08.10.2011 Developer Meeting

On the Call

Ed C (Seattle)

Ways to engage volunteers

Michelle Purcell (Philadelphia)

Ramp up - discover how to contribute to Mifos

Andrew Hagner (Philadelphia)

Ramp up, Get familiar with Development Environment

Jasmine (Seattle)

Van (Portland)

Keith W (Ireland)

George (Nairobi)

Krishnan (India)

Kay (Seattle)

Harry (unknown)

Agenda:

Projects we can structure for volunteers

Mifos X Status Update

Action Items:

Catalog existing projects and current status/availability of each project

Package existing bugs into approachable projects

Krishnan to send out one-pager on his accounting work

Send out results of user survey/feedback

Start creating menu of projects to engage differnet levels of contributors on.

In general:

Make product more appetizing for individuals and external contributors

Mobile app - strong need there.

Joining initially, not the cleanest contribution experience

Potential Projects

Mifos Mobile

Good project with major contribution that could be made

Van: Do we have the necessary hooks to tie this in?

KW: Need to expose java hooks in cleaner way through web services - most of work would be separate to Mifos.

Good specialization area if have SMS or mobile app experience

Decoupled from Mifos codebase.

Re-usable as well if changes are made to core Mifos codebase.

Dependency is at service contract level

Van: How much definition do we have around the requirements?

Binny has pulled together notes for this for Indian customers.

Have customers there who would test working prototypes

Actual implementation

App that has web interface and then hook into some type of SMS framework (FrontlineSMS/etc.)

GC: East Africa Perspective

Juhudi Kulimo (sp?)

Kevin Gibbs

Purely one way - information going out to loan officers so they know what they need to collect.

Can break it down simply - atomically over time, then rolled out button to flag information that was wrong.

Not a good example because don't have portfolio MIS

Get loan officers out of carrying big paper ledgers

RapidSMS may be easier to work with than FrontlineSMS (more dev work to get it going) - UNICEF guys in Uganda are doing a lot of work on that.

http://www.rapidsms.org/

Client facing stuff - getting via SMS their balances, etc.

Van: need commitment from users

India - Digamber/GK

Africa - Ed/George to get users

GC:

Android is relevant for East Africa with low-cost Huawei phones

Good to target Android developers.

Krishnan

Artoo in India - doing pilots with Ujivaan (based in bangalore)

Decent android app - artoo.in (could be interested in working)

Currently integrating with MostFit API

Smaller Projects

Bugs - but need to understand existing Mifos codebase

Ways to Get Involved from Drexel Perspective

Docmentation until familiar with codebase itself

Getting dev environment set up - doing screencast about that.

Michelle:

Set up development environment

Bug fixes to understand structure of code

Identify ways the class could contribute in ongoing basis moving forward.

Small bite-sized that could do initially

Students working as team to institute new functionality in some area from design to implementation.

Good manageable starting point - work out details of setting up dev environment to help them.

Longer term - mobile part

Creating a Menu of Projects

Similar to OpenMRS

Projects based on time commitment

Status of Existing Projects

Is Spring Freemarker migration still in progress?

Jasmine: has effects on translatewiki i18n

Identify what's still missing for translation projects and if we're in a position to work on that.

Migration from JSP/Struts to Freemarker - valuable but a lot of time and investment.

Issues with Getting Dev Environment Setup

Getting some errors when debugging mode -

Updates on Mifos X

Loan Creation and Loan Disbursement Screens - improving permissions around that.

1. of improvments around back-dating transactions that has been easier to get in on different code structure.

Working on repayment schedule - need better flexibility around repayment schedule loans - any principal/interest/dates vs constrained approach.

Proper rescheduling, how loan payments are made.

Separate out some of the bundling of portfolio mgmt with accounting management

Get better structure into the codebase

Krishnan ready to help on addressing the accounting requirements

Separate concept of recording transactions in portfolio and actual accounting of the transactions for themselves

Build an interface where those transactions cross the interface - accounting happens behind interface

Mifos doesn't have to keep being the accounting engine.

Publishing one-pager on this accounting concept as an introduction to get more feedback.

End goal

Simpler client/portfolio domain

Separating accounting logic as well.