Schedule

Board meeting: October 18
Report due to board: October 11
Plan to complete by: October 9

Report

## Description
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as
a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for
entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer
financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues
- Respond to the board's question: "If Mifos I/O was always intended for
Fineract, why wasn't it part of the project from its inception?"
Before I answer, first some history about Mifos I/O:
Markus has been thinking about and planning a rearchitecting of MifosX since
before it entered incubation at Apache under the name Fineract in December
2015. Besides his other duties he spent much of the time up till March 2016
gathering stakeholder support.
In March, the Mifos Initiative sponsored Mifos Tech Days in Amsterdam to which
all Fineract committers were invited (though not all could attend). At that
conference, Markus introduced his architecture, and early versions of some of
the command processing code. Videos of those talks were made and put online.
Then Markus and Myrle went into heads-down mode designing the security
concept, the accounting module, and other basic building blocks for the new
architecture. In August Mark joined us and started work on a new UI designed
to be capable of being ALV2 licensed according to the ASF's constraints,
unlike the current Mifos community app. During this period we wanted to work
with just the three of us in order to develop a clear architectural vision
before we presented it to the community. We were new to Apache (Fineract was
still in incubating), and didn't realize that we were violating the spirit of
the "no off-list communications" rule. The code we were producing is not part
of Fineract, and we never planned to introduce it without community buy-in, so
it seemed a reasonable way to work to us. Early 2017, we changed the code to a
public repository. We did a renaming and restructuring at the same time,
during which we gave up the commit history. For this reason, you won't see
the history before that point.
In March Markus, Mark, and Myrle switched to a new employer named Kuelap,
founded as a for-profit with the intention of making the same social mission
that Mifos pursues fiscally sustainable. We have continued to work on the
source code of Mifos I/O, preparing it for deployment. Mifos I/O currently
consists of nearly 30 github repositories.
When we first addressed this structure on our mailing list, we understood Greg
Stein's response to be a veto against spreading code across multiple
repositories for a project. Not long after those comments from Greg, Greg
took charge of Apache Infra. For this reason, Myrle put careful consideration
into the question of why we actually wish to work this way and produced an
in-depth explanation which she presented at ApacheCon in November 2016 in
Seville. Before it was clear that Apache would accept a multiple repo
approach, this was a technical obstacle to introducing the code to the
community.
In April of 2017 Fineract graduated to a top-level project at Apache.
Between the funding pressures of founding a start-up, the customer pressures
involved in pilots, and the time-pressures that graduating a top-level project
have produced, we haven't had the time to campaign for community buy-in that
we'd like.
At this point the source-code is extensive. The community wouldn't work if we
just threw this into everyone's lap and said: "here: this is your new
code-base". Even if we got the votes, people wouldn't be able to work
effectively.
So we're slowly trying to collect the community and help them understand the
new code well enough to make an informed decision about whether they wish to
accept it. While we have done considerable development off-list, we've been
quite open about this fact. We are not quietly introducing off-list code into
the code-base without community buy-in. Myrle has already made clear that she
hopes to get *all* committers on board before we begin the process of IP
clearance and code moving.
## Activity
We've added three new committers and one new PMC member. We've added new
moderators to the mailing lists.
GSoC projects have finished, and are waiting to be merged. These projects
which were led by interns on the Mifos Initiative and Apache include
two-factor authentication, a notifications framework, data import tool
enhancements, credit bureau integration, GSIM/GLIM, security fixes from static
analysis, and changes made to API structure for Swagger API documentation.
We are looking towards participating in GCI (google code in) and digital
ocean's Hacktoberfest.
We've begun discussions on bringing the Fineract CN code into the Fineract
code base. Kuelap is hosting a demo-server for those who want to see what it
looks like.
We're also considering a point release which will contain some of these
changes.
The Mifos Initiative has engaged a number of individual volunteers who are
working across the community on the following projects but not directly
contributing code: Denila Philip, product management volunteer, has taken over
guiding requirements and product managing the mobile money gateway which is a
critical project for Apache Fineract but has dragged on for a couple of years
and through two GSoC internship cycles.
Ramesh Padmanabhan, an executive-level network engineer, is conducting
interviews with partners across the community to document their cloud
configuration and hosting environments to help build out toolkits,
documentation containerization and hosting of forthcoming cloud-native
architectures.
Kristen Perchal, a BCG consultant, who is conducting interviews with
individuals across the community to understand their roadmap development
process and document previous strengths and weaknesses of engagement with the
community on roadmaps to help advance a collective community-driven roadmap
process with the ongoing transitions in the software and community.
Aditya Oturkar, a project manager at Analog Devices, on documenting
requirements for Drag and Drop/Ad-Hoc style reporting in Apache Fineract. 
Mabawonku Bolarinwa, a business analyst/microfinance practitioner from
Nigeria, on documenting the credit bureau integration requirements for
Nigeria.
## Health report
The biggest threat to our project is the long list of unmerged pull requests
on the Fineract code base. The oldest open pull request is still from March
2016. This problem is worsening with the contributions of the recent GSoC
interns added to the "pile". We hope that the addition of several new
committers who have experience and are still actively developing on Apache
Fineract 1.0 will lead to progress on this issue. Avik in particular has
started reviewing and commenting on older pull requests.
While adding to the backlog of pull requests a positive sign of health in the
community are the contributions of code from a number of new partners in the
community including several modifications made by the BOWPI team from
Guatemala, GSIM/GLIM changes made by the iDT Labs team in Sierra Leone, and
changes made by R116 Solutions for Mentors International in Latin America.
The addition of the Fineract CN code base, though not yet voted in, is also
both a sign of activity, and a contributor to the problem. We're a small
community and only about a third of the committer base are active coders. 
Those of us who are programmers have been splitting our efforts between two
code bases. We still need more committers. Should we vote in the Fineract CN
codebase, we cannot afford to let pull requests there linger too.
In all though, the increase in discussion around the health of our project,
and the addition of Fineract CN indicates there is a baseline of interest by
contributors in our project that can continue to drive the project.
## PMC changes
- Currently 13 PMC members. 
- Last PMC addition was Avik Ganguly last week.
## Committer base changes
- Currently 18 committers.
- New committers:
- Avik Ganguly was added as a committer on Tue Oct 03 2017
- Ippez Robert was added as a committer on Mon Aug 21 2017
- Nikhil Pawar was added as a committer on Wed Oct 04 2017
- Santosh Math was added as a committer on Fri Aug 18 2017 plus two committers
not in the Apache records: Zayyad Said (who was voted in in March, and has not
yet returned an ICLA) and Nayan Ambali (who has provided an ICLA, but has not
yet received an Apache ID).
## Releases
- Released version 1.0.0
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/fineract/1.0.0/ on June 1, 2017.
- The Mifos Initiative has issued a Mifos X release based on the current
Apache Fineract code.
## Mailing list activity
- Subscriber counts to dev and user have been slightly but steadily
increasing. The number of new subscribers who introduce themselves has seen
a slight uptick, which is nice.
- Email counts are not completely comparable with previous quarters because in
mid-September we rearranged what e-mails are sent to which lists. Those
changes may have also driven changes in subscriber count to the issues and
commits mailing lists. Hopefully, those changes will also make our dev list
more attractive for newcomers.
- dev@fineract.apache.org: 
- 160 subscribers (up 16 in the last 3 months): 
- 707 emails sent to list (969 in previous quarter) 
 
- issues@fineract.apache.org: 
- 12 subscribers (up 4 in the last 3 months): 
- 200 emails sent to list (248 in previous quarter) 
 
- user@fineract.apache.org: 
- 140 subscribers (up 15 in the last 3 months): 
- 106 emails sent to list (41 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity
- Jira activity has been down somewhat.
- 44 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months 
- 20 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
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