Thanks James for posting the results and your effort in putting together this exercise. The results show a more aware community. I have highlighted a few points from the survey report that are quite important.
- *The Apache Fineract website and the Getting Started Guide need a lot of work. As an example, the first thing the Getting Started guide does is confuse users and prompt questions: It says it is "for Fineract 1.x (non-CN)". What does that mean? Am I in the right place? What is non-CN? Does this apply to me? 1.x? Is there a later version of Fineract? Presumably CN stands for Cloud-Native. Surely cloud native is better. But where is it? Help! My point is that there is too much of a cognitive load when you come into the documentation. In fact I have learned so much more from lurking on the Listserv, and I must commend the friendly community. * - *The CN vs 1.x question would be much better if it had an open answering option, my opinion: CN has driven the community apart, abandoning an existing product that has active users on it and businesses relying on it like that was not a good decision of the project, and also not one made the apache way, it was very much driven by the team at that time pushing people onto a tech stack and buzzword bingo whereas the featureset was forgotten about (in a similar way it happened between Mifos and MifosX). It ultimately drove the efforts of collaboration apart and has resulted in various larger implementers/developer teams forking away.* - *Fineract CN architecture is too complex for proper contributing * *The community should set off on a CN architecture review that should be given at least 3 months of technical audit, bringing different stakeholders together, bridging the differences. * - *New features implementations are not happening regularly. **Concerned* - *Maybe some tutorial videos would be great for the less experienced community (I don't know if they already exist) * - *User manuals for personnel without financial knowledge. **I know some great work that Bharat is doing on revamping this documentation together with other community members.* - *Have a CI/CD with Quality Assurance and Release Tag in the Source Code Repositories form more focused work teams (front back end) to streamline development **We need a strong GitHub workflow for partner organisations, distributed Dev to get their PR reviews conducted faster than the PRs going stale.* - *Documentation is scattered and use cases other than micro-finance need to be highlighted. There is hardly a senior functional fintech influencer connected to the project at Product engineering level. **Industry Participation is required.* Most of these point to confusion "*between 1.x and CN, a review of design principles of CN, the documentation standards that the project needs to improve now"*. I am really grateful to you for initiating a content change on the website to mark CN as under dev & removing the confusion for industry peers, who come across the Fineract project. Thanks On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:20 PM James Dailey <[email protected]> wrote: > [Reminder - please stay on thread] > > RESULTS: On Tuesday this week I gave a talk at ApacheCON about a few key > themes. One of those was a discussion of the recent Survey that I > advertised here on dev. > > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Survey+Results+-+2021+August > <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Survey+Results+-+2021+August> > > A few key things jump out at me: (commentary). > > 1) We have a growing number of people who are here (nearly 30%) because > of their workplace. They have been introduced to the project due to where > they work. > I believe this is a sign of a maturing project. > Caveat: Since we did not ask this question before in exactly this way, we > will need to ask it again in a year or two to find out if this is a real > phenomena. > > 2) n = 41, which is exactly the number of Committers on the project. > Coincidence?!? > or a sign that we're getting a good sample of engaged people? > Next time I will ask if respondents are Committers or members of PMC. > > 3) Despite not having a formal release out, fineractCN is being used in > production, and (for obvious reasons) clearly forked by a fairly high > percentage of respondents. While fineract1.x is still dominant, the use of > FineractCN by 22% of respondents is super interesting. > > 4) Related, and a sign of a healthy community, about 50% of the > respondents said that they would be interested in helping with fineractCN > despite a lower percentage actually using it and knowing what changes it > entails. That seems like a vote for Community! It also suggests a > strategy: let's find out what those forks are doing, what domains, what > features? [new thread to be started, related to Architecture working group > ] > > 5) We asked where "your customers are located".... meaning if you are an > integrator or working for one, where are your implementations. Africa > region #1, Americas #2. See the results. > > Please feel free to comment here. Please stay on thread... i.e. it should > be about what the survey is telling us, not some other thread. > > Thanks > @[email protected] <[email protected]> > -- Ankit Managing Partner Muellners ApS, Denmark Impressum- Muellners® Inc; Copenhagen, Denmark CVR: 41548304; New Delhi, India CIN: U72900DL2019PTC344870; Foundation EU CVR:41008407 This mail is governed by Muellners® IT policy. The information contained in this e-mail and any accompanying documents may contain information that is confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, or if this message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender by reply e-mail and then delete this message, including any attachments. Any dissemination, distribution or other use of the contents of this message by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. 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