## 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:


There are no issues requiring board attention

## Membership Data:


Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (3 years ago)
There are currently 41 committers and 19 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Aleksandar Vidakovic was added to the PMC on 2020-10-11
- Petri Tuomola was added to the PMC on 2020-10-06
- Graham was added as committer on 2020-08-25
- Manthan Surkar was added as committer on 2020-09-26
- Percy Enoabane was added as committer on 2020-10-02
- Petri Tuomola was added as committer on 2020-07-14


## Project Activity:

  • We have added more committers and PMC members over the past 3 months. 
  • Fineract 1.4 was released in September. Aleksandar Vidakovic , one of our committers, stepped up to be the Release Manager for Fineract 1.x. Aleks while working in collaboration with Ed Cable, Michael Vorburger and other PMC members, was able to prepare and send out the much needed 1.4 release. We're hoping to release Fineract 1.x every few months going forward (based on the rate of contributions). Fineract 1.5 has been programmed to be released at the end of 2020 or early 2021. There is a fair amount of bugs being fixed by Petri Tuomola, Michael Vorburger  and a few other committers and volunteers.
  • In the run up to Fineract 1.4, a weekly "bug fixed" report was shared on list which helped to highlight the progress made and encouraged additional contributions. Since the 1.4 release had originally been contemplated in mid-2019, the shift in momentum was noticeable on list and in the PRs. 
  • GSoC and Outreachy ended in August with most of our students passing their final evaluation and adding quality to the Fineract code base. A lot of bugs, issues and code quality work was done during the summer by interns. (Add more details on what each student did). Some our GSoC interns have already become committers on the project and are doing great. 
    • Manthan Surkar contributed Checkstyle (amazing), related error handling and logging, Spotless (so cool), the SqlBuilder (WIP), and Swagger (check it out on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVd-0YAo6c!). 
    • Percy Ayuk contributed Error Prone violation fixes which improved the quality of Fineract 1.x. He also fixed alot of bugs and did work related to migrating away from deprecated dependencies like from Joda time to Java.time migration (still pending to be merged).
    • Yemdjih Nasser worked on updating Fineract CN dependencies especailly Spring and Spring boot, Did work on migrating from OpenJPA to EclipseLink ( pending ) and helped to mentor alot of other interns and volunteers. He earned committership before GSoC ended.
    • Natasha Natarajan worked as an Outreachy intern to fix Fineract issues, migrate some old dependencies to new ones and did some QA work.
  • Highly informative and substantive ApacheCon Fineract/FinTech Track, https://www.apachecon.com/acah2020/tracks/fineract.html and slides https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17ahcInsVSu5R00BaJKfCs_wh2XnCtLh4 . There were panel sessions where discussions took place about the current ways Fineract is implemented and the state of the community. We had talks on use cases and ways in which Fineract can be improved. There were outreach talks around encouraging more community contributions which will add more value to Apache Fineract. Thanks to the work of Javier Borkenztain, Ed Cable and Myrle Krantz for planning the Fineract Track at this year's ApacheCon.
    • Birds of Feather sessions were exceptionally valuable in facilitating brainstorming and planning around future roadmap items including shared contributions to scalability and performance as well as a phased approach to making Fineract 1.x more extensible through a plug-in like architecture starting with reporting. These BoF sesssion resulted in actionable tickets that we are ready to have members of the community assist with. 
  • Fineract CN was proposed and anticipated as the next generation of Fineract, containerized, microservice based, adding much needed flexibility:  These discussions on the list around improving Fineract CN and eventually making the first release.  These discussions hinge on some fundamental vs incremental improvements to the micro service architecture and underlying technology stack. There is an Outreachy Project for Fineract CN which focuses on upgrading key dependencies over the next few months which will help take the project closer to release.


## Community Health:

Communication on the Dev List has increased slightly as seen by a 1% increase in traffic in the past quarter (582 emails compared to 575). This is probably due to people reporting issues and asking questions as a result of the recent Fineract 1.x release.

Issues created, PRs opened and closure rate have declined by approximately 50% over the past 3 months mostly due to the conclusion of the GSoC and Outreachy programs. The increase in these metrics in the summer were due to our interns doing a lot of work at Fineract. We are back to steady state.

We have 26 code contributors this quarter showing a 23% increase mainly due to the efforts made to release Fineract 1.4 and the recently ended ApacheCon in September 2020.

Overall, the community is healthy with a steady rate of contributions from a few dedicated committers, but we need to do better to attract more contributors and enable providers serving Fineract in production to give back to the Upstream project.


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