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Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

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Mentors Nayan Ambali
Overview & ObjectivesData Import Tool was a 2013 GSoC project; it is standalone web-app and used for importing bulk data like clients, groups, loan and saving accounts and transactions into the system. Code from this projected can be migrated to Mifos X platform to provide seamless integration.
Description

At present data import tool is standalone and one has to deploy it and connect it to Mifos X platform to use it for importing data. It will make the tool more readily available for all users to migrate the code from this project to Mifos X platform and give seamless integration.

Advantages of merging the code with platform:

1) Bulk upload API will always be in sync with platform APIs.

2) Easy of build UI for bulk upload inside Community-App.

3) Import will be much faster as we are eliminating one tier.

Apart from integration, we'll also be adding in additional import functionalities beyond clients, loans, and savings accounts:

4) And we will be adding other essential import options such as CoA, Code/Code Values, Offices and Data tables. 

Helpful SkillsJava (Spring/JPA/Jersey), SQL , JavaScript , Git
Impact

It has many impacts

  1. This drastically reduces the time to set up of initial configuration/data of Mifos X for organization adopting this system as MIS.
  2. For data entry operator, this feature can be used as bulk creation option (such as import bulk loans, import clients)
  3. These templates can be used as offline store. And once user has internet connectivity can upload these templates with captured data.
Other Resources 

Workflows Engine 

Mentors Binny Gopinath Sreevas (Unlicensed)
Overview & ObjectivesWorkflows can be used for adding additional data/surveys for capturing data or adding checklist to a pre-defined workflows at certain points of the workflow (scope does not include adding custom workflows).
Description

In most of the cases MFI wants to capture additional data during certain workflows (example: during client closing, wants to conduct exit survey, capture PPI during loan creation) and this requirement can fulfilled by adding option to attach datatable/survey/question group to the pre-defined workflows as certain points (example: during loan creation, during approval time or during disbursement etc).

And same can be achieved by integrating workflow engine.  

Helpful Skills Java, SQL , JavaScript , Git
Impact

Helps organization to streamline their data capture process in the MIS and as well as in the field. And this leads toward more measurability of the MFI's impact in the field and more transparency.

Other Resources 

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MentorsJames Dailey
Overview & Objectives

Pay-as-you-go mobile phones have revolutionized access to telecom, the same can be done with solar energy access. Off-grid installations of PVC panels and batteries can be pared with a mobile payment mechanism to allow clients to purchase power "as they use it". This functionality will allow organizations to become involved with 3rd party providers of solar systems.

Description
  1. Create a pre-paid account mechanism as an account type or account option in Mifos (perhaps extending existing classes), zero fees.
  2. Create a new API for consuming pre-paid account balances.  
  3. Create a simple external model that mimics consumption by a household on a daily basis - imagined as a set of data received from solar panel (watts used, time of day, volts present).  
  4. Load up pre-paid account by account transfer in P2P interface (my phone to your account) or via trusted agent - i.e. trusted agent receives cash and loads account on Mifos.
Helpful Skills SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services
Impact

Providers of pay-as-you-go solar can use MIFOS for their operations. MFIs can become such providers.

Other ResourcesMobile project on MifosX

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Mentors Nayan Ambali
Overview & Objectives

At present MIfos X platform is shipped with Community-App (SPA) as default UI, but initial load time of the application high. And for users on narrow bandwidth internet it takes a considerable amount of time to load the app.

Instead of loading the app every time, we can convert the Community-App into a Chrome App and user can download them once and install it ion the machine, and it can used as thick client.

Description

Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And Chrome apps are also written in same stack. Using grunt we should be able to repackage Community-App(SPA) into Community-App(Chrome App)

Helpful SkillsJavascript, AngularJS, Grunt
Impact

Users with slow internet connectivity can use this app (Installed on the machine) instead of loading Community-App (SPA) on the browser. Users will also have a continually updated app. This will also allow MFIs to potentially use Chromebooks as field-based devices for their branches.

Other Resources  http://developer.chrome.com/apps/angular_framework.html

Basic CRM Functionality - Inquiries/Complaints Module

Mentors Binny Gopinath Sreevas (Unlicensed)
Overview & Objectives

Right now Mifos X contains core client management functionalities including tracking basic demographic information, know your customer information, document management, and survey collection through data tables. As financial institutions serving the poor begin to offer a more in-depth and diverse range of financial inclusion products, the need for more robust client management and in-depth client understanding has grows. Their core system needs to provide more and more CRM-type functionality that complement the portfolio management and financial/social reporting the Mifos X provides.

This project will work to deliver the initial set of customer relationship management functionalities including a module for tracking inquiries, complaints

Description

This module will have a request management functionality. A request can be of 2 types: Complaints and Service Requests. Each request must be against a customer and optionally against an account of the customer. Each request will go through a simple workflow.

Actions that can be performed on a request:

Assign -> will change status to "assigned"

Start Work --> will change status to "in progress"

Close --> will change status to "closed" (with a sub-reason code)

At each step user can enter comments.

The customer summary screen will have a link to view the requests of the customer - along with a summary and current status - with option to click-through to get the complete history of each request.

Description

 

Helpful Skills 
Impact

Deepening the client relationship and ensuring fair, responsible, and transparent financial services to the poor is a core piece of the industry's roadmap for financial inclusion. Providing customers the ability to voice their concerns and feedback about the services they're receiving provides a simple yet powerful tool to protect the client. Empowering the financial institution with the ability to track these inquiries and overall maintain a more holistic relationship tracking entire lifecycle of their clients gives them a much better ability to understand their clients and respond to their needs with appropriately designed services and products.

Other Resources 

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Mentors 
Overview & Objectives

This project would seek to create one unified ID/login and profile for community members similar to the OpenMRS ID. It would achieve the following two primary objectives:

  1. One unified profile and identity for community members in which they can share with the community who they are and also build reputation and recognition. This ability to discover and self-identify with other community members is difficult when we have so many different tools and profiles to maintain.
  2. Single Sign On for our various collaboration and community infrastructure tools listed below.

 

Description
  1. Identifying a single sign-on authentication protocol that ties together authentication of our various community collaboration tools: 1) Atlassian Studio - JIRA, Confluence, JIRA Agile, 2) Social Q&A - AnswerHub 3) Mailing Lists - Mailman (administered through SourceForge 4) Source Code Version Control - GitHub 5) Continuous Integration - Jenkins 6) General Community Website (mifos.org) - Wordpress 7) Partner Directory
    1. This could be built out independently, tie into some OpenID protocol, or leverage one of our existing tools for this authentication - Atlassian Studio/Crowd or AnswerHub or another common OpenID protocol. 
  2. Design and implement a dashboard to handle the creation of this unified ID
  3. Design and create a common profile tied to this ID with basic information and photos that is searchable by the community.

Design a profile

Extra Credit:

Helpful Skills LDAP
Impact

Impact is two-fold:

  • Common unified profile and identity can help to grow collaboration and participation in the community. By being able to simply share who you are or discover who's in your community, we can deepen the bonds of community which motivates each member to participate more often and invest personally in the health of the community. Building reputation and recognizing efforts of each type of community member (users, partners, volunteers, etc) in a tangible way also helps to increase participation.
  • Single sign-on will it make much easier for community members to collaborate and communicate. Right now there is often a high barrier to signing up for the various tools - SSO will make that process easier but also encourage others to more regularly be involved.
 
Other Resources

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Mifos X SDK

MentorsMichael Vorburger & ? (I'd need functional assistance...)
Overview & Objectives

The Mifos X platform as of today is a well structure but monolithic code base - one Git repo, one build, one WAR. This has worked out well for us, but as we grow, it could be interesting to introduce a proper SDK and plug-in concept, allowing contributors to build individual JARs that can be dropped into a certain directory of Mifos X to augment the core platform on well defined extension points and hooks. These modules would be loaded at run-time, not require rebuilding Mifos X, and would remain compatible when a customer upgrades their core platform version.

We currently see the SDK as something more relevant to the Java back-end, so in this project you would likely work less on our AngularJS UI (barring some configuration UI for the plug-ins probably); but if you do have any ideas how to make the front-end more modular and extensible as well, we would love to hear from you.

Description

This project will have three axis/phases: 1. platform infrastructure framework kind of work, based on a very simple or fictitious example extension; 2. identifying the functionally which could require / be sensible to extend in Mifos X, extracting clear and documented Java APIs from it, and then make changes to existing functional platform services to make them extensible by plug-ins; 3. well document this - such plugins will only be written if it's easy and clear how to do this. Note that the more technical part 1. should only take about 1/4 of your project, the focus will have to be putting the "theory" from 1. into "practice" in phases 2. & 3.

Helpful SkillsJava, modularity, API design, dynamic class loading, OSGi-like concepts (without any plans to actually move Mifos X to running on an OSGi kernel; it's unnecessary complexity, for this)
ImpactDevelopers from partnering organisations would be able to more easily extend the core Mifos X by extension code running in-process the platform (as opposed to REST-based
Other Resources

Many other Java-based platform have such mechanism, and you would be expected to draw at least conceptual, if not outright technical inspiration (re-using code, if feasible) from things like the Eclipse Plug-In architecture (or similar non-OSGi based ones in other IDEs), research if Spring itself or some extension from someone has anything useful for this (think like Guice Multibindings plus ServiceLoader API as discussed on this StackOverflow, or this blog, or these Mycila Guice Extensions; but without going all the way to OSGi-based Spring DM / Dynamic Modules; again, overkill, here), get inspiration from drop-in add-on modules extension capabilities in enterprise software such as e.g. Atlassian plug-in framework, and learn how e.g. our friends at OpenMRS do this (see OpenMRS SDK doc and OpenMRS project).

Mobile Field Office Planner

Mentors? Sander van der Heyden
Overview & Objectives

To allow field-based staff to manage their daily schedules and to ensure that their supervisors are able to review these tasks and to plan field operations and bring in more efficiency and transparency for field operations

Description

Field officers typically have a predefined set of tasks to follow, for example: Do survey for a locality, Conduct Group Trainings, Conduct Group Tests, Do Center Meetings and Collections. Each could have a task code to make operations streamlined.

Field officers manage their calendars by selecting an activity and specifying a center, date and time for which this activity is planned. This becomes their planned activity for this slot.

A simple workflow to manage each slot – when field officer starts the activity, status of the slot is changed from “new” to “open” and when the activity is completed, it is set to “closed”. It would be ideal to manage this workflow using a mobile tool – preferably an inbound SMS message. For example: an SMS from the field officer’s phone with the text “OPEN 1430” will change the status to “OPEN” of the field officer’s activity that was planned for 2:30pm.

Field officer may change his plan up to a certain time prior to the start of the activity.

Auditors and branch managers will review the activities and track the field officers’ planning and efficiency.

Helpful SkillsJava, SQL , Git, SMS integration
ImpactField efficiency and operational efficiency
Other ResourcesSee SMS Integration and Outbound SMS

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MentorsNayan Ambali
Overview & Objectives

To run any business successfully, you need the insight of the business and that is possible when you have information system in which you can get the information in the format your business analysis team needs. And in current world business are very much market adaptive and market scenarios changes very rapidly. To cope up with that  good MIS need to have Ad-hoc report builder.

Easy-to-use, drag-and-drop report designer builds crosstabs, tables, and chart-based reports using a standard browser.

Description

The ad hoc reporting will be based on a logical mapping of Mifos data elements to business entities (like customer, loan account, savings account, loan transactions, savings transactions etc.) and business attributes (like loan approved date, loan amount, loan outstanding amount etc.). An end user will be able to configure and generate reports based on these business entities and business attributes.

Reporting fields and reporting criteria will support basic derived fields like "days overdue", "amount overdue", "customer total outstanding amount", "customer total relationship value" etc.

The reporting will support basic functions like summing up totals, sorting based on different fields and grouping based on different fields.

Helpful SkillsSQL, Pentaho reporting, DW concepts.
ImpactBusiness analysis team, funders, management or operational users can get the required data in real time instead of depending on someone to develop reports. Helps in taking quick decisions as data is available immediately.
Other Resourceshttp://community.pentaho.com/faq/waqr_faq.php

Basic CRM Functionality - Inquiries/Complaints Module

Mentors 
Overview & Objectives

 

Description

 

Helpful Skills 
Impact 
Other Resources 

Actionable notifications/alerts/status updates in Mifos X

MentorsNayan Ambali
Overview & Objectives

For better usability system need needs to have notification notifications to the logged in user about actions he/she need needs to perform in the application.

 

Description

Build real time notification system in application to notify to users about pending/new actions she/he needs to take. Example if branch manager login to the application and 3 new loans are created and pending for approval then system should notify him/her about the pending actions.

This involves both invoking and triggering these notifications based on these actions or activities as well as the extension of the user interface to support the display of the notifications as well as the ability of the user to take action upon the notifications.

Helpful SkillsJavascript, CSS, HTML5. AngularJS and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus
ImpactBetter usability. improve the productivity of users and actions will be taken on time.
Other ResourcesUsability and Design

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Business Analytics (OLAP)

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MentorsKojoG
Overview & Objectives

Develop ETL scripts to create OLAP cubes (fact and dimension tables in MySQL). This will allow managers to perform ad hoc slicing and dicing of their data 
to answer important questions about their operations.

  • Create ETL scripts and tests
  • Create a Mondrian schema to work with Saiku Analytics
Description

 

Helpful SkillsDatabase Management Systems, MDX, SQL,
ImpactData drives a microfinance institution - the more powerful and robust analytical tools management has, the better they can tailor their services and outreach to impact the poor most effectively.
Other ResourcesSaiku Analytics Demo - demo.analytical-labs.com
Wikipedia OLAP Article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olap
Introduction to OLAP - http://www.db-class.org/course/video/preview_list
Gentle Introduction to MDX - http://www.iccube.com/support/documentation/mdx_tutorial/gentle_introduction.html

REVIEW - Outbound SMS Integration

MentorsGurpreet Luthra (Unlicensed) (plus Michael Vorburger, as needed)
Overview & Objectives

MFIs have requested the ability for both inbound and outbound SMS communication. This project will focus on outbound notifications, MFIs would like to be able to send out meeting notifications, payment reminders, or other messages. Sending SMS receipts is another important use case that would increase security for both the client and MFI. We will first focus on the simplest use case of sending out an SMS message from the View Client Screen.

Outbound SMS integration could be done via integration through the Cloud API of an SMS service like Nexmo or Twilio or any other SMS service -

Jira Legacy
serverMifos Atlassian JIRA
serverIdfadabfd4-0fae-3a17-93dc-48fcff6b6b6a
keyMIFOSX-119

This project could also look at integration with FrontlineSMS. Integration with FrontlineSMS would offer up a wide array of possible use cases including SMS forms, better management of contacts and more.

Description

Currently Mifos and the client and portfolio data it contains is only accessed by the staff of the MFI. However, the majority of clients served by MFIs own mobile phones. A simple yet powerful way for them to interact with the data in Mifos is via SMS. MFIs have requested the ability for both inbound and outbound SMS communication to send notifications to their clients and to enable clients to retrieve information about their accounts. When living on less than $2/day, this simple yet timely interaction with their financial accounts is extremely important.

Helpful Skills 
Impact

When you're living on less than $2/day as many of the microfinance clients are, income often has a volatile flow with many peaks and valleys leading to difficult financial management and a challenge in ensuring smooth consumption flows. Visibility into their limited financial resources is critical. SMS allows staff to more frequently communicate important information to their clients. It gives the clients the security and piece of mind to know how much they have in their savings account or how much they owe on their loan - vitally important pieces of information when trying to live on low yet volatile income streams

Other Resources

Random Hacks of Kindness Problem Page

REVIEW - Client Scoring Modules

MentorsUdaiU (Unlicensed)
Overview & Objectives

Create Client Scoring Tools in Mifos X

Objectives: 

  • Based on user requirements, develop algorithms and scoring parameters in Pentaho to create this scoring module. 
Description

MFIs using Mifos often want to implement a credit scoring/client prospecting analysis tool to help automate the onboarding process for new clients by creating quantifiable measures to assess credit worthinesss. More and more MFIs are moving towards individual lending models where this scoring will be of greater need. Using our Data Tables (Surveys) module and our Mifos Business Intelligence Suite on Pentaho, they can set up questions and define parameters/scores to assess these questions.

Mifos X is more optmized for individual lending so client scoring tools become all the more valuable with the rich client data that an MFI is able to track in the system.

Helpful Skills 
Impact

Minimizing risk is important for running a sustainable microfinance institution. More importantly, many of these client scoring tools go beyond financial and business performance by analyzing social indicators to provide a quantifiable metric at the social impact made on a client. Having tools to capture these data and properly score/analyze it allow MFIs to deliver the strongest and most beneficial services to their clients.

Other Resources

See:

REVIEW - Client Impact Portal

To develop a portal that aggregates information from different MifosX deployments and report on predefined social and operational metrics

Objectives:

Implement back-end logic in MifosX required to make information available to the client impact portal 
MentorsSander van der Heyden 
Overview & Objectives
  • Implement UI and back-end logic of the Client impact portal
  • Description

    Client Impact Portal

    MentorsSander van der Heyden 
    Overview & Objectives

    Microfinance institutions usually work with various external parties, such as funders or investors. Using the data that is available in MifosX we would like to offer those stakeholders a seperate portal showing accurate and high-level information about the institution that would otherwise be reported manually by the institution. This information helps them in their decision making processes, but also enables them to assess the broader impact they are having with their funding.

    Description

    To develop a portal that aggregates information from different Mifos X deployments and report on predefined social and operational metrics

    Objectives:

    • Implement back-end logic in MifosX required to make information available to the client impact portal
    • Implement UI and back-end logic of the Client impact portal
    Helpful Skills  SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services
    ImpactFunders and investors are vital for almost all MFI's, providing them with accurate information on the impact they are making with each of their MFI's is something they highly value and that enables them to assess whether they want to further support the MFI's moving forward to enable growth of the MFI.
    Other ResourcesData Analytics & Client Insight - Are we making an impact? (Client Impact Portal demo)

    Web UI quality cross browser non-regression testing

    MentorsMichael Vorburger + ?
    Overview & Objectives

    While the Mifos X Community App front-end UI based on AngularJS-based currently does already have some JS unit tests, we lack a full UI level web tests which continually non-regression test common scenarios. We believe having this could add value in terms of quality, including ensuring automated cross browser testing.

    Description

    Possibly building upon a extremely limited small scale existing POC (if you find it to be a useful starting point), your mission, should you chose to accept it, would be to build out comprehensive UI walk through scenario test coverage for the Mifos X UI. If you can build more such tests faster and more maintainable (= less code) by using any of the existing frameworks listed below or others you know of / will find, or build useful such infrastructure yourself as part of this code, we're eager to hear from you! Keep in mind that the main deliverable of this project is not (only) a foundation framework, but must actually include an extensive suite of running tests integrated into the Mifos build.

    Helpful SkillsCandidates should demonstrate serious interest and basic know-how by accompanying their application for this project with pull requests to the existing mifosx-ui-selenium-webdriver-tests POC.
    ImpactContinuously verified and cross browser checked quality of the Mifos X UI.
    Other Resources

    http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/

    https://github.com/vorburger/mifosx-ui-selenium-webdriver-tests

    https://github.com/vorburger/webdriver-runner

    https://saucelabs.com or https://browserling.com

    https://github.com/FluentLenium/FluentLenium

    http://www.gebish.org

    http://www.thucydides.info

    Security Penetration testing

    Mentors?KojoG
    Overview & Objectives

    We believe the Mifos X platform is super secure and impenetrable. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prove us wrong, and help close gaps you may find.

    Description

    Beyond a one time exercise, you should integrate (some of) the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, tools flag up future newly introduced potential vulnerabilities.

    Helpful SkillsCandidates applying for this project would ideally have prior experience in penetration testing, and document this in their application.
    ImpactRe-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform.
    Other Resources

    https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

    https://code.google.com/p/zaproxy/

    http://wapiti.sourceforge.net

    Run FindBugs & related tools for some serious static code analysis

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_test

    Scalability testing, reports, infrastructure for ongoing test, documentation

    Mentors?Vishwas Babu A J
    Overview & Objectives

    During last year's GSoC 2013, star student (and GSoC 2014 mentor) Anuruddha has greatly contributed to the scalability of the Mifos X by adding server-side pagination and distributed caching to the platform. This project's goal is to measure just how well we really scale - with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos.

    Beyond a one time exercise, you should set up infrastructure we can keep using, and integrate the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, help us to keep up good perf.

    Description

     

    Helpful Skills 
    ImpactRe-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform.
    Other Resources

    http://twitter.github.io/iago/

    http://www.loadui.org (by the good people behind SOAPui)

    Selenium WebDriver

    https://jmeter.apache.org/

    http://grinder.sourceforge.net/

    http://opensta.org/

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    Extend Community app to run on Mobile devices with Offline Support

    Mentors TBDVishwas Babu A J
    Overview & Objectives

    MIfos X platform is shipped with a Community-App (SPA) as the default UI which is optimized for Web Browser display on large screens (Mobile, Laptops and Tablets). We need to extend the same to support mobile views (with minor changes to workflow) and provide offline functionality

    Description

    Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Also since there is a clear separation between the view and the Controllers in Angular JS, we should be able to spin up mobile views fairly easily reusing the same Controllers and Services. As it is quite common for Mobile users to have intermittent data connection, we should also support offline functionality,

    Helpful SkillsJavascript, AngularJS, Apache cordova
    Impact

    Field officers can access MifosX from a Mobile optimized view, capture data offline that can be synced back to the server when an internet connection is available.

    It also becomes easier for the community volunteers to maintain the mobile view ( as we reuse most of the code from the Community app) as opposed to maintaining a separate Android app.

    Other Resources


    Custom Fantastic Mifos Project

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