Mifos (Microfinance Open Source)

Mifos now has a site at http://mifos.sourceforge.net! Thanks to James Dailey for putting together a great summary of the motivation, as well as information about project status, how to volunteer, etc. That site supersedes this page.
Microfinance, especially microcredit (the practice of loaning small amounts to primarily women with no collateral) has been shown an effective means of lifting people out of poverty. Yet only 10% of the people that could beenfit from microcredit have access to it.

The Grameen Foundation USA Technology Center and the Reuters Digital Vision Program are collaborating in the design and development of Mifos, an open source project for the back office software of Microcredit institutions. Rather than try to build a separate system for each microfinance institution, a single version can be developed and used by all.

Project Status as of December 20, 2004

Business Requirements Document
Version 1.2, outlining the basic philosophy, requirements and use cases is available in "draft" status (though still confidential as we finalize. If you'd like to be part of the finalization process, please volunteer!) We're soliciting input from IT and business users in MFI's as well as people with product management experience.
Technical Design
An area of high activity. We've made some provisional architecture decisions: a web-based architecture using open source technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Given the poor connectivity for many MFI's, many branches may operate in "disconnected" mode, with both the web server and client running on the same physical machine. A data export facility with either email or a CD-ROM containing the data will be used to transfer the data to headquarters. This opens up interesting options for running the service as an ASP as well as giving a lot of the communication for free.
Team Mobilization
We've gotten a wonderful initial show of support from people in the Bay Area. A recent meeting attracted about a dozen people, and we're working with them now to ascertain the role that best fits their interests, availability, and needs of the project. We're working on general systems issues like architecture, UI, workflow and data model, and how those are impacted by the needs of internationalization, security, backup, etc. After this initial design work is done (February 2005) we'll be working with a broader group of developers, potentially including some overseas to build Release 1.0.
Site Visits
Three of us traveled down to the Dominican Republic in early December to visit Esperanza International, a microfinance institute with about 3,000 borrowers. Summary notes from that meeting appear in my blog entry on the visit.

Volunteering

If you are interested in learning more or can recommend relevant people or sources, please contact steven.ketchpel@rdvp.org Please include:
  1. What you would be most excited about helping with
  2. How your experience could help the project
  3. What languages you're comfortable with (both human and programming)
  4. Where you're located
  5. Best way to reach you (including times for phone calls)

You can read my blog.