| Program announcement | February 9, 2021 Season of Docs program announced |
| Organization applications | February 9, 2021 at 18:00 UTC Organizations can begin submitting applications to Google |
| March 26, 2021 at 18:00 UTC Deadline for organization applications | |
| March 26 - April 15, 2021 Google program administrators review organization applications | |
| Organizations announced | April 16, 2021 at 18:00 UTC Google publishes the list of accepted organizations |
| Doc development | April 16, 2021 Doc development can officially begin |
| Technical writer hiring | May 17, 2021 Technical writer hiring deadline |
| Monthly Evaluations | June 16, 2021 Organization administrators begin to submit monthly evaluations to report on the status of their project |
| Final project evaluation and case study | November 16 - 30, 2021 at 18:00 UTC Organization administrators submit their case study and final project evaluation |
| Results announced | December 14, 2021 Google publishes the 2021 Season of Docs case studies and aggregate project data |
| Followup surveys | May 2, 2022 Organizations begin to participate in post-program followup surveys |
...
| Info | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
Mifos has been accepted into the 2021 Season of Docs and are actively seeking applicants for our project listed below. Ideal candidates should at least have experience with technical writing for software projects, with previous experience around documentation for open source projects and fintech being a plus as well. Interested applicants should send their resume and at least three documentation projects you've worked on previously to edcable@mifos.org by May 1, 2021. |
About Mifos
The best way to understand what we do is to watch a few videos.
What is Mifos and What Does our Community Do?
| Widget Connector | ||
|---|---|---|
|
| Widget Connector | ||
|---|---|---|
|
How is the Mifos software used?
| Widget Connector | ||
|---|---|---|
|
2021 Season of Docs Timeline
Please see Google Season of Docs website for the full program timeline. Here are a few key dates and their current status:
| Anchor | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
About the Mifos Initiative
The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit leveraging the cloud, mobile & open source community to democratize financial services worldwide and digitally transform the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked. We aim to create a world of 3 Billion Maries where everyone has access to the financial resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their family. Our unprecedented approach unites financial institutions, local technology partners, and volunteer developers to collectively advance open source banking infrastructure to sustainably build impactful innovations in digital financial services.
...
Documentation audiences across our community include the end users of our software, the staff of financial institutions and fintechs that use Mifos to create customers and their accounts, configure loan and savings products, process transactions and track repayments and deposits, manage their general ledger and generate financial and operational reports. The primary audience of our documentation is our partner community who host, deploy, configure, and support the software for these financial institutions, build new fintech solutions and applications using the APIs, and develop, maintain, and extend the core upstream project which powers their solutions. Joining these partners as part of our developer community are individual volunteers, interns, and corporate strategic partners who collectively guide the development, QA, and release management to ensure timely and high-quality open source releases of our platform.
Our Problem & Need
This project will help provide a unified source of documentation to guide developers and implementers who are building on the stack, deploying it, and contributing to it. It will serve as the foundation of our developer portal which will accelerate innovation of new fintech solutions, ease the onboarding of new partners and contributors, and increase upstream contributions to the project. This consolidated documentation will provide an understanding of the entire landscape of solutions around Mifos and Fineract including the core banking platform and the ancillary web and mobile apps, and integration and API layers on top. It will help developers and implementers understand the two generations of architecture, which use cases each is ideal for and the boundaries of the project for them to build upon. It will help innovators deploy the platform and quickly get engaged so they can envision the experiences they can build, and help guide new contributors to contribute back to the upstream project according to the Apache Way.
...
The more unified we can make our documentation and show how the various components and solutions all fit together via live APIs and sandbox environments, the more innovation and upstream contribution we can catalyze.
Project Scope
The project will consist of a mix or re-organization and consolidation of existing documentation, updates and rewording of existing documentation and the writing of some new sections of content.
We have several volunteers on the functional and technical side working ongoing updates of documentation. We do not have any technical writer yet identified for this project but they will extend upon existing documentation and the efforts of our developers.
Reorganization & Consolidation
Documentation exists in multiple places and some of this documentation will be maintained in its current place but this developer portal will centrally link to the most up to date version of documentation.
...
Timeline: 10 person-days
Update Existing Documentation
A wealth of documentation already exists but some of it needs to be elaborated upon, expanded, or updated to reflect more recent technical or functional changes to the software itself, changes to infrastructure or community processes, etc.
- Update architectural overview of our second generation Fineract 1.x platform to more accurately reflect monolithic app architecture and succinctly describe its multiple layers and updating the corresponding dependencies for each layer. (3 days)
- Update architectural overview of our third generation architecture showing a high-level overview of the microservices, the underlying libraries and third party components its built upon and how the overall microservices interact with each other. (4 days)
- Updates to the description of each microservice on the wiki/readme to help implementers and contributors understand its purpose in the domain driven design and a functional/technical overview of each microservice. (5 days)
- Updates our recently written Swagger/OpenAPI documentation to have similar descriptions of each section as that of our static HTML API documentation. (2 days)
- Update coding standards to reflect current community procedures after recent refactoring of implementation of more run-time static analysis and code quality scanning tools. (1 day)
- Update our guide on our contribution process and the Apache Way to more accurately reflect the norms and process for contribution and best practices of upstream development while still maintaining a production-ready version of a downstream solution. (2 days)
- Update installation and cloud deployment guides to reflect the updated tools and scripts that the community has written to support more of the DevOps advances that have been made around containers and Kubernetes and to reflect current releases and major dependency changes. ( 4 days)
- Update FAQs explaining difference between Mifos and Fineract. (2 days)
Total: 23 person-days
New Documentation
- Draft high-level summaries of each project/repository/solution to show how the entire landscape of Mifos/Fineract software is connected to form a set of composable building blocks to create different financial services. (5 days)
- Draft an explainer on the new architecture originating from the technical reviews done by the community members to document the pros and cons of the new architecture, design decisions and rationale for the new architecture and which generation of the core platform (Fineract or Fineract CN) is ideal for which functional use case. (5 days)
Timeline: 10 person-days
Review & Incorporate Feedback
Based on review of the above deliverables by project supervisor and volunteers, technical writer will implement feedback and refine deliverables
...
Project Total: 50 person-days
Out of Scope
The following items are out of scope for this project:
- Updating User Manual - Current user guide needs to be updated for several new features that have been developed and for screenshots to reflect new UI changes that have been implemented
- Updating Payment Hub EE and API Gateway documentation - our recently developed Payment Hub EE and API Gateway for Open Banking layer both could benefit from refining and expanding to add additional helpful context.
- New live API Documentation - APIs for Fineract CN need to be documented in Swagger format.
- Updating our deployment toolkit - our deployment toolkit consists of a six-stage process along with reference templates that could be updated to reflect new features - this is out of scope.
- Documentation of Data Model - to assist in the reporting and understanding the Mifos/Fineract data model, a more comprehensive set of documentation/data dictionary could be developed.
- Partner Onboarding Guide - These technical docs along with our other resources like deployment toolkit, etc could be gathered into a more comprehensive partner onboarding guide which is out of scope for this project.
- Functional Specifications of new features - a valuable supplement to our technical and end user documentation are detailed functional specifications for brand new features. This is out of scope.
Measuring Project Success
We would consider the project successful if, after the consolidation and updating of the documentation into a Developer portal:
- Number of pull requests and upstream contributions increase by 20%
- Number of onboarded partners increase by 10 over a 3 month period.
- Number of new volunteers onboarded grows by 10 over a 3 month period
- Number of partners making contributions upstream increases by at least 5 additional partners.
- Number of new solutions developed by ecosystem grows by at least 3 new solutions powered by the APIs
- Number of questions on mailing list regarding to how deploy or configure the platform goes down by 20%
Project Budget
Total project budget is $10,000 USD
...
| 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.
...
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:
| Widget Connector | ||
|---|---|---|
|
...