; IBM’s MVS, DOS/VSE, and similar systems; and the network controllers for these. He first discovered Unix-like systems in the mid 80’s through Microsoft Xenix, which had just passed to the original SCO, and has maintained an interest ever since. Around the same time the first IBM PCs were released.

Set up a number of Unix-based office automation systems before Windows-based systems were common.
Although never employed as a programmer, has programmed in a number of languages, starting with FORTRAN, then COBOL, and eventually C, with a bit of assembler and machine language thrown in.
Administers his own and several other networks for friends and family.
In his day job as a project manager, plans and manages projects, mostly in the area of infrastructure.

Discovering Mifos: A few years ago a member of Graeme’s extended family in the Pacific Islands was considering setting up a Microfinance Institution. He asked if I knew of any software to run one and, after a few hours with Google I was an expert and recommended Mifos. Within a week I had a system built and running on my home network, which has been used for evaluation and testing although the original idea has yet to be realised.

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!

Student	Mentor	Project
HaraPriya K	Van Mittal-Henkle	Mifos front end prototype using Groovy, Grails, and a CSS Framework
Vishnu vardhan Pasupula	Van Mittal-Henkle	Mifos front end prototype using Groovy, Grails, and a CSS Framework
Kojo Gambrah-Sampaney	Jeff Brewster	Enhance automated acceptance test suite
Ruth Frowein	Jeff Brewster	Mifos mobile voice
Dhanushka Kottegoda	Udai Gupta	Spring managed entity persistence and transactions\| Speed up unit & integration automated test suite
Shahzada Mushtaq	Udai Gupta	MifosNG
Mohammad Shahiduzzaman	John Woodlock	Increase Mifos modularity by refactoring business objects out of UI layer

Stay tuned for a more detailed look into each of the students later this week.

What is Google Summer of Code?

Students all over the world seek something interesting to do during summer. This summer, some student hackers will participate in the Google Summer of Code. They’ll be paid by Google to do something great: contribute to FLOSS: Free and Open Source Software. Mifos is one of the organizations participating in the program. Students that choose Mifos will not only be writing FLOSS, they’ll be helping to end world poverty!

If you know a student, or you are a student, check out Mifos in the Google Summer of Code. Act fast, student applications are due Friday, April 9th.

Jump into the #Mifos chatroom in IRC or head over to our Developer Mailing Lists to ask any questions you have.

Visit our Google Summer of Code wiki page on mifos.org for all details.

Get Inspired:

Watch how our open source technology is accelerating the growth and impact of microfinance:

See how we’re aiming to reach 3,000,000 Marie’s to uplift them through microfinance.

: Marie Claire -- Inspiration for the Mifos Shared Vision

Who We’re Looking For:

Quick learners
Troubleshooting wizards
A passion for writing beautiful code
Excellent communication skills
Knowledge of developer tools

Does that sound like you? Then apply now!

Take a closer look at the incredible journey Udai Gupta and Johan Hilding went on last year during their Endless Summer of Code.

Udai is now a key part of our core development team and will be mentoring Google Summer of Code interns this year.

Meet our Mentors and the Projects they’re leading:


Mentor	Project
Van Mittal-Henkle	Prototype new Mifos front end using Groovy, Grails, and a CSS Framework
Adam Monsen	Internationalization/Localization improvement \| Database upgrades using LiquiBase
Jeff Brewster	Expand and enhance automated acceptance test suite
Udai Gupta	Spring managed entity persistence and transactions \| Speed up unit & integration automated test suite
John Woodlock	Increase Mifos modularity by refactoring business objects out of Mifos UI Layer

Mifos

Star Contributor of the Month for June - Keith Woodlock

Keith Woodlock – Ireland

Grameen Foundation and ThoughtWorks Partner to Extend Microfinance Technology Platform to Global Communities

IT For Microfinance Workshop Series & Upcoming Virtual Webinar

Star Contributor of the Month for May - Sam Birney

Sam Birney – San Francisco, CA (Currently in Beirut, Lebanon)

Mifos Earns High Ratings in CGAP Software Review

Meet the 2010 Google Summer of Code Mifos Interns

Grameen Foundation launches Mifos 1.5

Star Contributor of the Month for March - Graeme Ruthven

Graeme Ruthven – Wellington, New Zealand

End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

UPDATE: 2010 Google Summer of Code Students Announced

What is Google Summer of Code?

Get Inspired:

Who We’re Looking For:

Meet our Mentors and the Projects they’re leading:

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Mifos Tweets

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