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

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MentorsNayan Ambali
Overview & Objectives

A business rule system enables these financial institutes policies and other operational decisions to be defined, tested, executed. Rule engines typically support rules, facts, priority (score), mutual exclusion, preconditions, and other functions.

This module will enable MFI admin to add, remove or modify the business rule against pre-defined work flows in the application.

Description

As financial institutes, the business process of the institute is governed by local regulatory, and internal rules and rules defined by other other stake holders. And MIS should have provision to define these rules in the application to achive the objectives of these rules defined by various stake holders.

Example: Insurance company does not provider insurance to any person above 65 age. In that case in the MIS if users tries to attach a insurance feed to a client's loan account whos age is more than 65 years then "business rule engine" should prevent that action with appropriate message.

The implementation would probably have 4 parts to it:

a) Code Hooks - Extend functionality of event listeners (what was done for "Guarantor Release for Blocked Funds" for loans) to include key business events like loan creation, loan approval, loan disbursement, savings account creation, savings account activation, savings withdrawal, client creation, client approval, etc. Pre- and Post- events to be enabled for these business events.
b) Enable rules (using Drools) for specific business events (Pre- and Post-)
c) If rule enabled, then evaluate rule. Rule should get the business object and any parent business object as input (Example for a loan disbursement, the loan account and the client details will be automatically supplied as inputs to the rule; For a savings withdrawal; the transaction, savings account and client details will be input to the rule. Evaluate rule and return true or false if the action should continue or not.
d) Implement Client level and account level limits using these rules - this will involve evaluating rules on data that is not directly supplied - For example: customer wants to withdraw 5,000. But has already touched the limit of 10,000 per day. The rule should be capable of evaluating the totals of transactions (i.e. use data not directly supplied to the rule).

Helpful SkillsSQL, Java, Javascript, Git
ImpactIt helps MFIs to follow the compliance set for regulatory and various stake holder. Also reduces the fraudulent cases
Other Resources Business Rules Engine

SPM (Social Performance Management) integration

MentorsMarkus Geiss (Deactivated)
Overview & Objectives

Social performance is an effective translation of an institution’s mission into practice in line with accepted social values.

In order to achieve strong social performance, an organization must manage its social performance as carefully and deliberately as it manages its financial performance.

Description

SPM will enhance the current Data and Code Table concept to ease the creation of Questionnaires, Scores and Basic Reports.

We'll implement a generic approach to allow multiple SPM Tools to integrate into our system seaming-less.

Data Table enhancements:

  • Classification of Data Tables
  • Sequencing
  • Long Labels for Fields

SPM functionality:

  • Surveys / Questionnaires
    • Scores
  • Reference tables
    • Multiple Performance Indicators
  • Adhoc Analysis
    • embedded in UI
  • PoC (Proof of Concept):
  • 1. PPI
  • 2. MPAT (if we still have some time)

    . The rule should be capable of evaluating the totals of transactions (i.e. use data not directly supplied to the rule).

    Helpful SkillsSQL, Java, Javascript, Git
    ImpactIt helps MFIs to track the impact to their clients and report data to their donors and funders.

    They can also use it to benchmarks their work internally to setup new campaigns or refine already installed.

    follow the compliance set for regulatory and various stake holder. Also reduces the fraudulent cases
    Other Resources Business Rules Engine

    Mobile Field Office Planner

    MentorsNayan Ambali
    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. To meet the requirement, Android based app need to be developed to cover these uses cases. And this app will be an extension to MIfos X Android Client built by GSOC intern, Ishan Khanna in 2014.

    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, XML, SQL , Git, SMS integration, Android app development is plus
    ImpactField efficiency and operational efficiency
    Other ResourcesSee SMS Integration and Outbound SMS

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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

    This project is a continuation of the initial PayGoSol foundation that was led by 2014 GSOC intern, Antonio Carella.

    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.

    Work in 2015 will include adding the following features to make it an out-of-the-box solution that any PAYG hardware provider could use:

     

    • Hardware Integration
      • Integration with SMS "kill signal" (sms outbound) 
      • Integration with unique "enabler code" for keycode entry and SMS outbound 
      • Per time period Charge and Pay per Kwh options (via control panel) 
    • Web App & Android Client
      • Better UIX and UI work 
    • Platform Work
      • Componentized PGS server (with Mifos X as dependent jar) 

     

     

    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 Resources

    Mifos Android Client on MifosX

     

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    MentorsBinny 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.

    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 

    Security Penetration testing

    MentorsKojoG
    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

    Scaling MifosX to serve 2 million+ customer accounts

    MentorsVishwas Babu A J
    Overview & Objectives

    This project's goal is to create an Amazon Cloud formation template for Mifos deployments at large Organisations. We would measure how we scale, with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos.

    We would also try to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in the MifosX and the community app codebase

    Description

    You would be creating a Cloud formation template on AWS for a sample high performance Mifos setup. The setup would include

    • Approximately 5 web servers (Apache) on medium EC2 instances fronted with a load balancer
    • Approximately 5 Tomcats servers on large EC2 instances fronted with a load balancer
    • Multi Az extra Large RDS
    • Distributed in memory cache environment

    You would then use Jmeter (or a tool of your choice) to create realistic data and run and benchmark performance on this setup. Based on the figures, we would make fixes to either to the MifosX / Community app codebases to fix any identified performance bottlenecks and then carry out multiple iterations of tweaking the Cloud formation template to achieve best performance.

    Helpful SkillsMust be a self starter, Experience with Amazon AWS and any opensource load testing tool is helpful
    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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    MentorsVishwas Babu A J
    Overview & Objectives

     Create a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation (with load balanced tomcats and percona servers) on an openstack setup on a public cloud. Also publish a whitepaper with details of Openstack setup

    Description

     Mifosx 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 (includes load balanced tomcats, percona mysql server etc ) on OpenStack. The POC would be on a public cloud provider (Rackspace?)
    • Publish a whitepaper of the same, which can be used as a reference for local implementors (who would additionally take care of provisioning their own hardware)

     

    Helpful SkillsUnix, OpenStack, experience with any public cloud (AWS etc) and Percona Server is a plus
    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 ResourcesOpenstack: https://www.openstack.org/

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    MentorsMarkus Geiss (Deactivated)
    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).

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    Automation of Conversion of AngularJS Community App into Chrome App 

    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

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    UI meta modeling, making screen adaption a configuration instead of coding activity

    MentorsMichael Vorburger  
    Overview & Objectives

    The AngularJS-based Mifos X UI, like most of today's AngularJS-based or really most web apps, is "coded out" with JavaScript & HTML partial views. This project aims to explore and deliver at least partially working solution, based on and applied to Mifos X UI as a "case study", how web UI of modern SPA web applications can be "modeled" (described), and "generated" (at build, or better, runtime right within the browser). Advantages of such a model driven (MDA / MDD) approach incl. that less technical users can change screen definitions themselves, and that changes to the underlying technical architecture (e.g. AngularJS version and other JS frameworks used) ideally only affect the generators, not the functional screen models.

    Description

    You could base this on ongoing explorations in https://github.com/vorburger/MUI.js, and using EFactory / ESON as model syntax (see https://github.com/vorburger/efactory; ESON a JSON-like EMF Xtext technology which is currently being incubated as a formal eclipse.org project). The goal and expected outcome of this project isn't some write up, but actually running code.

    Helpful SkillsConceptual Modeling, JavaScript, advanced AngularJS, curious and creative mind, capability to actually deliver
    ImpactEnable the Mifos X UI to be much more easily customized and adapted by end-users
    Other Resourcessee links above 

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    Extend Community app to run on Mobile devices with Offline Support

    (INCORPORATE offline client work here) 

    MentorsVishwas Babu A J & Markus Geiss (Deactivated)
    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

     

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    Business Analytics (OLAP)

    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

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    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

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