ending poverty with software using globally distributed teams to tackle difficult problems...

1. Ending Poverty With Software Solving large problems with Open Source software, distributed teams, and Agile methodologies Adam Feuer, Van Mittal-Henkle, Adam Monsen Grameen Foundation Mifos Initiative

2. Poverty a large problem

Six million children die of hunger every year, 17,000 every day.

2.7 billion people live on less than $2/day

(World Bank poverty definition; 2001 data).

40% of the total world population of 6.8 billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Absolute_poverty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_poverty#Poverty_as_restriction_of_opportunities

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

2.7 Billion Poor 4.1 Billion Non-poor

3. Microfinance is key to ending poverty

Financial services for the unbanked

Smooths irregular income flows

Provides cushion for emergencies

Expands economic activity

Vision is to eradicate poverty by helping the poor to help themselves.

Yunus: Our grandchildren should have to go to the museum to see what poverty was like.

Prof. Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in the late 1970s in Bangladesh and successfully scaled profitable microloans to millions of people.

Nobel Peace Price 2006

4. Lending to women

Typically~ 98% loan repayment (recovery) rate.

Microcredit customers are mostly women

Group / Solidarity Lending is common, creating a bond among a group of clients.

Often only Loans, not Deposit(Savings) accounts (hesitancy among regulators)

9. Mifos open source banking software

To reach 2 billion people, you need web-based, scalable software

10. Basic Stats

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mifos/ registered 2004-11-19

Initial release (and some early publicity) in 2006

Winner of JavaOne 2009 Duke's Choice Award for Best Java Technology for the Open Source Community

Google Summer of Code (2009 & 2010) student programs

Today

About 214 database tables according to SchemaSpy job on http://ci.mifos.org/schema/head/latest/

About 120'000 Lines of Code (NCSS, Non Commenting Source Statements)according to Sonar report on http://ci.mifos.org:9000/project/index/1

Very active mailing list, bug tracker, and IRC channel

11. team/tools/code late 2007

team

development in fits and spurts

no activity on IRC

unsearchable, unmirrored mailing lists

tools

clunky ci server, manual backups, haphazard system monitoring

subversion outages & performance issues (java.net svn)

parallel tracking/planning systems (Mingle + Issuezilla)

code

cumbersome, unmaintainable build w/Ant (unknown jar versions!)

didn't know what version of our code our largest customer is using

monolithic codebase

Mifos only ran in JBoss and was only usable from Internet Explorer

insanely slow & cumbersome compile/edit/fix cycle

12. team/tools/code Today!

team

scrum with daily standups, iterations, burndown

this slideshow is a remix of one given by a volunteer

awesome IRC channel

searchable, multi-mirrored mailing lists

tools

Hudson CI server, tested backups, awesome monitoring via OpenNMS

distributed version control (sf.net git)

single, powerful issue tracker and planner (JIRA Studio)

code

predictable, modular build w/Maven (proper dependency management!)

codebase divided into modules, API and plugins

Mifos runs in any servlet container and is usable from any browser

much improved compile/edit/fix cycle (Eclipse WTP)

customers running known, tested versions of our code

13. Distributed, Agile, Awesome

documentation on FlossManuals.net (crowdsourced barnraisicalized synergy!)

http://en.flossmanuals.net/Mifos/Welcome

distributed decision-making

http://www.mifos.org/developers/wiki/DeciderViaEmail

14. Communication Bandwidth

As an open source team, how can w ewe communicate most efficiently?

The usual suspects:

Mailing List, Wiki, Project Tracking Tools (Bugzilla, Jira), IRC

Higher communication bandwidth alternatives:

Audio, Video, In Person

Higher communication bandwidth has reduced time to convey ideas, reach decisions, build team cohesion (USA, India, Ireland, Australia, Ghana-Africa)

Free tools that work for us

Audio skype

Video tokbox

15. Team = Product

Great communication = great team

Great team = great product

16. Mifos Technology Roadmap

Legacy micro-finance web application-> financial services platform for offering serves to the poor

Legacy code was monolithic and used:

Hibernate, Struts, JSP

Integrated BIRT reporting

Lots of custom code:

Transactions

I18n

Security

17. Mifos Technology Roadmap (Target)

18. Get Involved!

Join the global collaborative Mifos community and united effort to build and extend this platform that fuels innovation from the bottom up and empowers the poor to ascend out of poverty. There are many ways to get involved:

Build acceptance tests

Find & fix bugs (look around JIRA for open issues you could have a go at)

Answer questions on mailing lists, participate on IRC

Guide implementations on-site

Write new or complete existing documentation

Translate Mifos UI or documentation

Localize by building local region-specific reports

Get on the mailing and/or IRC and say Hello! People will point you to how and where you can contribute.

19. Based on a presentation by Mifos volunteer Michael Vorburger http://vorburger.ch

20. Links

http://www.mifos.org

http://www.mifos.org/developers - Developer start page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OGeRdluyU Mifos Intro. Video

http://www.gfspl.in- Grameen Koota, Bangalore/India MFI using Mifos

http://www.mifos.org/developers/wiki/MifosVolunteerProjects- Mifos volunteer projects page

http://www.mifos.org/developers/wiki/TestServers- try Mifos

https://ci.mifos.org/hudson- continuous integration

http://ci.mifos.org/schema- schema diagrams

http://www.mifos.org/developers/wiki/MifosVersionControlGuide- source code

http://link.mifos.org/listserv- mailing lists

#mifos on irc.freenode.net &http://www.mifos.org/developers/listserv/irc-mifos/irc-logs

http://twitter.com/mifos(@mifos)