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titleMifos Initiative has been Accepted as a Mentoring Organization!

The Mifos Initiative has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the 2017 Google Summer of Code. Subscribe to this page for the latest updates to project ideas and mentors assigned to projects. Prospective students should begin engaging with the community and working on pull requests.

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AngularJS Web App Enhancements

Mentors
Overview & Objectives

Our AngularJS Web App is the standard application on the Mifos X distribution that provides all the core functionality for the most common methods of financial inclusion and products and services. It's also the starting point for any partners looking to customize or extend the UI. It's constantly being improved based on user feedback, better performance, and to integrate new design standards.

Description

In 2016, our Google Summer of Code intern refactor, re-designed, and re-skinned the Web App. This project would continue by making additional UI enhancements including:

  • Redesign the client, group, and center records
  • Redesign the loan and summary savings pages
  • Implement Wizard UI product and account creation
  • Implement UI for workflows & data table entity checks
  • Improve the collection sheet UI
  • Extend the notifications framework
  • Improve interface for role-based dashboards.
  • Performance improvements by introducing on demand loading

Helpful SkillsJavascript, CSS, HTML5. AngularJS and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus
ImpactEnhanced User Experience, Intuitive application design
Other ResourcesUsability and Design

Browser-Based Offline Access

Mentors
Overview & Objectives

For this project, we require an intern who is qualified and willing to work core HTML5 offline functionality. If we able to add offline support in community-app then we can have same application working on all browsers with offline support and need of a desktop app will not be needed.

Description

The project will involve the following. It will be a continuation of the 2016 Google Summer of Code project worked on by Mohit.

  • We can use IndexDB for storing data offline and once connected synchronize it, store actions that happened in same sequence and then fire against server.

  • We can store some data in JSONs as key-value pair and offer pre-sychronize which will fetch data as JSON for creating clients and other actions in offline mode.

  • Currently, HTML templates load from server everytime we refresh our application. As, discussed we should have some sort of template caching with expiry headers.

  • We can make some template made available offline using application cache.

  • With Template cache which is angular component. It looks for template in cache if not in the cache, it will load from server and then put in cache.

  • Mimic synchronization back and forth mimic how you store, how you date it out.
Helpful SkillsJavascript, CSS, HTML5. HTML5 Offline support knowledge i.e - Service workers, Sw-toolbox, IndexedDB wrappper - Dexie.js
ImpactOffline Functionality to Community App
Other ResourcesMore Information on Project

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Mentors
Overview & Objectives

As Mifos X has matured as a core banking platform, it's been adopted and used by larger institutions serving hundreds of thousands and even millions of clients. Partners operating cloud-hosted subscription models are also supporting hundreds of thousands of clients across their multi-tenant installations. We need to benchmark, analyze and improve the performance and scalability of the system.

Description


Enhancements to the back-end platform will include parallelization of all the jobs with a configurable amount of concurrency, look at the explain plans of the queries being used in the jobs, paginate input queries for jobs, put lazy fetching where required, node-aware scheduler and cache, office-wise configurable jobs to distribute job-load across servers and write some tests to prove that the concurrency will work for a decent amount of scale.

In addition, you'll provide some metrics which can help mid-sized MFIs (those having around a million active loans) in adopting Mifos X.


Helpful SkillsJava, Javascript, Spring, JAX-RS, JPA,
ImpactHigher outreach to the unbanked by supporting larger institutions and scaling more rapidly.
Other Resources


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Mentors
Overview & Objectives

Because of regulatory reasons or to do background check of a client (risk management), MFIs depend on credit bureaus. As part of it, MFI must submit client details to credit bureau and also need to pull client information from credit bureau before approving any new loans to a client.Mifos X can be integrated with a popular CBs in India and from other regions (based on the demand).

Description

During the 2016 Google Summer of Code, Nikhil Pawar, completed the credit bureau integration module with integrations for the major credit bureaus in India. This project will continue extending the functionality of the module and work on integrations with the major credit bureaus in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The major functionality will be sending the data to CBs on regular intervals in the format CB expects. And option to pull the client’s information from CB whenever loan officer/branch manager/ user wants to view the information for a particular client.

Helpful Skills SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services, Big Data (Hadoop, Hive)
Impact

The credit report shows account information such as repayment record, defaults, type of loan, amount of loan, etc. of the customer. This information facilitates prudent decision-making when the credit underwriter processes the loan application. This help MFI to reduce the risk of bad loans and reduces the multiple lendings to same person from different MFIs.

Other Resources

Detailed requirements https://goo.gl/aZWMZa

Mifos Credit bureau Integration. (Risk calibration Module -RCM)

Source Code: https://github.com/apache/incubator-fineract/pull/215

ETL-Based Data Migration Tool for Loan Performer to Mifos X

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Mentors
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 grown. Their core system needs to provide more and more CRM-type functionality that compliment the portfolio management and financial/social reporting that 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 options to click-through to get the complete history of each request.

Helpful Skillsfamiliarity with Mifos X tech architecture, angular js,node js, java,Spring, backend integration
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 

JPOS Integration - Point of Sale Cash Out

Mentors
Overview & Objectives

Integrate MifosX with an opensource Point of Sale (POS) called JPOS.

Description

Use case would be to get a debit transaction (cash withdraw from checking account) thru the POS device /local runtime with 2FA.  In India, the ability to get cash out through a point of sale network is provided for under RBI regulations. In production there will likely need to be an intermediate "Merchant Acquisition" or "Payment Processor" in between a single POS and MifosX Instance, but this could be abstracted out as a payment gateway only (primarily data mapping). The implementation target is the ability to do a 2 factor authentication on a POS device running JPOS (emulator ok), input account number (via some simple method), then be able to do a (cash-out) account withdrawal in real time to the MifosX account. Additional use cases would be to implement a transaction for payment for goods. i.e. enter specific goods, then do payment from MifosX account to Merchant Account (probably also in Mifos).

Helpful Skills

Familiarity with API work. Understanding of transactional flows.

Java.

Two-factor authentication - see other project idea .


Impact
Other Resources

https://github.com/jpos/jPOS/

Security Penetration testing

MentorsMark Reynolds
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

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Mentors
Overview & Objectives

Create a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation on OpenShift. Also publish a whitepaper with details of this set up.

Description

Mifos X was built to be cloud ready from the ground up. One of the most popular deployment environments for MifosX has been on Amazon EC2, however due to country specific regulation, many implementors are forced to seek alternative models that can scale as effectively. The aim of this project is two-fold:

  • Propose a scalable deployment model for Mifos on the OpenShift PaaS. Your application should highlight a starting point with some details of your planned deployment architecture, as Mentors would be not giving you step-by-step instructions in this project, just "nudge" you along; you would be expected to learn about how to deploy Mifos yourself and by autonomously using the documentation available and help from the public mailing list and IRC channel, and figure out the details of the Cloud deployment.

  • Propose how the above proposed model could be contributed to Mifos in the form of e.g. ready-to-run "configurations" etc. allowing ANYONE to deploy THE LATEST VERSION of Mifos in the Cloud themselves, and then implement this approach in practice. (Contrast this with a "one-off exercise", e.g. taking the current Mifos X WAR file, and UI, and manually making some changes to it, and then manually deploying that to some Cloud PaaS - this would not be sufficient for this project's expectations.)

  • Implement a Continuous Deployment "Devops" EXAMPLE instance of this scalable blueprint using the latest nightly Mifos build artifacts.

  • Publish a high level whitepaper of the same, which can be used as a reference for local implementors, who would additionally take care of provisioning their own hardware. This documentation should be ideally high-level, and what it described much be automated; only providing lengthy step-by-step manual instructions would not be sufficient for this project's expectations.

To prepare for this project, applying students must demonstrate at least that they have already successfully locally built and ran a Mifos X REST back-end server and UI, populated the database etc. as well as provided a simple pull request proposing some minimal deployment related improvement.

Note that we now believe that a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a more suitable foundation for this project than a raw Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform (such as Openstack, offered by public cloud provider such as e.g. Rackspace; or Azure, or raw Amazon EC2). This is because a PaaS, such OpenShift, already come with relevant features such as built-in, managed, supported and monitored HTTP load balancing (e.g. OpenShift comes with HAProxy).

We are aware that OpenShift out-of-the-box currently does not provide supported clustering for the MariaDB/mysql database used by Mifos (there is documentation for un-supported example based on an OpenShift template and suggested descriptions on blog posts, or also this one based on Severalnines.com; similarly one could deploy the commercial Percona XtraDB Cluster product ). However at this point we believe that this would not be required, and that proper configuration on OpenStack of the already existing cache facility (incl. distributed cache invalidation) available in Mifos X will add more value at signficantly less operational complexity.

You may need to develop some minor "adjustments" for Mifos X to work well in a PaaS. For example, writeable directories may be limited, and configuration changes may be needed to pick up allowed data directories from an environment variable configuration (but consider multi node distribution in this cluster setup!). Also a cloud PaaS like OpenShift may not support "always running" instances, and scheduled jobs may have to be configured to be kicked off via an explicit HTTP "wake up" request from a cron job.

While OpenShift should already take care of automatic distribution of Mifos code (WAR) updates among nodes in the cluster, you may also have to consider distributed configuration in a cluster. Normally all Mifos X configuration should reside 100% fully in the database only, and as such this may be a non-issue. If however there are any customized configuration files, then perhaps something like the Spring Cloud project could be of interest to ease distributed configuration management.

We are aware of other PaaS product similar to OpenShift, such as notably Cloud Foundry, or even Heroku (closed source..) but would suggest to use OpenShift.

Helpful SkillsContinous Integration, UNIX, OpenStack, experience with any public cloud (AWS etc) and Percona Server is a plus, plus some minor Java coding required to adapt Mifos code to be able to pick up the database configuration from the OpenStack provided environment variable (and possibly automated Cache configuration tuning on OpenStack).
ImpactImproves deployment options for Mifos. Would be very helpful for specialists in African countries who deal with strict regulatory controls in hosting data outside their region
Other Resources

OpenShift https://www.openshift.com

Old Mifos mailing list posts related to related things, search e.g. "mifos google app engine", and find as this one as well as this one.

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