2020-07 July 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:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.

## Membership Data:
Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (~3 years ago) There are currently 37
committers and 18 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
roughly 2:1.

Community changes, past quarter:
- 1 new committer - Yemdjih Kaze Nasser

## Project Activity:

The Fineract community maintains two active projects.

Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used.

Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active
development and has not been officially released

- Fineract 1.x

The 1.4 release is still pending as the community is working to find volunteer release managers and maintainers to help cut the release. The community is still anticipating a number of significant contributions for the 1.5 release so would like to urgently get the 1.4 release shipped.  The community recognizes that for the contribution model and upstream development to work properly, contributions need to come from the individuals and committers belonging to organizations building and using the software in production environments (e.g. commercial solutions powered by Fineract). Despite a recent uptick since April 2020 in contributions from volunteers and interns, contributions from the ecosystem, especially ongoing maintenance and release management from the ecosystem of expert fineract-deployers is at relatively low levels. 

Three intern candidates have been brought on directly through Apache Software Foundation for Google Summer of Code and are making great progress on implementing checkstyles, refactoring the code, hardening the codebase, upgrading core dependencies, implementing live API docs, migrating to EclipseLink and more. In addition there is one Outreachy intern working on some Fineract issues and several of the seventeen Mifos GSOC interns who are contributing to Apache Fineract via Fineract CN Mobile, Credit Bureau integration module, and more. To learn more about each intern, visit this blog post from the Mifos Initiative at https://mifos.org/blog/gsoc-2020/.

PMC members, Awasum Yannick and Michael Vorburger are continuing to do timely reviews of pull requests being submitted and have overseen a 5x increase in the number of resolved ticket over the past quarter. Great work to their leadership, hard work, and strong example they're setting for the rest of the community. 

- Fineract-CN

The community is still trying to push towards a stable first release of Fineract CN centered around a minimum set of mature and stable microservices. There is discussion regarding the twin goals of a) deployable MVP solution, and b) base level of libraries to ensure upstream contribution models from the organizations using the code in production. Progress is still slow on getting the few organizations, actively using the codebase, and their expert "users",  to contribute back.  Focus is currently on sufficient deployment tools to make the project more approachable for new devs. 

Work is still ongoing to get the public demo server live. GSOC projects related to live API documentation as well as additional UIs on top of Fineract CN are in progress. Work is ongoing to provide an Open Banking API layer on top of Fineract CN to all third party and trusted first-party apps to securely connect. 

## Community Health:

Both projects continue to retain healthy discussion with 534 mails sent to our dev mailing list, which amounts to a minor seasonal (~25%) increase in traffic compared to the previous quarter (425) 

Activity rates on JIRA have seen a sharp increase (nearly 5x) thanks to the tireless efforts of Michael Vorburger to encourage contributions, review pull requests in a timely manner and recognize incoming contributions in a weekly Fineract Weekly Resolved Issues update and Dashboard on JIRA. Thanks as well to Petri and Awasum for their contributions, mentorship and reviews of code along with our Fineract interns. 

- Fineract 1.x. 
- 200 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (50 in the previous quarter)
- 129 JIRA tickets resolved in last 3 months (26 in the previous quarter) 

- Fineract CN
- 8 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (29 in the previous quarter)
- 0 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (3 in the previous
quarter)

Community members, Javier Borkenztain and Edward Cable, are working with the ApacheCon committee to plan out a Fineract track for ApacheCon @Home.