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

We're currently applying to participate in Google Code-In 2014. Applications are due November 10 and decisions will be made by November 12.

2014 Google Summer of Code - Get to Know Mifos

After participating in Google Summer of Code in four different summers, we look forward to the opportunity to work with pre-university students through Google Code-In. As both a 501(c)3 non-profit and an open source project, our global community has a diverse range of tasks (both technical and non-tecnhnical) that will be a valuable experience for the students. Students will gain exposure to an active open source project, a widespread global community, and expand upon a wide range of discipline as they use technology to help alleviate global poverty.

Get Stoked!

Watch the following videos to learn about our gigantic mission and the game-changing platform we've built to achieve it.

http://youtu.be/co5cK2cYVU0

Guidelines

Getting started Read about setting up the code and understand the basic concepts around MifosX.

Expectations

Students working on Mifos X will be expected to:

Use the mifos-developer mailing list
provide patches
follow the Mifos coding standards
document their work
have access to reasonable bandwidth, ie: have a fast, reliable Internet connection
track and report on progress daily

Prerequisite Skills

Basics

Quick learner
Troubleshooting and analytical skills
Passion for writing clean code
Excellent communication skills
Knowledge of developer tools
- such as: a text editor, source control, how to build software
- experience with specific tools will also help, such as: Eclipse IDE, Git

Mifos includes wide variety of technologies, we do not expect a student to be expert on all of these. But it will be helpful if you have some experience in some of these. Helpful skills (specific technology requirements vary with project chosen):

MySQL,Jersey, Hibernate, Spring,
HTML, CSS, JavaScript (JQuery), AngularJS
JUnit, REST
Java
Gradle
Android SDK
Git

Hints

When you need help, ask for help! Do some searches before asking, please. We are very excited for you to join us, but we need to know that you're willing to put in the time and effort required to do your part. When you do ask, ask well.
Not sure if you are qualified? Download and build the code, then run the Platform and the reference user interface. Instructions for doing so are available at Getting started - Contributing to MifosX.
Email the mifos-developer mailing list with your questions and project ideas.
Install Skype for (generally infrequent) video calls. You'll need a headset for Skype, too.

Mentoring

Mifos folks are constantly working remotely (mainly using Skype), especially in supporting remote contributors. We often do video calls and desktop sharing If possible, we'd love to meet you in person! Specific mentors for each project will be listed below.

Mentor	Category	Location	Time Zone
Michael Vorburger	Coding & Quality Assurance	Switzerland	CET (GMT +1:00)
Avik Ganguly	Coding & Quality Assurance	India	IST (GMT +5:30)
Gaurav Saini	Coding & User Interface	India	IST (GMT +5:30)
Ishan Khanna	Coding, Testing & Documentation (Android App)	India	IST (GMT +5:30)
Ed Cable	Outreach/Research & Documentation/Training	USA	PST (GMT -8:00)
Nayan Ambali	Coding & Quality Assurance	India	IST (GMT +5:30)
Dayna Harp (Unlicensed)	Documentation/Training	Belize	CST(GMT -6:00)
Markus Geiss (Deactivated)	Coding & Quality Assurance	Germany	CET (GMT+1:00)

Project Tasks

GCI students will have the opportunity to work on the following types of tasks:

Code: we have a range of introductory coding tasks across our Java platform, AngularJS community app, and Android mobile field operations app.
Documentation/Training: Most of the end users of our software aren't super-technica. Documentation is critical - we have a number of short how-to guides as well as training slides to work on.
Outreach/Research: As a global non-profit with a rich social mission to bring financial services to the poor, we have an enormous amount of non-coding work to get done in our community - on the marketing front this involves product positioning and collateral, donor and volunteer outreach, social media management, CRM & contact management, digital media design, as well as analysis and research of our competitors and new financial inclusion products and services.
Quality Assurance: Mifos X is enterprise-grade, mission-critical software to run a bank - quality, security, and performance couldn't be more important - as our software continues to grow, we have a range of manual and automate testing tasks.
User Interface: Since many end users of our software aren't that technically literate, an optimal user experience is ever more valuable, various areas of our app could use some mockups and wireframes.

Coding

Task: Automated Testing of Mifos Android Application (Unit Tests)

This task involves coding of Functional and Instrumentation tests (Unit Tests) for the latest Android App. Since it is a fresh code with no prior tests in place, this would be an awesome opportunity for the intern to learn Testing of an Android App using Instrumentation Test Runner on Android inside out. This would be an ideal task for Google Code in students as the tests have to be written with a certain pattern, therefore no prior knowledge about Mifos wouldn't be a major blocker.

Tags : Android, Java, Unit Tests, Testing, Git

Documentation/Training

Task: Document Standard Reports in Mifos X with examples

Mifos X ships with a number of standard default reports representing the most commonly request, loan, client, accounting, and funds reports. We need to provide a short description of each report, the audience it's directed at, a list of the fields in the report, its available formats, and selectable parameters. For the task, you will run each report in our demo server, generate it as a PDF to upload to our wiki as an example, and add the descriptive details in the table found at Reports Shipped in Mifos X.

Tags: Pentaho, Business Intelligence, Reporting, MySQL, Documentation, Confluence

Task: Create Functional Overview slides for End User Training - New Client

Using Mifos X procedure documentation, create a set of slides for end user training. The slides will include:

How to Log on to Mifos X
How to create a new client, upload identification documents, put in approval queue, approve
How to create a savings account
How to post a member fee
How to post a deposit

Tags: Documentation, Training

Task: Create Functional Overview slides for End User Training - New Loan

Task : Documentation for using Android App

With a basic documentation in place, Mifos Android app still lacks documentation for some functionalities. This task would require the students to use the app and write down the steps to perform tasks using the app along with screen shots. It'll be a big plus for the community if a screen cast of the app being used can be created by the user. Ishan Khanna can guide you more on how to create a screen cast.

Outreach/Research

Task: Insert 2-3 line description of task and optionally link to issue in JIRA or additional background detail.The description will also list languages or skills that may be required to complete the task (Tags).

Complete

Task: Personalize Mifos YouTube Channel and Organize Videos into Playlists

We use YouTube as both a means of outreach as well as education and training. This task would involve branding our YouTube channel with images and colors for our non-profit initiative as well as optimizing the channel and existing videos for searchability. Part of this task is also organizing our existing screencasts and training videos as well as other financial inclusion videos into relevant playlists.

Tags: YouTube, Video, Training, Documentation, Social Media

Task: Design the t-shirt for our Global Mifos Summit

Each year we hold an annual conference and give out a new t-shirt to community members. We also give the shirts out to our volunteers throughout the year since this is one of our biggest incentives a developer could get :) The design of the t-shirt should have both a tech feel as well as some of the warmth of a non-profit to it. We'd like to do the t-shirt on a dark or blue background so a lighter single color design is preferable. Deliverable for this would be a high-res illustrator or photoshop file of the design. For this task, you would have the freedom to design what you want but it should communicate across collaboration, community, empowerment, financial inclusion, solidarity, innovation, technology. working on a common platform, unity, peer support., diversity given our community is completely global, flexibility and freedom of open source. It could tie in elements of technology like software code/bits and bytes, mobile phones, cloud computing. It could tie in elements of microfinance like different forms of currency, villages, microbusinesses like farming, artisanry, etc.

Tags: Graphic Design, Volunteers, Outreach, Community Management

Task: Create Mailchimp template for our Volunteer Newsletter

Volunteers are the lifeblood of our community and it’s imperative we remain in active communication with them. We would like to start sending a regular outbound communication to our pool of active and inactive volunteers (about 200 individuals) that promotes opportunities that we’re seeking volunteers for, recognizes active volunteers and star contributors, and explains and captures recent volunteer contributions. We use mailchimp for our outbound email communications which includes a bi-monthly newsletter that we send to about 4000 individuals.

Tags: Mailchimp, Outreach, Newsletters, HTML, Volunteers, Community Management

Task: Research Donation/Online Payment Processors

Currently we only use Paypal for our online donation processing. We want to move towards a more comprehensive online payment processor with lower costs and more functionality around donation pages and fundraising campaigns. This task involves researching various donation payment processors and completing a matrix comparing various aspects that are important to us. Payment processors to compare include: Convio, Paypal, NationBuilder, Network for Good, and iATs.

Parameters to compare include: Fees, Donation Page Creation features, Minimum donation amount, Level of salesforce integration,

Quality Assurance

Task: Insert 2-3 line description of task and optionally link to issue in JIRA or additional background detail. The description will also list languages or skills that may be required to complete the task (Tags).

User Interface