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| Item | Amount (USD) | Running Total (USD) | Notes/Justification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Writer | $6500 | $6500 | |
| Graphic design - architecture diagrams, flow diagrams and visuals to accompany documentation | $1000 | $7500 | |
| Project Management, Supervision, and Review of Deliverables | $850.00 | $8350 | To cover partial cost of scoping out project, managing its delivery and final review of deliverables. |
| Volunteer Stipends (3 at $500 each) | $1500 | $9850 | For volunteers that will be closely providing information and/or reviewing deliverables |
| T-Shirts for Volunteers | $150 | $10000 | Printing of t-shirts for documentation volunteers |
Additional Information
Previous experience with technical writers
We have worked extensively with technical writers before in the creation of user-facing and developer facing documentation. We have done this through community-wide efforts and documentation sprints via the FLOSS Manuals community, dedicate sabbaticals and long-term volunteers like Laurie Wilmot and Bharathi Ram, as well as with university students as part of their technical writing curriculum and with live documentation and conversion of our APIs to Swagger format through GSOC.
Primarily we have engaged with technical writers to draft functional documentation for end users and system administrators in configuring and using the Mifos X web application and mobile applications. For our Generation 1 Mifos 2.0 software, we worked extensively with the FLOSS Manuals community to create and maintain documentation, leveraging the entire community to assist in the review process. As new features were rolled out, volunteer, Bharathi Ram would create the user manual based on functional specs for each new feature. You can learn about this experience at https://mifos.org/blog/star-contributor-month-bharathi-ram-donnie-tuck/. Documentation would then be tested out and used as the basis for instructional videos and user acceptance testing. For our Generation 2 Mifos X software, volunteer Laurie Wilmot took on the major task along with several university students focusing on technical writing to create our entire Mifos X manual. Read https://mifos.org/blog/star-contributor-month-laurie-wilmot/ to learn more. We had to focus deeply on the information architecture to ensure that the manual was created to both cater to administrative users configuring the software as well as staff using the software on a daily basis. Through GSOC, GCI, and with volunteers in general, we have worked in improving our technical documentation, especially our installation guides and manuals including working with an Outreachy intern, Lydiane Kengne, to convert our User Manual to Gitbooks format.
Our major learnings from these experience has been a clear process and goals for the documentation to be produced, extensive understanding of the use cases being supported and what the technical or functional user is expected to do, maintainability of the documentation and ease of access, as well as testing with end users to ensure the documentation created is accurate and allows the user to create their desired task.
Previous participation in Season of Docs, GSOC, etc
The Mifos Initiative has a long track record in participating in programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In. We have participated in Google Summer of Code for nine different years, graduating 17 interns in the last GSOC program we participated in 2020. These open source programs represent a critical growth engine for our community as described in our Endless Summer of Code video:
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