## Description:
The mission of Apache Fineract is the creation and maintenance of software
related to a core banking platform that provides a reliable, robust, and
affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service
providers to offer financial services to the world's underbanked and unbanked.

## Issues:
We have not had a formal release since Aug 2022, although, due to heroic
efforts by Aleks , version 1.9 is undergoing a VOTE for release this week.

This pattern, however, of going a very long time with lots of code changes in
dev branch and then relying on one person to pull it all together, checking
hundreds of PRs, reviewing hundreds of tickets, and updating multiple
dependencies is not a good model.  We are trying to address this.

## Membership Data:
Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (nearly 7 years ago, contributed by
Mifos) There are currently 51 committers and 24 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter:
- Adam Saghy was the last addition to the PMC on July 10th, 2023.
- No new committers. Last addition was Bharath Gowda on 2022-12-14.

## Project Activity:
We are in the process of releasing version 1.9.   Previously, the last full
release was in August 2022.   The last release was a patch release:
1.7.3 was released on 2023-03-24.
1.8.4 was released on 2023-03-24.

## Community Health:
Our track on Community over Code 2023 in Halifax was bigger than the year
before in terms of number of talks, although attendance was largely driven by
three organizations.   The community is getting traction in different regions
and the downloads statistics shows steady growth. We have seen 1,300 downloads
in the last two months.

Whilst our technology solution is gaining strength, we have several gaps in
both a collective understanding of a shared roadmap and a model where multiple
significant “contributor groups” are actively developing.  Being a ‘fan’ of
the project is very welcome but insufficient for an healthy open source
project.   Per a suggestion after the last Board report, a "Guild" of
supporters based on commercial companies that are using the software is being
proposed.

###Deprecating Fineract-CN
A vote is underway to formally remove the Fineract_CN repositories.   In past
reports we highlighted that there was no progress in moving forward to a
formal release.   Discussion is here →
https://lists.apache.org/thread/fhrbnnxltghrdrgzd7t9km6byjkb4y1r  Vote is here
→ https://lists.apache.org/thread/5cfpyllw80sxc8oddkzfd358qwntqr66 (5 binding
  votes in favor, 1 binding vote against)  The next step is to create a ticket
  in infra and list the 30+ repos that need to be archived.

###Approachability:
To reiterate a key issue - the project is complex enough to require specific
domain knowledge and non-trivial software environment setup. While the project
doesn't have good data on what constitutes difficulty for the devs coming to
the project, we see a lot of questions. We have a goal of making it more
approachable with improvements to documentation.

There is some ambiguity about what skill level is required for starting up a
dev environment, never mind the skill level required to run the software in
production.  We also see many users coming to the project on very old version
of the software - downloaded from other repos or sources - further confusing
the picture.  The message we are trying to give out is that older versions are
not supported, so please upgrade.

###Authentication and Security Framework
This remains an area of concern in the security framework.  We are seeking to
add more context for users of the software, i.e. how to run it securely. There
are fixes going into version 1.9 that will start to address the security
framework concerns and potentially allow for a migration to Keycloak (or other
authentication service) for those using the software.

###Emeritus status:
We are delayed in our plans to remove people who are no longer active, per the
PMC decision of May 2023.  We have this as an action item.

###Powered By listing
We (I)  have started discussing the idea of putting "powered by" listings of
companies using the software on our site, and the potential for thank you
pages.  https://apache.org/foundation/marks/linking#projectthanks  We will be
keeping ASF Marketing & Publicity in the loop.

###Other topics:



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