In thinking about 2022 and beyond, it's important to set goals that make sense for the project. 

  1. Fineract 1.x continues to have an active set of developers, but I keep hearing from and about companies that are on a fork of the code base where devs are reworking many of the same key problems in the code.  Upgrades from such forks to the mainline, in such a scenario, are costly and require a lot of reworking of the code.  It's inefficient for everyone. 

    We as a community need to do a better job - somehow - of making contributions easier for the devs at these companies to stay upstream with their code changes.  As surveys have shown, many contributors have struggled to approach the project. 

    Bottom line, the best projects have a lot of virtuous cycles of people contributing their live production improvements to make sure their improvements are maintained by the community and are - themselves - improved upon. 

  2. There's a need to connect to the broader goals of transforming the economy to be more just, more inclusive, and to address the global challenges of economic inequities and ecological disaster. Financial systems are at the foundation of how economics work for people, so building good ones is important. 

  3. Security should never be an afterthought. We have a robust process in place in the case of an officially reported CVE, but we would much rather that code is safe from the start.  As the Log4J vulnerability showed, Apache projects - run by volunteers - have a large role in protecting the overall health of the internet.  

    We will want to have good static checks running, more dynamic updating dependencies, and CI/CD to catch problems as early as possible.  

  4. Fineract1.x is, admittedly, fairly monolithic at this point and there's a need to get more separation to enable better maintainability.  Alexander has made this point in his presentation and onlist with other chiming in. I think 2022 is when we make some modest improvements, mainly with the aim of making the project more approachable and maintainable.  All changes are incremental so let's choose wisely.  

  5. FineractCN isn't advancing much, but I still see some activity and I wonder who would like to finally get an official - limited - release out in 2022. We need to find a forcing function to make this happen.  Maybe, set a community goal: go through the release process in 2022 or decide this is not something we're going to work on. 

  6. While coding is the action, the community is where we understand what we want to do.  Contributions to requirements, to documentation, to tests, all of these matter.  To build Community, perhaps we can find ways to build tests in a more non-code way.  Good test coverage, written in understandable ways, will provide a kind of documentation as well.  I think that test coverage could be tagged for Fineract1.x and also -for some tests - FineractCN.  


My journey with what we call Fineract today began in 2001 in a village in India where I first observed microfinance in operation. I call 2002 the year I started the project, so 2022 will be twenty years. What one can accomplish in the long term is more important than what one can accomplish in a year, but year goals are where we take the important steps that give us the momentum.  

Wishes all of US a Good Year in 2022

- James Dailey, SEATTLE 

(James originally created the Mifos project in 2002, the MifosX release was contributed to Apache and became Fienract1.x in 2011.  But none of it was possible without years of work by volunteers over the twenty years of the project.)