The Mifos Initiative is looking forward to participating in Outreachy for our first time. Mentors from our project, who have served in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In are passionate about leading the next generation of coders and are excited to have the opportunity to help underrepresented groups get involved in open source. Our open source financial services platform, Mifos X, helps to bring technology-enabled financial inclusion to poor women across the globe. It is a powerful way to both eliminate global poverty and participate in open source. 

Please see https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreachy/2015/DecemberMarch for the timeline for the December 2015 round of Outreachy with the internship period lasting between December 7 and March 7.

These blog posts highlight the efforts of past interns and their mentors:

• http://mifos.org/blog/meet-2014-google-summer-code-class-interns/

• http://mifos.org/blog/a-light-hearted-look-at-our-2014-gsoc-interns/

• http://mifos.org/blog/gsoc-14-mid-term-experience/

• http://mifos.org/blog/gsoc14-experience-mifos/

• http://mifos.org/blog/2014-google-summer-code-bigger-better-ever/

• http://mifos.org/blog/gsoc-reunion/

We're looking forward to participating in Outreachy for the first time. We've participated in Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In for a number of years graduating more than a dozen interns and are eager to share the collective knowledge and wisdom of our mentors across our community. We hope to continue building our next generation of contributors who are joining in our movement to fight poverty through open source software. We want you to be part of our mission of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries.  

Interns in 2015 will have the option to work on a variety of projects related to Mifos X - our core back-end Java platform which provides a full set of RESTful APIs to deliver financial inclusion, our front-end Community App built on top of the AngularJS framework, and a variety of other apps including our Android-based mobile client. 

• What is the Mifos Initiative and how does it advance financial inclusion to the poor?

• How is the Mifos software used?

• What is Mifos X?

• How is the Mifos X platform designed?

• Watch how Mifos technology is helping end world poverty

• What do interns work on for Mifos?

• What is it like being an intern for Mifos?

• Getting started Read about setting up the code and understand the basic concepts around Mifos X.

Interns working on Mifos X will be expected to:

• Use the mifos-developer mailing list

• provide patches

• follow the Mifos coding standards

• document their work

• have access to reasonable bandwidth, ie: have a fast, reliable Internet connection

• track and report on progress daily

Basics

• Quick learner

• Troubleshooting Wizard

• Passion for writing beautiful code

• Excellent communication skills

• Knowledge of developer tools

  • such as: a text editor, source control, how to build software

  • experience with specific tools will also help, such as: Eclipse IDE, Git

Mifos includes wide variety of technologies, we do not expect a student to be expert on all of these. But it will be helpful if you have some experience in some of these. Helpful skills (specific technology requirements vary with project chosen):

• MySQL,Jersey, Hibernate, Spring,

• HTML, CSS,  JavaScript (JQuery), AngularJS

• JUnit, REST-assured

• When you need help, ask for help! Do some searches before asking, please. We are very excited for you to join us, but we need to know that you're willing to put in the time and effort required to do your part. When you do ask, ask well.

• Not sure if you are qualified? Download and build the code, then run the Platform and the reference user interface. Instructions for doing so are available at Getting started - Contributing to MifosX.

• Email the mifos-developer mailing list with your questions and project ideas.

• Ask a question in our Gitter chatroom at https://gitter.im/openMF/mifos

• Install Skype for (generally infrequent) video calls. You'll need a headset for Skype, too.