Mifos Bay Area Launch Reception (3/22/2007)

The Grameen Foundation had a reception celebrating the launch of Mifos, hosted at VISA, just down the street from me in Foster City. It was well attended, with 60 or so people. Mifos is the MIcroFinance Open Source project that I worked on during my RDVP fellowship. Two and a half years later, there are 4 MFI's working on implementing Mifos at their institutions, in India, Tunisia, Kenya, and the Philippines. The other exciting aspect is the development of the open source community to support Mifos. While I tend to think about the volunteers that are involved, George Conard (of the Grameen Foundation) and Brian Behlendorf (of CollabNet) both pointed out that it's important to recognize that there are developers that can make their living from working on it as well.

Alex Counts, President of the Grameen Foundation, gave a brief introduction. George Conard, the Director of the Mifos Initiative, spoke next. He gave a really good talk, with a few powerpoint slides, emphasizing the need for microcredit (using examples of both recovering from emergencies and funding purchase of raw materials), the importance of IT systems in microcredit (ability to scale to 1 billion prospective customers), the sorry state of the current systems (90% using a homegrown system, Excel, or none at all), the challenges (each homegrown system re-creating the wheel to accommodate the slight twist that they need to support their local methodology; or small vendors trying to support a system in a different language and timezone). Open source provides a solution: the ability to re-use code and for an ecology of support vendors to spring up around it.

Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet (who brought you SVN) and a key contributor to the Apache project, was the keynote speaker. I was impressed that he spoke about microcredit; I assumed that we'd get a standard (if privileged, insider's) view of the benefits of open source. But Brian went the extra mile, and put it in the context of microcredit. He mentioned that he'd been at Davos recently, and that had driven home to him the fact that microcredit worked (ie, that borrowers could put small loan amounts to work generating greater economic benefit) and that lenders were interested in making the loans, but they couldn't connect, and that, according to Brian, sounded like a software problem! He did a good job of describing the open source benefits of transparency, and also acknowledged the Grameen Foundation for the the critical role they had in funding the development. (He compared it to the role that IBM had played in bringing Eclipse to market or CollabNet's development of SVN.)

All in all, a fun event. Great to see the Mifos progress (can't wait until it actually goes live at Grameen Koota!) and thanks to a Grameen Foundation board meeting, plus the gathering for this event, a lot of people that I'd met over the years were there (Alex Counts, Peter Bladin, Emily Tucker, Susan Davis) from Grameen, another early Mifos volunteer Charlie Tomberg, plus people that I'd met through the RDVP fellowship from Cisco (Peter Tavernise) and Google.org (Rachel Payne). It was also great to meet Elizabeth Clarkson of Omidyar.net which made a sizable investment in Mifos.

Want to get paid to work on Mifos?

The Grameen Foundation has a job opening for a Seattle-based Technical Program Manager:

Technical Program Manager

The Grameen Foundation's Mifos Initiative is working to address key information management challenges in the microfinance industry through the development of an open source software platform for microfinance
practitioners. By making technology a key strength of microfinance, the Mifos Initiative will have an enormous impact on the capacity of the microfinance industry in our efforts to alleviate poverty around the world.

We are looking for an experienced technical program manager to drive the technical roadmap for the Mifos Initiative and to own the software development infrastructure for the Mifos platform. This position is critical to the success of Mifos and will ensure that both the functionality and the underlying infrastructure for Mifos are rock solid. The ideal candidate will have deep technical expertise, a passion for delivering tangible, customer-focused results, and experience working with open source software efforts.

The Technical Program Manager (TPM) for the Core Software Platform on the Mifos Initiative is responsible for the technical roadmap and architecture for core Mifos functional and infrastructure areas as well as the software development technology infrastructure, including the open source infrastructure. The Technical Program Manager will work very closely with the software development lead for the Mifos initiative. The TPM will drive key functional areas of the Mifos platform (such as reporting) and be the driver of the overall technical roadmap and architecture for the platform. In addition, the TPM defines and implements process and technical improvements to the build and test processes, manages the continuous integration, build, and other servers for Mifos, and facilitates community discussion around the underlying software development infrastructure. The TPM identifies key technical
issues and drives them to resolution.

This position is based in Seattle, WA.

Essential Job Functions:

• Develop and maintain technical roadmap for the Mifos platform
  
• Work with Mifos community to identify and drive technical enhancements to key product areas including system security, reporting, accounting integration, deployment tools, system administration tools, etc.
  
• Develop and execute strategies for release and upgrade management and test and build processes for Mifos platform
  
• Work closely with Mifos technical lead to drive overall improvements to the software development infrastructure
  
• Manage servers (test/demo, build, continuous integration, etc.) and open source infrastructure for the Mifos Initiative
  
• Identify enhancements to process and infrastructure that support software development activities and implement appropriate solutions
  
• Foster Mifos community discussions related to technology platform
  

Required skills and experience:

• At least 5 years technical program management experience developing technology solutions
  
• Demonstrated experience driving issues to resolution and shipping products; passion for delivering tangible results; able to juggle multiple priorities
  
• Experience driving technical architecture and strategy for complex applications
  
• Strong experience with Java-based application development tools (including build, test, and continuous integration)
  
• Experience with some or all of the following technologies preferred: Tomcat or Jetty, mySQL, CruiseControl, Selenium, Ant,Cobertura
  
• Experience with release and upgrade management
  
• Experience with open source software development, agile development methodologies and test-driven development preferred projects preferred; willingness to learn and utilize these methodologies required
  
• Passion for the mission of Grameen Foundation and microfinance
  
• Experience with financial systems a plus
  
• Previous exposure to developing world and/or microfinance a plus
  
• Engineering- or CS-related BA/BS or equivalent
  
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
  
• Ability and willingness to travel domestically and internationally
  

To learn more about the Mifos Initiative, visit http://www.mifos.org and
http://mifos.sourceforge.net.

To apply, send resume and cover letter to mifos@grameenfoundation.org.
No calls please.