We are announcing that Grameen Foundation USA will be exiting its activities related to Mifos®. Over the coming months we will make a concerted effort to transition the initiative to leaders in the Mifos community. Though this has been a very difficult business decision, we are confident that this is the best approach for Mifos to achieve long-term success.
Grameen Foundation launched the Mifos initiative in 2006 to address a critical need for a solid technology platform tailored to the needs of the microfinance community. Our goal has been to provide software that can promote growth and transparency in microfinance and achieve deep, lasting impact in the lives of poor people.
Since then, Mifos has become a robust open-source software platform that is used by microfinance institutions around the world. As open-source software, Mifos has been supported by a global community of software developers, translators and users.
However, the challenges of running a global software business within an NGO from the United States, combined with the expense of maintaining a substantial software development team, will not enable us to achieve our goals or to realize the potential of Mifos. Consequently, our leadership has decided that, over the coming months, Grameen Foundation will transition out of this business. Our direct involvement in Mifos will conclude at the end of November 2011.
Thoughts on how the Mifos community can follow David Eaves' advice on enabling a better community experience based on his analysis of Mozilla metrics and dashboards analyzin contributors and their interactions.
David Eaves, a public policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert who advises businesses on open source strategies and community management, put together a fascinating post on his blog. He takes a look at a set of dashboards and metrics Mozilla is using to measure the efficiency of its contributor community. He has pulled together some great insight that our (and any open source community) could follow to maintain better relationships with contributors and enable greater interaction and collaboration across a community. We’re very excited to see such a large project like Mozilla doing this and should try to do it more formally with our contributor data in MifosForge.
Specialists around the world are independently guiding the adoption of Mifos. Providing local support and implementation services to MFIs is of the many values of the Mifos ecosystem. This is a guest post from Nayan Ambali, a member of Conflux Technologies, detailing a recent Mifos Roadshow, they embarked on throughout Northern India.
Our roadshow was intended to showcase the functionalities of Mifos to MFIs in northern India. We chose to start with Utter Pradesh (North India state) because of its highly dense population plagued by gender inequality and poverty with more than 40% living below the poverty line. Most of the MFIs are lagging in adopting technology compared to their counterparts in South India.
For the months of January and February, we're showcasing two Bankers without Borders volunteers who have been updating and expanding our documentation. Bharathi Ramasubramanian and Donnie Tuck have brought an understandable voice to some of the complex new features in our most recent releases. They've updated our user manual so you can use the new features and understand the value they can provide.
A closer look at the features, functionality and reporting improvements that we've shipped in the Mifos 2.0 and Mifos 2.1 and Mifos Business Intelligence Suite.
Over the past several months, our team and community has been quite busy - we've shipped two major releases and a brand new business intelligence suite offering you powerful reporting tools to analyze the data that has been captured in Mifos.
While we've continued to make behind-the-scenes architectural improvements that you might not notice, these releases contain some new functionality that we should take a closer look at. We'll start by diving into our most recent release, Mifos 2.1 and then go back to take a look at what was in Mifos 2.0. In a separate post, we'll look at what Mifos Business Intelligence Suite can do to help you understand your business and how your services are impacting your clients.
The Mifos community would like to extend our congratulations to Ken Banks, the 2011 Pizzigati Prize recipient, for his leadership and innovation in Mobiles for Development through FrontlineSMS. We would also like to recognize Adam Monsen, Mifos software engineer and open source evangelist who we nominated for the award for his fervent passion for open source software and his selfless commitment to empowering users and developers in our community to contribute.
For the month of December, we're showcasing Keith Pierce, a man of many talents, who has contributed to Mifos in all capacities. This time, we're recognizing him for his Drupal expertise. Keith has been maintaining the face of Mifos, keeping our mifos.org and mifos.com sites running smoothly and securely.
Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world. This time around we're recognizing Keith Pierce. Keith, father-in-law to our very own Adam Monsen is a former volunteer, contract, and full-time developer for Mifos. Now he's volunteering his time to help us in maintaining our websites built on Drupal. In only a couple months time, he's helped implement a solid and secure development workflow, fixed bugs on the sites, and built out functionality to make the sites more usable for the community. Keith's continued commitment to Mifos shows that there are many ways you can get involved.
Last week we held our first ever online user meeting and it was a big success with 44 people from 12 countries in attendance. Despite some hiccups with the logistics of GoToWebinar, the turnout and participation was fantastic. The mix of people attending was just what we were looking for - existing Mifos users as well as new potential Mifos users, Specialists supporting MFIs implementing Mifos, and contributors strengthening the Mifos platform. We got to hear some detailed feedback from new users like I.Can Capital Microfinance in the Philppines and valuable insight on product architecture from long-time Mifos veterans like Terry Wong, who is still following our project even after volunteering 5 years ago.
Miguel Jóia representing Iniciativa Mifos® Moçambique recently presented Mifos at the 10th anniversary celebration of ICC Mozambique.
A Toast to the Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique
Building on the 10th anniversary of the ICC Mozambique, members of the Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique presented on the 8th of December their Mifos-related services for various Microfinance Operators, regulators and funders.
The Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique has been in the market since February 2010 and completed in September its first Portuguese Mifos deployment for a Mozambican MFI. Mifos partners, SBS (Miguel Jóia), ICC (Henriqueta Hunguana) and Afrisis (Natu Lauchande) represent this Mifos Specialist providing value-added services for the Mifos platform and expressed their commitment to disseminate and implement the Mifos system in Mozambique and other Portuguese speaking countries.
For the months of October and November, we're showcasing the Translatewiki.net Community, who've supplied us a robust new infrastructure for translating Mifos and an active community of translators to maintain and extend the languages Mifos is available in.
Each month we honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world. This time around we're doing a group recognition for several key members of the Translatewiki.net community. Transitioning the Mifos user interface to FreeMarker pages meant we need to re-translated our entire software. This could have been a nightmare but it's been a blessing. Making the switch from Pootle to Translatewiki.net, we've benefited from a stable and actively maintained translation infrastructure that smoothly syncs with our Git repository. Coupled with an enthusiastic community of translators, we've been able to maintain our existing Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese translations with the new UI framework and are beginning to translate Mifos into languages like Bengali, Tagalog, Telugu, Tamil, and more.
