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

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 June, we’re showcasing Keith Woodlock, who came on as one of our most productive volunteers this past summer and then joined the Mifos team as a contractor.  He’s been an instrumental contributor helping to refactor the Mifos platform so it can be easier for other contributors to participate and build on top of Mifos.

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.

Keith’s Impact:

Contributions Made to Date:

I started off by fixing some bugs and then moved onto tackling some core problems that existed around ‘Collection Sheet’ functionality, an important bulk data entry mechanism used by several of the MFIs on Mifos.

Current Projects: At present I am doing work that is part of the whole push to EvolveMifosCodeBase which involves moving to a spring based application with a defined set of SPI and APIs.

Keith’s Impact on the Poor:

“I like the idea of microfinance and giving those on or near poverty the opportunity to help themselves. Hopefully Mifos can help in removing barriers that MFIs may have when supplying these financial services.”

What’s Rewarding about Working on Mifos:

“It’s very satisfying to know that the software that you help to produce can be used to help impact peoples lives in a positive way.”

Advice for others in the  Mifos Community:

“Even in the short time I have being involved with mifos, much is happening that is moving mifos forward. Keep up the good work.”

Fun Facts about Keith:

Favorite Food: Thai, Mexican

Favorite Open Source Project: After Mifos? Eclipse maybe.

If Keith could travel to one place in the world, it would be: South America would be nice to see sometime

Interesting fact about Keith: I break the build often in Mifos.  Sorry!

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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.

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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.

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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

Sam’s Impact:

Contributions Made to Date: Outside of his time working directly for GF as engineering manager and more recently as a contractor guiding the Al Majmoua deployment, Sam has mostly contributed lots of testing and bug reports, some fixes, enhancements and documentation.  Sam quickly fixed Issue 2903 that Al Majmoua users encountered while entering new loans right after Mifos 1.5 release shipped.  Sam swiftly identified the issue as a concurrent user problem with the Fund table.  He looked into the AccountBO code and found the source of the bug, and provided a patch to resolve the issue – all in one day!

As a volunteer, Sam also helped by representing Mifos last year at JavaOne when we won our Duke’s Choice Award for best Java Technology for the Open Source Community.  Listen to Sam recount his experiences with Mifos in the JavaOneRadio interview booth.  Watch this video as he and Van Mittal-Henkle took the stage to accept the Duke Award from James Gosselin.

Current Projects: Sam is working on a new type of import plug-in for handling transaction types that are different from regular repayments.

Sam’s Impact on the Poor:

“My hope is the work we are all doing with Mifos will result in high-quality, free software that enables MFIs around the world to more effectively realize the dream of empowering millions to overcome poverty.”

What’s Rewarding about Working on Mifos:

“It is always rewarding to see your work being used by someone else, but in the case of Mifos it is even more inspiring to see what the clients of MFIs are doing with the opportunity that microfinance provides.“

Advice for others in the  Mifos Community:

“Try to understand what it is like for an entire organization with multiple offices to use Mifos as a mission critical system every day – working with an MFI has definitely changed my views of what aspects of the software are most important.”

Fun Facts about Sam:

Favorite Food: Cheese Fondue

Favorite Open Source Project: Mifos

If Sam could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Brazil

Interesting fact about Sam: I enjoy surfing, even though I’m terrible at it.

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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.

Cloud Computing saves city of Los Angeles millions in IT costs: In an interview with Tim O’Reilly, CTO of L.A., Randi Levin, highlights how moving the city’s services into Google’s cloud will save $5 million over the next three years.   Cost savings and overcoming the challenges of a “legacy IT infrastructure that couldn’t meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce” were the primary drivers for the move.

Levin is looking ahead to where she can best use her staff. What are the important tasks? “It’s not running servers,” said Levin. “The city will get much more bang for their buck if we’re developing applications and websites, or making processes more efficient. As a general rule, we’re going to start moving out of that business and letting somebody else do it who can do it more efficiently.”

This is a similar lesson microfinance institutions can learn – for their staff and management, time shouldn’t be spent maintaining servers and technology.  By moving information management services into a cloud based offering like Mifos Cloud, their focus can be on managing their business, extending their outreach and developing new products and services for the poor.

Triple Jump notes that ‘Tier 3 Microfinance Institutions perform just as well as Tier 1′: Recently Microfinance Focus conducted an interview with Steven Evers, Director of Triple Jump Advisory Services.  He notes that  relative to larger Tier 1 Microfinance Institutions, investments in smaller Tier 2 and 3 MFIs perform just as well.   Despite their relative success, these smaller MFIs have challenges accessing funders due to the challenges and burden of assessing risk and more intensive process of managing these investments.

Steven contends, “Much like commercial banks do not have the tools to offer microfinance to micro-entrepreneurs, we have found that commercial lenders generally do not have the tools to work with tier 2 and tier 3 MFIs. They believe that the risk is too high, the amounts too small, and the relationships too demanding.”

This interview demonstrate the strong need to make both capital and information flow more efficiently and effectively across the sector.  If small and emerging Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions can provide funders timely information regarding their performance and financial transparency at a low cost, more funders can effectively reach these MFIs and help them accelerate their outreach.  Mifos as an open platform provides a great tool for MFIs to cost-effectively report back to their funders. Through integrated SPM with the PPI and real-time business analytics Mifos can make these small, quickly growing MFIs a more attractive investment option for funders.

Volunteer Michael Vorburger speaks about Mifos at Jazoon in Switzerland: Mifos Star Contributor of the Month for December, Michael Vorburger, gave a great tech talk at Jazoon 2010, Mifos: Ending Poverty One Line of Code at a Time. Great thanks to Michael for helping spread the word and for using Jazoon to speed up progress on the Migrate Developer Wiki project by bringing in some Hackergarten participants.  He and Raphael Ackermann are now cracking away on building scripts to migrate our wiki over to Confluence on our MifosForge.

Google Summer of Code 2010 is underway – follow what our interns are doing:   The 2010 Google Summer of Code season is ongoing and our interns are actively working on their projects. Unfortunately Ruth had another commitment arise and had to withdraw so we’re at a class of six.  Follow the tag mifos_gsoc on delicious to check out blog posts and other updates from our interns. The summer will certainly be full of many challenges, rewarding moments and valuable lessons learned – check out Hatim’s post on Day 1 of his GSOC experience.

• • The Economist looked at the “behind-the-scenes logistics of Kenya’s mobile-money miracle” in the article titled “Banking on Mobile Phones: Out of Thin Air.”
  • CGAP announced it’s completed eight new software reviews of which Mifos was a part.  Our review is now translated into French and Spanish.  Click here to see the full set.
  • It’s been an active couple of weeks for our counterparts on Grameen Foundation’s Social Performance Management team, visit the Grameen Foundation PPI blog to see some exciting updates including the release of Oikocredit’s PPI Report and a recap of the PUCA trainings in Mali/Senegal. Follow @gfppi on Twitter for all the latest.
  • Barclays published their “Banking for Billions” report highlighting that 2.5 billion of the world’s adults remain unbanked.  Click here to download the full report (.pdf).

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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.

Review Process

The reviews are a product of CGAP’s Information Systems Program, a joint initiative of CGAP and the EU/ACP Microfinance Programme.  Every few years, CGAP conducts this formal review process. Mifos was part of the second round of the 2009-2010 Reviews.  The other software reviews can be found in the CGAP Technology Resource Center. Grameen Foundation is proud to have participated in this review and pleased with the positive feedback our software has received.

Independent consultants from Horus Development Finance  in coordination with CGAP, conducted a thorough and exhaustive review of our software including information provided by us, the vendor, analysis of a series of test cases performed during a product demonstration, and user feedback from at least 3 MFIs.  For full details on CGAP’s Review Methodology, click here.

The various portions of the review are linked to below:

• Mifos Profile on CGAP Software Listings
• CGAP Review (.pdf) | French version (.pdf)
• Completed Mifos Request for Information (RFI) (.pdf)
• Grameen Foundation Published Response to Review (.pdf)

Using Mifos? Rate our Software

Let the rest of the community know you are using Mifos.  Share your feedback on the Mifos product through our CGAP Software Listing.  Click here to submit your rating.

Excerpts from the Review

Perfect Score of 4 Stars on Implementation/Training/Support

Strong user feedback showed our comprehensive approach to technology implementation including business consulting, process optimization, and effective change management. Our open source community and online resources provide a readily available source of support for users worldwide.

“Surveyed users reported Mifos as Good to Excellent on implementation and training and support services provided by the Mifos team and their partners.

The Mifos implementation methodology is based on a thorough process and includes business process optimization of the MFI with the new technology. Mifos provides training sessions, including a Train-the-Trainers module for key staff to replicate their know-how throughout the MFI. Consistent with the open–source approach, the methodology can be adopted by any MFI which prefers to implement the solution on its own.

Grameen Foundation has alliances with 6 partners (in South and East Asia and East Africa) for installation, training, and support services.

A community web portal allows users to have access to technical documentation, guides, best practices, and support resources. The web portal also provides a platform for knowledge sharing between the community members and contributors who continuously improve Mifos with customization and new features.

Grameen Foundation also offers “Mifos Cloud,” a “software-as-a-service” model hosted in Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment. In this model, users pay Grameen annual fees per client to maintain their database off-site rather than at the MFI. Users access the solution over the internet.

It should be noted that all Mifos services are, for the present time, delivered only in English.”

Perfect Score of 4 Stars on Technical Capabilities

This score captures the flexibility and scalability of Mifos as a highly secure web-based platform offering real-time access to data through easy delivery mechanisms like the Cloud:

“Mifos is a centralized, web-enabled application based on open-source development model and can be hosted in any open source OS or Windows Server 2003. It can be accessed from workstations with a web browser connected to a LAN or the Internet. It can also be installed and run on a stand-alone PC. The application supports the open MySQL 5.0x database.

The solution integrates a high-level security for user identification, access to the database, and data exchange with the server.

At the logical level, users are granted with granular, role-based permission facilities which manage hierarchy, task assignments, and data scope. Comprehensive audit trails capture all system changes except for product parameterization.

The “Mifos Cloud” version offers top-tier security and disaster recovery and secures data from corruption.”

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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.  

Shahid – Victoria, Australia

Mohammad Shahiduzzaman (Shahid)

• Project: Increase Mifos modularity by refactoring business objects out of UI layer
• Mentor: John Woodlock
• Location: Victoria, Australia
• IRC nickname: maveriick

Shahid received his Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. From there he worked around three years in TherapServices,LLC. While completing the 2008 Summer of Code, Shahid passed his Masters and managed to maintain a full time job as well. In March 2009, he came to Australia to do a research masters at Monash University. His current research is focused on natural scene image classification.

Frankly speaking, Shahid don’t know about Mifos before Summer of Code and would have probably skipped over Mifos if he’d not seen the organization name, Grameen Foundation.  With Bangladesh as his home country, he was greatly familiar with the Grameen Foundation and microfinance after Dr. Yunus had received the Nobel prize. After passing some time browsing the Mifos website, he started to love it, recognizing Mifos as a good match for both his personal interest and skill set.

Shahzada Hatim Mushtaq

• Project: MifosNG
• Mentor: Udai Gupta
• Location: Sweden
• IRC nickname: geoaxis

Shahzada Hatim Mushtaq is currently a graduate student of Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg (second largest city in Sweden).  Like many of his peers, his hobby is the work he does every day which includes designing and coding software, studying other people’s software design and code, and reading/istening/watching to tech articles/talks.  Hatim is an avid follower of current news events and is a die-hard trekkie.  He tries to reboot himself  every year by traveling to places of historical and cultural interest.

Dhanushka - Sri Lanka

Dhanushka Kottegoda

• Project: Spring managed entity persistence and transactions| Speed up unit & integration automated test suite
• Mentor: Udai Gupta
• Location: Sri Lanka
• IRC nickname: dhanushka

Dhanushka Kottegoda is a 23 year old from Sri Lanka currently completing his undergraduate studies at the Informatics Institute of Technology- Sri Lanka (in collaboration with University of Westminster-UK). Working towards a Bachelors of Science Degree in Software Engineering, he is presently in his industrial placement year.  Prior to this, Dhanushka had his education at Ananda College, Colombo 10. Aside from programming, his interests include playing bass guitar and sketching. Dhanushka is looking forward to successfully completing GSoC 2010.

Kojo - Accra, Ghana

Kojo Gambrah-Sampaney

• Project: Enhanced automatic acceptance test suite
• Mentor: Jeff Brewster
• Location: Accra, Ghana
• IRC nickname: kgambrah

Kojo Gambrah is 22 years old and is very passionate about open-source technologies and social entrepreneurship especially in emerging economies.  He is in his third year at the Ghana Telecom University College studying Information Technology. He first discovered programming in BASIC in 6^th Grade on a V-Tech laptop and that was enough to shift his interest from automotive engineering to computers. He is interested in quality assurance and software development best practices. These are skills that will prove useful to starting a software house to serve emerging markets later on. This interest is well aligned with the Mifos goal of delivering quality software for MFIs.

Vishnu vardhan Pasupula

• Project: Mifos front end prototype using Groovy, Grails, and a CSS Framework
• Mentor: Van Mittal-Henkle
• Location: Hyderabad, India
• IRC nickname: Vishnu

Vishnu, a student at KMIT, Hyderabad is currently pursuing a Bachelors in Electronics and Telecommunication degree.  Whether it is technology, places he visits, or nature, he loves exploring. As a passionate problem solver, math was one his favorite subjects.  Although rather silent and more introverted, Vishnu enjoys listening to people. Vishnu’s hobbies include reading, playing chess, and playing football.

His experiences with Mifos to date have given him a chance to learn about new technology like Grails. His goals for being a part of the community are to learn a lot and raise his confidence level by contributing  to Open Source. He thanks the amazing Mifos team for accepting him and hopes that all new students can get mentors like the Mifos team.

HariPriya K

• Project: Mifos front end prototype using Groovy, Grails, and a CSS Framework
• Mentor: Van Mittal-Henkle
• Location: Hyderabad, India
• IRC nickname: haripriya

HariPriya is a student from KMIT, Hyderabad, studying in the electronics and telecommunication department.  She chose to work in the R&D department of her college because technology, especially when it is applied somewhere is exciting and can give wings to your imagination. She loves reading books, meeting people, listening to soft music and traveling.

Mifos got her attention when she was googling around for GSOC 2010.  She never intended to work on it initially but was blown away by the amazing TEAM who are so “helpful,  kind , encouraging, and above all believed in her”. The trust and appreciation of her work from the Mifos team, motivated her to apply. Haripriya wishes that her work after college can be on a team like Mifos.

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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.

Currency-denominated Loan Products and Fees – Mifos now provides baseline multi-currency support allowing MFIs to define loan products and their associated fees for up to two different currencies. This feature, along with the API to import banking transactions shipped in Mifos 1.4 and accounting integration with Dolphin are some of the product needs we met for Al Majmoua, the leading Lebanese MFI and another pioneering MFI from MENA that we’re proud to have as part of our consortium.  After a successful pilot rollout, Al Majmoua is currently rolling out Mifos at its remaining branches across Beirut and will soon be fully live and in production on Mifos.

User Administration and Manage Shutdown: This powerful feature gives system administrators the ability to see a list of all logged in users and where in the Mifos application they’re currently at. The Manage Shutdown feature allows the administrator to schedule when Mifos is going to be shut down and will send out a warning message to all logged in users, letting them know of the impending shutdown.  For large MFIs with many users spread out across tens and hundreds of branches, this will make system administration easier, and make Mifos much more user-friendly for end users.  Kudos to Jakub for leading the development of this feature.

Visit our Product Download page to download Mifos 1.5.  Check out the release notes for full details on functionality and any known issues in this release.

Shamim Banu - Grameen Koota borrower featured for our upcoming release

Shamim D

Shamim D demonstrates the power of extending our platform through our Customer Consortium. Much of the new functionality are features required by our respective customers.  Our m-pesa integration supporting the import of loan repayments, loan disbursals, and savings deposits (coupled with loan repayments) from m-pesa is being built for KEEF, an innovative emerging MFI out of Kenya.  KEEF, who’s fully live on Mifos, will now be able to capture the full value of mobile money and demonstrate its potential for more direct outreach and new services for the poor. Moratoriums and branch-level holidays, key product needs for MFIs across the Philippines, is being built for KMBI, our newest consortium member who’s currently deploying Mifos.  Finally, Mifos as a scalable platform will cross a major milestone with this release.  Mifos will now support up to one million clients, a crucial requirement for Grameen Koota, serving nearly 500,000 clients but aiming to scale to 1 million in 2011, and 2 million in 2012.

Visit our product roadmap to learn more about Shamim D and upcoming releases.

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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.

Graeme’s Impact:

Contributions Made to Date: Since Graeme is not a Java programmer, he’s found a number of ways to contribute his skills and talents to our community around operational and implementation topics. Besides always being an active voice of sound wisdom on our mailing lists, Graeme has contributed in the following ways:

• Written a how-to on implementing a Virtual Private Network using OpenSSL.
• Involved in a project to develop security guidelines for Mifos implementations.
• Suggested a few changes to the application and installation processes.
• Logged requests, mostly in the areas of operations and usability.

Current Projects: Graeme is planning to work on a Debian package to deploy Mifos and its database on Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu. This is looking like a big job that he’s never done before – so he intends to draw on his son’s skills as a Debian package maintainer!

Graeme is also preparing to build “Mifos-in-a-box” – a single-box solution using FLOSS virtualisation software with guest systems for web/app, database, and development/management servers. This will be built with what he considers as good security practices in mind.

Graeme’s Impact on the Poor:

“I can’t measure any as yet, but I hope that the MFI referred to above will come to fruition within the next few years.”

What’s Rewarding about Working on Mifos:

“Being part of a community of a great bunch of people working to support a great cause.“

Advice for others in the  Mifos Community:

“Be patient and don’t demand answers. A lot of the people you’re dealing with are volunteers and aren’t available to answer instantly. But they will answer.”

Fun Facts about Graeme:

Favorite Food: Indian or Chinese

Favorite Open Source Project: Apart from Mifos, Debian Linux – all our non-Windows boxes, and all our servers, run Debian.

If Graeme could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Japan, but away from the cities.

Interesting fact about Graeme: Nothing exciting. I played, coached and refereed basketball for about 25 years, still playing A grade club basketball when I retired at nearly 40; I raced motorbikes for a few years, but not particularly successfully (it was my daily transport, after all!); I ride a bicycle when I can (which isn’t nearly often enough these days)) and have completed the 160 Km ride (100 miles to those of you who aren’t metric yet) around Lake Taupo four times, but only managed a best time of 5:24.

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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!

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!

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:

Who We’re Looking For:

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

Meet our Mentors and the Projects they’re leading:

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