Hello Michael, Thanks for starting this valuable topic on the mailing list. I wanted to respond wearing my hat as leader of the Mifos Initiative as many of the tools/structures you suggested are constructs that we're providing currently to the community, have attempted to roll out or are planning to roll out. When Mifos began the process of donating the source code and incubating Apache Fineract as a top-level project in the Apache Software one of the main reasons why one of our project champions thought Mifos would be a good fit for ASF would be because we already had a community of implementers and built in place a number of formal structures for our implementer/end user community and that these lessons could be valuable for other Apache projects.
Given everything in accordance with the Apache Way is via individuals, naturally the role Mifos Initiative continued and continues to play to augment the Apache Fineract community is the catalyst and steward of the ecosystem, acting as a convening body for organizations to discuss and establish a roadmap, secretariat hub connecting users with solutions and services provided by the ecosystem. Given we have been providing mechanisms for "recommended partners" like a partner directory for more than the past 10 years, I thought it was obvious that Mifos was playing this role. By design I have not tried to overstate our role in this regard on the mailing lists as in the past, others from ASF expressed concern in Mifos exerting too much influence which was necessary given that we incubated the Fineract community and continue to catalyze its growth as much as possible. All that being said, I'll use this thread to bring to attention what we have been currently doing and proposed interventions we are designing and are soon to be rolling out. Hopefully this will bring awareness to these tools if others weren't aware and rather than start brand new efforts, if people are interested in helping to strengthen/refine or participate in these tools, then they can as well. *Current Structures to Connect the Ecosystem* *=====================================* - Partner Directory (Active) - Services Marketplace (Live but not Active) - Appstore (Soon to be Launched) - Sponsored Development (Ongoing) - Developer Portal (In Development) - Volunteer Matching (Active) - Working Groups/Product Council (Active) - Contributor Recognition (Ongoing) *Partner Directory (Recommend Implementation Partners) - * https://mifos.org/directory - As stated before, this listing of partners is something we maintain to provide a higher degree of assurance on the capabilities of someone claiming to be capable of providing services on Mifos/Fineract - we are continuing to evolve and formalize this partner program and providing more levels of distinction/certification based on two primary dimensions of success (live ongoing deployments and merit/activity/participation in the OS community. We have tried to automate the reporting of activity (at all levels, not just code) through self-reporting via a Google form and automatically tabulated scores but that has been difficult to maintain so I would love to explore linkage with Github and pull requests to help in distinguishing partners. It would be nice to tie this in accordance with badges which we're exploring as part of Discourse. While this is currently under evolution, this page lists out the structures of our partner program (https://mifos.org/take-action/partners/) and the criteria for how partners are measured ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/18ZEbMrZNhdZab6LTJWFkkQ6NYTLbC3WIUvau9-QaEeg/pub ) I have maintained this partner directory since 2008 as part of Grameen Foundation and over the years at Mifos Initiative we have continue to try to evolve it and are open to any suggestions from the ecosystem to improve this directory. We vet each partner that applies to be a partner through an initial discovery call and onboarding process that requires a successful deployment before they can be listed in the directory. Right now our primary aim is to re his is something that I maintained as part of Grameen Foundation since 2007/2008 and then have maintained For the past two years, we have also been surfacing the concept of a more formal "Association" like FINOS/Mojaloop Foundation/Linux Foundation/Cloud Native Computing Foundation and many of our partners have already been briefed about this. Since our ecosystem is so vibrant and the need is apparent, I'll soon be announcing this association formally and inviting members of the ecosystem to join. *Services Marketplace* While I know we were last discussing a marketplace or bounty service back in May such as https://www.bountysource.com/, what I've tried to facilitate is at least a forum or list to do the connection and matching between individuals seeking services and companies aiming to provide them along with hiring, consulting roles, RFPs, and volunteer needs. In August of 2017, we launched such a matching forum using Mobilize - https://mifos.org/blog/connecting-mifos-community-mobilize/. Despite promoting it via list and all our online meetings for the community, uptake was limited and we evolved into the current *Marketplace category on our Discourse Forum at https://discourse.mifos.org/t/about-the-marketplace-category/9210 <https://discourse.mifos.org/t/about-the-marketplace-category/9210>* We have modeled this closely after those of ODK ( https://forum.getodk.org/c/marketplace/8) and OpenMRS ( https://talk.openmrs.org/c/implementing/job-board/19) but uptake has still been limited as well. *Appstore * Since the terms Marketplace/Appstore get interchanged, I wanted to distinguish this as distinct from more of a matching marketplace for services/jobs/paid development as described above. Whereby an appstore would be to discover solutions powered by Fineract/Mifos, plugins/modules/extensions, apps, value-added features/integrations built by the ecosystem. Mifos has planned to and will maintain an Appstore similar to Mambu Marketplace (https://www.mambu.com/partners/marketplace/) Wordpress Plugins, (ttps://wordpress.org/plugins/). We'll expedite getting this out there even if it's a simple listing of the different apps, solutions, cloud hosting options, etc that are available at the moment. Over time as more of an architecture supporting extensions/plugins is in place and these plugins can be more easily distributed and deployed, this appstore will of course facilitate this. I have a volunteer working on design of such a marketplace and how the platform architecture could better support it and will have him share his current thinking at the moment. We have always also used GCI as a means of getting some design input on this dating back to 2017 as well: https://codein.withgoogle.com/archive/2017/organization/5682383600746496/task/6286874075201536/ We already try to do this manually by connecting individuals with partners who have built specific loan products or have built advanced credit scoring etc but it would be nice to facilitate this in more an automated fashion with Mifos acting as the steward and broker. To some extent, we try to do this through our "Powered by" section at https://mifos.org/impact/powered-by-mifos/ highlighting the different use cases for which Mifos/Fineract is being used for. *Sponsored Development* Mifos too is seeking sponsorships through our Github Sponsors page - https://github.com/sponsors/openMF. Any funding we received through there would be used to sponsor developers to build features or fix bugs as needed by the community. The structure of this is very similar to the Mifos membership/recurring giving program that any community member is welcome to join: Open Source Fintech Force - https://mifos.org/take-action/os-fintech-force/ As I think is well known, Mifos has historically and will continue to solicit grants as a non-profit to help advance the development of the code and strengthen the community. Recent grants include two grants from DIAL - one as a catalytic grant which for "Dirty Jobs" which was used to contract out Shruthi Rajaram as community engineer in 2018 for 6 months ( https://markmail.org/thread/edf6ffq7sl7fqd3g) which helped to reinvigorate community a bit as well as the strategic grant from DIAL which helped to catalyze Payment Hub efforts and Open Banking efforts on Fineract. While this isn't sponsored development persay, Mifos has played an outsized role with Google Summer of Code - we directly mentored 17 interns through the Mifos Initiative and also provided the check-in protocol and ongoing communications structure for the 3 additional Apache Fineract GSOC interns this past year. *Developer Portal* Mifos has always acted as a gateway to individuals seeking to contribute to the project not just for HFOSS and social mission but for other reasons as well. We continue to and want to provide a more engaging and developer-friendly experience to incoming contributors to help them more rapidly test out innovation and most importantly contribute back to upstream via the Apache Way. This is something that would augment the documentation that Fineract community has in place. We have a proposed design/architecture for the portal which is being led by a volunteer but would welcome more help on that. We also have a grant proposal out on the Developer Portal to Goldman Sachs that we're awaiting word back from in the next month. *Volunteer Matching* Through our website (https://mifos.org/take-action/volunteer/) and through volunteer portals like Benevity and programs like Social Coding 4 Good, we try to recruit volunteers, technical and non-technical to contribute back to the project. Each volunteer that goes through our website is onboarded via a call and then engaged actively on a project. Recently we've been organizing our volunteers into working groups like our Product Management working group which has been effective. This process is time-consuming and always welcome more mentors to help hand-hold volunteers. *Working Groups & Product Council* As has been evident on-list, we have formed and facilitated collaboration around a number of key strategic areas through working groups such as Scalability & Performance, Open Banking, AI and ML, Mobile Apps, Payments and Digital Financial Services, Web Development, Fineract CN Product Council. We've done this to provide a more focused discussion, formation of a roadmap and synchronous communication around these topics. Listing of some of these groups is at https://discourse.mifos.org/g *Contributor Recognition* Historically we have recognized our Star Contributors but have recently fallen behind on doing that regularly. I currently have some of our past interns and volunteers fleshing out the design of a Contributor Wall of Fame/Mifos/Fineract Alumni page to show contributions and who each community member is. I will share more progress of this soon. On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 9:13 AM Aleksandar Vidakovic < [email protected]> wrote: > True... makes sense! > > On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 5:56 PM Michael Vorburger <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 5:53 PM Aleksandar Vidakovic < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> :+1: for the "Recommended Implementation Partners"... informally I think >>> some people know these companies already, but it's a great idea to make >>> this more visible. >>> >> >> BTW I was specifically thinking not ONLY of "these companies" but.. >> anyone interested. Other users? Students? Why not! >> >> >> On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 5:34 PM Michael Vorburger <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Hello Airsay & everyone, >>>> >>>> Airsay raised the following interesting question on the "Fineract >>>> Customization" email thread, which to me seems worth discussing on a fresh >>>> new email thread here: >>>> >>>> "Are there any avenues to donate to the project to have specific >>>> functionality built into Fineract?" >>>> >>>> So, you CAN donate to the ASF at https://donate.apache.org, but this >>>> ("just") contributes to the capex & opex costs of e.g.the Apache Software >>>> Foundation (ASF) running issues.apache.org etc. for all projects. >>>> >>>> You CANNOT donate directly to our Apache Fineract project, and that's >>>> perhaps a Good Thing and a Feature, not a Bug? ;-) It would be complicated >>>> to determine where such money would go (IMHO). >>>> >>>> You COULD certainly just donate to specific individuals; e.g. I >>>> personally set up https://github.com/sponsors/vorburger once.. :-) >>>> >>>> BUT I suspect that you may really be asking something else... what you >>>> possibly are really getting at here is "I have problem XYZ or feature >>>> request ABC, and am looking for someone to implement that for me, and am >>>> willing to pay any interested party real money to do so" - am I right in >>>> assuming that may at least partially be the real question that you were >>>> asking? >>>> >>>> As far as I know, there absolutely are parties possibly interested in >>>> working with folks such as you like this (for full disclosure: I >>>> personally am NOT one of them). But perhaps it's not so obvious to you how >>>> to connect with such parties? I believe we all together as the project >>>> community could perhaps do better at enabling this. A while ago we >>>> discussed some ideas about creating some sort of magical sophisticated >>>> "matchmaking marketplace" site for such requests. We haven't really >>>> progressed on this, but... perhaps this really isn't that complicated? I >>>> have a simple suggestion for you, and anyone else interested: >>>> >>>> If you need something done which you don't have the know how for >>>> implementing yourself, and don't want to wait for a volunteer to possibly >>>> look into some day, then first create a JIRA issue describing whatever it >>>> is - as always. Then send a short email to this developer mailing list >>>> sounding something like this: Subject: "$€¥£₱ for FINERACT-123", Body: >>>> "Hello, we need FINERACT-123, and are willing to pay a mutually agreed upon >>>> fee we'll privately settle on first to anyone interested who is able to >>>> fully implement that to our specification when a Pull Request for the >>>> requested functionality was made available and merged into the develop >>>> branch of Fineract. Please direct reply offlist to me with any questions >>>> and your proposed quotes for implementing issue FINERACT-123." >>>> >>>> BTW if I were you, I would fairly strongly feel that it is in both YOUR >>>> and this community's interest to have any such work done "upstream first", >>>> on https://github.com/apache/fineract. To you, it makes it easier to >>>> upgrade to new releases. To us, it helps move a common unified code base >>>> with new features and bug fixes forward. If it's functionality that someone >>>> implements for you on a "private fork" that they are offering you, then >>>> discussing that, IMHO, should not happen on this public mailing list at >>>> all. We do understand that sometimes customization requests require changes >>>> to existing code, but believe that it's possible to combine "upstream >>>> first" and "local customizations" through modularity; there is currently >>>> new energy on exploring this (NB FINERACT-1127 & FINERACT-1171) - more >>>> about that separately later. >>>> >>>> Maybe you'll get 0 replies to such an email. But IMHO it's worth giving >>>> that a try and see what you get... I'm (very) curious myself! It's IMHO >>>> totally OK for follow-up discussions to be held privately. We the community >>>> would simply see JIRAs being self assigned, pull requests being raised, >>>> reviewed and merged. Money may have flown to Make It So - there's nothing >>>> wrong with that (at least to me personally), and that doesn't have to be >>>> public on list. >>>> >>>> If something like the model outlined here takes on and proves to work, >>>> then the Apache Fineract community could eventually even start to maintain >>>> some sort of list, in a simple MD doc on Git, about "Recommended >>>> Implementation Partners" - based on publicly verifiable contribution track >>>> records (i.e. merged PRs) by parties offering such services in reply to >>>> "$€¥£₱ for FINERACT-123" email threads. >>>> >>>> Further thoughts on this topic very much welcome on this public thread! >>>> >>>> M. >>>> >>> -- *Ed Cable* President/CEO, Mifos Initiative [email protected] | Skype: edcable | Mobile: +1.484.477.8649 *Collectively Creating a World of 3 Billion Maries | *http://mifos.org <http://facebook.com/mifos> <http://www.twitter.com/mifos>
