This was extracted (@ 2025-02-19 21:10) from a list of minutes
which have been approved by the Board.
Please Note
The Board typically approves the minutes of the previous meeting at the
beginning of every Board meeting; therefore, the list below does not
normally contain details from the minutes of the most recent Board meeting.
WARNING: these pages may omit some original contents of the minutes.
Meeting times vary, the exact schedule is available to ASF Members and Officers, search for "calendar" in the Foundation's private index page (svn:foundation/private-index.html).
## 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.
## Project Status:
Current project status: Stable. Issues for the board: Nothing urgent to
highlight.
## Membership Data:
Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (8 years ago) There are currently 54
committers and 24 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio ~
2:1 if the math is right.
Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Adam Saghy on 2023-07-10.
- Marta Jankovics was added as committer on 2024-10-14
## Project Activity:
1.10.1 was released on 2024-12-31. (pending issue with website)
1.9.0 was released on 2024-01-12.
## Community Health:
A drop in listserv traffic is probably indicative of better help available
from outside resources, including the newly launched Fineract-Academy.com by
PMC member Adam Saggy. This was approved by the PMC.
Message from PMC chair Dec 31st, 2-24:
https://lists.apache.org/thread/1799o3xx9n6f9nmxfqkryjcf2cdqslb7 Today, our
software is in use in organizations large and small around the world, reaching
- according to some vendors - at least 65 million end users, and by dozens of
vendors and maybe hundreds of direct providers. I suspect this under-counts
our use...and impact.
Some highlights and things to do: In 2024, we reworked the docker hub target
and got that working again. We continue to see a lot of downloads there.
We released 1.9.0 in January 2024, version 1.10.1 on Dec 31st, 2024.
In 2025, we intend to make the release process easier such that this can
happen more frequently.
As part of this we may decide (after discussion) to do away with back porting
of security patches and only have one official current release. If you want
to earn karma by back porting recent security fixes or have an issue to
report, send to security @ Fineract .apache.org
In 2025, I'd also like to propose the following:
* Readme and asciidoc documentation is improved and versioned with each
release, with wiki content streamlined to project management.
* Builds improvements as discussed in this dev thread
https://lists.apache.org/thread/9l46b7p6bxt7c475o94wrg3k2wc54zdv
* Progress on each of the FSIPs as outlined at https://cwiki.apach
e.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Significant+Improvement+Proposals
In a virtuous cycle of innovation, we continue to need the "roadmap" of items
like those on the FSIPs as well as a set of "anti-roadmap" items, aka much
later priority roadmap items. The roadmap is defined by the community not by
any one Vendor, but contributions drive that roadmap. We have to ask “what is
being planned?” Or “what would you like to add?” And discuss.
Our assumed anti-roadmap currently includes "we will not embed complex
reporting" and "we will not build the front end", as it is useful in defining
where outside users and vendors can develop additional value-adds with some
predictability.
The philosophy of commercial open source requires companies ("vendors") making
money such that they can contribute to the core code, and always exist
upstream on the codebase because it is strategic for them.
"You get what you develop, you get what they develop, you get what everyone
develops." In terms of patterns, as has been pointed out recently, we need
to push back on "Endless feature expansion". We don't do a good job of
pruning features, which makes the process of development more complex than it
needs to be. We may need a more frank discussion in 2025 about backwards
compatibility and feature limitations.
+1 on "look left and right" when touching the code. We should make sure that
we develop cleanly and with sufficient documentation and consistency. More
eyeballs are needed on the reviews. Subscribe to the feed and start
following. In 2025, we should clear out old jira tickets and focus on the
real needs and errors of today. Is this something you can help with?
@Kanchana: follow up with PMC Chair and PMC regarding community health
## Description: At Apache Fineract®, our mission is to build, maintain and enhance a cloud-ready core banking system for robust, scalable, and secure operations of financial institutions. Fineract® provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers. We believe in financial services for everyone, including and especially for the unbanked and underbanked. Fineract® is aimed at innovative mobile and cloud-based solutions, and enables digital transaction accounts for all. ## Project Status: Current project status: ongoing. Delays and difficulty in getting out a release. Issues for the board: In anticipation of new CRA requirements and similar, the issues around security fixes and releases may become critical. This project is fairly unique in the ASF in how directly and immediately it is used by commercial entities, in direct mission critical production systems used as interfaces with end customers. Therefore, it will be important for the project to establish the CRA/open source stewards checks and protocols consistent with ASF wide policies. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (7 years ago) There are currently 53 committers and 24 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:3 [Autogenerated. I calculate this as 2:1 ) Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Adam Saghy on 2023-07-10. - Kristof Jozsa was added as committer on 2024-09-24 - Marta Jankovics was added as a committer on 2024-10-10 ## Project Activity: Release 1.9 on 2024-01-12 Release 1.10.0 process was started in April 2024 but is stalled. There are open security issues. Recent releases: 1.7.3 was released on 2023-03-24. (Deprecated) 1.8.4 was released on 2023-03-24. (Deprecated) 1.8.3 was released on 2023-01-16. (Deprecated) ## Community Health: The release process is too complicated and needs be streamlined. We would welcome an experienced ASF hand to get to a better release process. Community activity includes an active listserv and roughly 80 Pull Requests per quarter, largely refactoring and adding functionality around lending capabilities. There is a certain amount of community discussion that occurs on the Mifos slack channels; I do remind people that bringing discussion back to the project is vitally important. We’ve also managed to make some formal Fineract significant improvements projects (FSIP) a visible priority with votes to adopt them. Votes are noted on the wiki pages. Fineract Significant Improvement Proposals: FSIP-1: Modular Security Architecture. Designed. Awaiting resources. FSIP-2 Scarf Data Tracking. Defined. In process. Stable. Evaluation to come in a few months. FSIP-3: Continue Enhancing New Progressive Loan Module to Support Interest-Bearing Loans . Defined. In process. Major enhancements later. FSIP-4 Cucumber Testing Framework. Defined. In process.
## 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. ## Project Status: Current project status: Ongoing, with delays in getting out releases. Issues for the board: Nothing critical. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (7 years ago) There are currently 52 committers and 24 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:3. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Adam Saghy on 2023-07-10. - No new committers. Last addition was Peter Bagrij on 2023-12-01. ## Project Activity: Release 1.9 on 2024-01-12 Release 1.10.0 process was started in April 2024 but is stalled. There are open security issues. ## Community Health: Overall, the community seems healthy and we are attempting to bring more organization, transparency and focus to the project. There are concerns about concentration, maintainability, and approachability. We implemented a Significant Improvement Project (SIG) pattern and four proposals have gone through approval with additional transparency enabling better discussion about these key efforts. Also on the positive side, there were presentations at Community over Code Europe and some discussions there about how to ensure better alignment on the project. A project roadmap was discussed there but has not yet been made visible to the list. Some concern has been expressed of devs concentrated at 2-3 vendors, with more than 70% of contributions coming from one project effort. These efforts recently have been designed to refactor key components to make them more modern and flexible. It is possible the refactoring will leave some implementations behind, as upgrade paths are difficult given both extensive forking and configuration specifics. ###Scarf The community has implemented Scarf which now is set up to gather data from downloads, main web landing page, docker-hub, and various wiki pages. The idea is to understand better who is looking and interested in the project and to understand what gaps they see. Two vendors are sharing the cost of paying for the scarf service, and the data - which started in June - is available to members of the PMC. The data is showing hundreds of downloads and visits per month. ###Docker-HUB is now working After much discussion, and after work by Victor, we re-established the docker-hub (ASF Account) using more standard docker build patterns. The previous build on docker-hub had not built successfully for over 28 months. This was a welcomed contribution. ###GSOC through Mifos GSOC participation is being coordinated through Mifos, as no one from the Fineract(R) project stepped forward, although these are some of the same people/committers. This was discussed with ASF GSOC coordinators who gave approval. ###Authentication and Security Framework: Repeating what we wrote in April 2024 report. We published a "how to secure Fineract", which we hope will help. Securing Fineract. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Securing+Fineract The home grown security framework (authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms) remains an issue of concern and is the subject of SIP#1. We ask our community users to please be aware that they should NOT run this without understanding the ins and outs of running the software securely. I've suggested that there are Vendors that could help with that. I have a concern that entities are putting this project "as is" directly on the internet, hosting lending activities and potentially banking activities without any proper security measures. ###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. ###Guild No further steps have been taken on this.
## 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. ## Project Status: Current project status: At Risk Issues for the board: Themes are long running CVEs and Security issues, insufficient contributor engagement, delayed releases. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (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. - 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: Release 1.9 on 2024-01-12 There was an issue with the release in that it was held up for CVEs that had been fixed in the code but we didn't want to make visible until we released the CVE formally. Unfortunately the release was already half way there.. and was public weeks before we made it clear that it was "released". This led to the situation where a Vendor, Fiter.io was promoting the release before we were public. The release process was not followed properly. We are trying to get release 1.10 out shortly. ## Community Health: There is very little discussion on list. Repeating some issues: Whilst our technology solution is gaining strength, we have several gaps in both a collective understanding of a shared roadmap and a lack of 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 October 2023 Board report, a "Guild" or Consortium of supporters based on commercial companies that are using the software is being proposed. After making several efforts, and gathering some interest from 6 entities to contribute about $2,500 per quarter each, it's been bogged down by some participant conditions. Its too much effort for me, for too little forward progress - I'm not sure this is going forward. ###Deprecating Fineract-CN: We fully deprecated Fineract-CN and infra archived the repos. An unfortunate side effect is the the docker hub still has earlier version that were never voted on or released. ###Approachability: We have a goal of making it more approachable with improvements to documentation. Some conversations on list about this. See previous reports for more commentary on this. ###Authentication and Security Framework: We published a "how to secure Fineract", which we hope will help. Securing Fineract. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Securing+Fineract The home grown security framework (authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms) remains an issue of concern. We ask our community users to please be aware that they should NOT run this without understanding the ins and outs of running the software securely. I've suggested that there are Vendors that could help with that. I have a concern that entities are putting this project "as is" directly on the internet, hosting lending activities and potentially banking activities without any proper security measures. ###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.
@Shane: follow up on Fineract Guild/Consortium
## 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@apache.org , 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:
Created by James Dailey, last modified just a moment ago ## 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 significant issues requiring Board attention ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (6 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: The last full release was over a year ago 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. Although we had communicated a plan for a release 1.9 in May 2023, we are delayed. Repeat of last report: There are many changes coming in, some of them breaking changes to the environment and to the APIs. This may create issues for our widespread community, but there have been no on-list objections. On the plus side, these improvements go a long way toward making Fineract scalable and highly performant in a cloud environment. Given that they are uneven across the modules we have a separate effort that should start soon to try to address that. Separation of concerns and Fineract Provider -a rather large piece of functionality is contained in one java component. The community has decided to work on separation of this on an incremental basis. A forcing function for this was the development of the feature set called asset externalization. A new component with that name was created, and then a component called fineract-loan. In order to not repeat the bad pattern, a new component fineract-commons has also been created. As features are touched in the code, the pattern is to refactor into the newly created components. There are concerns about code-debt and trying to avoid more of it by slowing down feature expansion, and instead focussing on tests, documentation, and finishing out partly developed features. Custom modules - Making it easier to customize Fineract, java class overwriting was built into Fineract in late 2022 on the dev branch. When combined with the efforts around separation of concerns via module refactoring, we expect this to provide a way for users to develop "custom code" without having to fork the code. These are part of the upcoming release. ## Community Health: As shared in the July 2023 Report: Community engagement is trending up but we remain at some risk. We are focused on addressing issues of approachability, making the project more visible, and addressing the documentation gap. There is an effort to create a user onboarding guide and to make more use of Asciidocs and move more of the documentation to GitHub such that each release has its own documentation. This, we hope, will lead to a more approachable project. There is a pending Pull Request on this and ongoing efforts by several outside. As noted in the April report: There is a lack of engagement by the broader community on planned improvements. It would appear 90% of the list is simply "downstream" and on various derivative forks (with no upstream contributions). A bright spot was the effort to create a joint roadmap - which gave the project a useful set of activities but little follow up has occurred. We want to avoid having a single vendor concentration, and have been actively seeking more engagement in the code by other users. The chair is reaching out to ComDev to seek advice. As one approach, to provide transparency and work on recognition, we plan to list vendors on this wiki page: Built on Apache Fineract ###Deprecating Fineract-CN We are still deprecating Fineract-CN. If we find links we remove them and mark the target wiki page as Deprecated, rather than remove them. This has ZERO effect on the Fineract1.x project. Not much has happened on this. We noted recently that the Docker infrastructure has the Fineract-CN project with a push to Docker 9 months ago, which is more recent than the current fineract1.x. ###Approachability: We find that even experienced developers have difficulty setting up the project environment for Fineract. Recognizing this, we've had some discussion on list around documentation and approachability of the project. We are heading in the direction of asciidoc generated files and moving content from the wiki to that infrastructure. ###Authentication and Security Framework Unlike other Apache projects, Fineract is a business application that is used in production environments as itself. Previously we noted the discussion to replace the existing security framework within Fineract for permissions, roles and authentiation. This is now underway with an incremental strategy. We anticipate this being part of the upcoming release. ###Emeritus status: Repeat of last report (July 2023): As previously reported, we have decided as a project to remove people who request removal or who have had at least 60 months of zero activity in the project. The PMC will remove the persons' access as Committer. If the person comes back to the Project, a simple email or communication will suffice for reinstatement. At that time, they should be re-oriented to the project in case they have missed any important changes to the internal processes and standards. The same shall also apply to PMC members as they are also Committers. ###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: Community Over Code conference in Halifax - we have led the development of the FinTech track. The community treats this as a kind of "summit".
#Fineract July 2023 Report ## 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 significant issues requiring Board attention ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (6 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 agreed to join the PMC (He initially declined but then later accepted.) and was added July 10th, 2023. - No new committers. Last addition was Bharath Gowda on 2022-12-14. ## Project Activity: 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. Although we had communicated a plan for a release 1.9 in May 2023, we are delayed. There are many changes coming in, some of them breaking changes to the environment and to the APIs. This may create issues for our widespread community, but there have been no on-list objections. On the plus side, these improvements go a long way toward making Fineract scalable and highly performant in a cloud environment. Given that they are uneven across the modules we have a separate effort that should start soon to try to address that. ## Community Health: Community engagement is trending up but we remain at some risk. We are focused on addressing issues of confusion and approachability, making the project more visible, and addressing the documentation gap. We have had a modest increase in postings to the listserv this quarter. We hope these tactics will help clarify the situation and generate more interest. ###Deprecating Fineract-CN The Fineract-CN code project was an effort to re-engineer the Fineract project from the ground up as a micro services architecture. After five years it has not had a formal release at Apache and discussions have waned. Because of the confusion it creates on list and elsewhere, in May we discussed ending the Fineract-CN code project. [https://lists.apache.org/thread/pkfg773zjnxt87v5y8m93gnv9kbzsys6] We subsequently took a vote to Deprecate all content related to that code base, including removing mention of it from the landing page. [https://lists.apache.org/thread/zz9jhzs0d0fnjsr0p5b943t2yzmffvop]. "Resolution: the Fineract community agrees that despite some good ideas and early interest, the lack of a formal release of FineractCN after five years indicates that the project is not a major focus of the community. Therefore the community will deprecate the FineractCN project, removing language from the front landing page and some wiki pages. If there is NOT renewed interest before October 1st then the vote is to remove and archive the FineractCN project". If members of the Community wish to revisit this, we remain open. This has ZERO effect on the Fineract1.x project. ###Approachability: We find that even experienced developers have difficulty setting up the project environment for Fineract. Recognizing this, we've had some discussion on list around documentation and approachability of the project. We are heading in the direction of asciidoc generated files and moving content from the wiki to that infrastructure. ###KeyCloak and Security Framework: There is an active discussion to replace the existing security framework within Fineract - the current package includes an internally developed authentication and roles based permissions engine - with a new concept that brings in the KeyCloak project (apache 2.0 license, managed at IBM). The strategy is aimed at improving the credibility of the project within the security-minded banking sector and taking something that works rather than building and maintaining our own. ###Emeritus status: Given a number of inactive Committers, I have proposed and we are currently voting on the idea of moving inactive people to Emeritus status after 60 months of no activity. [https://lists.apache.org/thread/dhjo4ty5ymgsbobg8hy7n746kbw3z8ol] Vote is not yet finalized but it would appear to be passing with 6 binding +1, all other votes supportive, and no other votes. "Resolved: To remove from active status anyone who has been in-active on the fineract project for more than 60 months. A person will be deemed inactive if they have not done at least one thing during the last 60 months: posted on the listserv, created or commented on a ticket, proposed or reviewed code or documentation, written or edited content for wiki or other documentation, or attended a meeting in person or virtually. The PMC will remove the persons' access as Committer. If the person comes back to the Project, a simple email or communication will suffice for reinstatement. At that time, they should be re-oriented to the project in case they have missed any important changes to the internal processes and standards. The same shall also apply to PMC members as they are also Committers." Final thought: Research indicates that developers take breaks from projects, but that if a break lasts more than a single year then the likelihood of returning to the project falls dramatically. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10012-6) ###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: There was no GSOC project at Fineract, although we did have an approved mentor. An outside group (Mifos) is participating in GSOC for code improvements, some of which may be proposed to fineract. These will follow normal contribution patterns for code review. Thinking broadly, we've discussed on list the need for jr devs to have a sandbox and some separate recognition that doesn't necessarily rely on having code accepted into the main release branch. / There are a number of proposed talks for Community over Code Conference in Halifax and talk selections will begin shortly. / I forgot to mention in previous report, PMC chair @jdailey became an Apache member in January 2023.
## 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 significant issues requiring Board attention" ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (6 years ago, contributed by Mifos) There are currently 51 committers and 23 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Bharath Gowda on 2023-01-04. - No new committers. Last addition was Bharath Gowda on 2022-12-14. ## Project Activity: We have 19 contributors active with 214 commits in the past quarter. We released a patch for security issues and a backward compatible database migration tool March 15 (1.8.4 and 1.7.3) We took a decision in 2022 to only support the last two releases with patches, thus version 1.8 and 1.7 get a security patch. We intend to release version 1.9 in May 2023. ## Community Health: Unfortunately engagement on Dev listserv is a bit down for this quarter despite active software dev. The community is developing good functionality and improving quality of code, however the devs are perhaps not doing a lot of design work or discussion on the list. There is a lack of engagement by the broader community on planned improvements. It would appear 90% of the list is simply "downstream" and on various derivative forks (with no upstream contributions). A bright spot was the effort to create a joint roadmap - which gave the project a useful set of activities but little follow up has occurred. Another highlight is ongoing work to be part of the Digital Public Good Alliance, meetings in Bangalore included discussion about how to use good open source practices, like Apache Way. Fineract is one of the oldest DPGs and the only one at ASF. There are a number of PMC members that are not participating. Some of them have taken themselves off of the private listserv and others have not responded or participated in 4+ years. The focus for the past year at Fineract has been on making a significant investment in the code, to make it more scalable and performant especially around the core loan management features. The hope is that these improvements will drive more high quality contributions. Historically, all deployments of the project and commercial uses by vendors have been to take the code as a "Starter Dough" for their deployments with nearly zero contributions coming back upstream. The intent therefore is to make the project more performant and useful for vendors, such that the best vendors would be want to be on the best upstream version and therefore to contribute back useful code, security fixes, etc. We are seemingly far from this goal. We are working to build community involvement for fixing deployment documentation, managing the roadmap, fixing security issues, and simply doing better at community building. These are significant challenges, and merely the starting point, and we hope that we can turn it around from current poor engagement levels.
@Rich: follow up with security team
## Description: At Apache Fineract, our mission is to build, maintain and enhance a cloud-ready core banking system for robust, scalable, and secure operations of financial institutions. We believe in financial services for everyone, including and especially for the unbanked and underbanked. ## Issues: Trademark: The project has been working to ensure that the Trademark policy is clear and to address potential issues. RESOLVED Old releases/upgrade paths: OPEN We are working to encourage users to migrate to more recent versions. Based on queries and other information, we are certain that a number of users are remaining on older versions or heavily forked code bases. Upgrade paths have become problematic. We adopted a policy that only the last two releases will be listed on the main page and supported. All users should migrate to those. This is especially for bug or security fixes, of which there are a few. We may revise to include a "stable long term release version" and more upgrade path scripts. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (6 years ago, contributed by Mifos.org) There are currently 51 committers and 23 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2 : 1. ~300 emails on list in Q4 2022. Community changes, past quarter: New Committer: Bharath Gowda New PMC Members: Bharath Gowda, Javier Borkenztain, Victor Romero. ## Project Activity: The project added a Patch Release Process. The project released 1.8.2 and 1.7.2 on 28-November-2022, for a relatively minor issue and partly to further test the patch release process. We released 1.8.1 and 1.7.1 as patch releases on 25-November-2022 - covering the CVE below - which was a first test of our patch release process. On August 22nd, the project released Fineract 1.8.0. as covered in our last Board report. There is active development, and a new release (1.9) is anticipated in Q1 2023. Most of the contributions are coming in from commercial motivated interests. The project got a critical security vulnerability report. It was able to deliver a patch following the Apache process and issue the CVE-2022-44635 for the supported versions, and the community also got involved in creating patches for earlier versions. A more explicit Trademark policy was adopted: Fineract Trademarks Usage and Policy. [https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Trademarks+Usage+and+Policy]. We communicated out the trademark policy on dev. Fineract (along with Mifos) was deemed a Digital Public Good in 2022, leading to more scrutiny. [https://www.un.org/techenvoy/content/digital-public-goods] [https://digitalpubli cgoods.net//blog/accelerating-financial-inclusion-during-covid-19-and-beyond/] ## Community Health: In November we conducted a Survey of the community. We had 22 responses, which was probably not a sufficiently diverse sample, but nonetheless, we found useful insights. The project continues to enjoy a generally positive impression, mostly unchanged from surveys in 2019 and 2021. There are a larger number of people responding who found the project on the internet versus the connection to Mifos.org. The domains covered by the production users covered digital wallets (70%), online lending (64%), payment accounts (60%), traditional banking accounts (58%). --> Survey Results 2022 November. "https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Survey+Results+2022+November" In October we conducted an effort to close older issues. The decision was made by vote to close all issues that were older than 26 months and had no activity on them. We ended up closing about 300 tickets but we still have a lot of stale issues. 2022-October-21: Jira Clean Up. This remains an area of constructive dialog with some arguing to keep stale tickets visible. We began work on additional roadmap thinking in 2022, but have not completed this effort: Roadmap Q4 2022 (PROPOSED) "https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Trademarks+Usage+and+Policy" ApacheCON track PMC Chair James Dailey
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Awasum Yannick (awasum) to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Awasum Yannick from the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache Fineract project has chosen by vote to recommend James Dailey (jdailey) as the successor to the post; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Awasum Yannick is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that James Dailey be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7B, Change the Apache Fineract Project Chair, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
## Description:
At Apache Fineract, our mission is to build, maintain and enhance a
cloud-ready core banking system for robust, scalable, and secure operations of
financial institutions.
We believe in financial services for everyone, including and especially for
the unbanked and underbanked.
## Issues:
## Membership Data:
Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (5 years ago, contributed by Mifos.org).
There are currently 46 committers and 19 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1.
Community changes, past quarter:
- Arnold G was proposed and accepted for PMC (awaiting formal mechanisms)
- Three new Committers have been nominated and accepted since the last
report in July. (Alberto, Adam, Norbert)
## Project Activity:
On August 22nd, the project released Fineract 1.8.0. Thank you to Aleks as
release manager.
Contributions of code, requirements and documentation came from Aleks,
John W, Bharat, Hemant G, Alberto M, James, Ed, Norbert, Adam, and others.
Enhancements included fixes to 48 issues as detailed at
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/1.8.0+-+Apache+Fineract>,
these included:
- Documentation on use of Cucumber for testing
- GitActions support for patching strategy
- Read/Write separation - fineract may now operate in different modes
This release comes quickly on top of releases in the past two quarters:
We released Fineract 1.7.0 and 1.6.0 over the past 6 months thanks to Aleks,
Petri, and Arnold.
Major features that landed with these releases:
- code significantly improved to support database independence
- PostgreSQL is officially supported
- better performance and JPA compliance through the usage of EclipseLink
Upcoming features:
- significant improvements in business time handling (COB)
- Spring Batch integration to replace Quartz jobs
## Community Health:
New PMC Chair has been proposed: James Dailey
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/~jdailey>
PMC Thanks Awasum Yannick
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/~awasum> who is stepping down.
Contributions have been steady over the past six months due to volunteer
contributors (including those working for companies) giving back to the
upstream Fineract Project. The hope remains that this will "crowd in" those
other companies and system integrators such that they can move to an upstream
model rather than forks of the code.
Fineract was well represented at ApacheCON. Thanks to Javier for serving as
chair of the finTech/fineract track and to James, Ed, and Dinesh for selecting
the talks. Talks will be posted on Fineract wiki when available.
We recently had a debate about the mission statement, which previously was:
"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."
When the project came over from Mifos.org, the mission and vision was also
inherited. The project still has many people on the listserv who strongly
endorse this mission of meeting the needs of unbanked and underbanked.
## 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 (5 years ago) There are currently 46 committers and 19 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - No new committers. Last addition was Arnold Galovics on 2022-03-15. ## Project Activity: We released Fineract 1.7.0 and 1.6.0 over the past 6 months thanks to Aleks, Petri, and Arnold. Major features that landed with these releases: code significantly improved to support database independence. PostgreSQL is officially supported. better performance and JPA compliance through the usageof EclipseLink Upcoming features: read/write separation. significant improvements in business time handling (COB) Spring Batch integration to replace Quartz jobs We have added Committers and PMC Members over the past few months. Responses to issues on the mailing lists have been timely and helpful to eh community. The next release 1.8.0 is due shortly (next week if no last-minute bugs). Starting with this release we'll have a process to deliver maintenance releases (for critical bugs and security issues). Rules are not yet entirely set in stone, but we'll try to provide support for two minor releases including the most recent release. ## Community Health: A sharp rise in the number of contributors and an increase in the contribution rate is due to developers and companies giving back to the upstream Fineract Project. We also have a few interns doing work as part of GSoC 2022.
No report was submitted.
## 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 (5 years ago) There are currently 46 committers and 19 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - Arnold Galovics was added as committer on 2022-03-15 ## Project Activity: Released 1.6.0 back in February 2022. Migrated all old Spring XML configuration to Spring Java configuration. Major JAX-RS Jersey upgrade from 1.x to 2.x. Major improvements to make Fineract more configurable (without recompiles); database configuration cleaned up, SSL, cache, connection pool are completely configurable now, no more hardcoded values. Proper use of environment variables for configuration; properties based configuration to select authentication scheme (was previously done by copying different application.properties files during compile). Improved and faster Docker image builds with Google JIB. Introduced Asciidoc for documentation (existing minimal documentation migrated, ongoing effort). Support for JDK17 LTS (was JDK11 LTS previously). Automatic Gradle project versioning (was previously done manually, Gradle plugin takes care of this now based on Git information). Dropped Drizzle JDBC driver; using now MariaDB JDBC driver (that we can package with the distribution). Added support for PostgreSQL DONE: Replaced OpenJPA with EclipseLink. Replace Flyway with Liquibase for database migration. Introduction of Lombok to reduce boilerplate code (ongoing effort). Fixed Sonar security hotspots. Introduced Cucumber BDD testing. Work on making Fineract more modular started DONE: Build speed improvements. Node aware job schedulers WIP (work in progress): Alternative implementation for the reporting module based on Eclipse BIRT (replacing Pentaho hosted at mifos) WIP: (Semi-) automatic releases with JReleaser WIP: Enforcement of architecture rules with ArchUnit WIP: Migrate integration tests to Cucumber and replace test infrastructure (Gradle Cargo Tomcat plugin, external MariaDB setup) with ready to use Testcontainers (working on test speed) ## Community Health: Fineract Community has been very healthy and active over the past 3 months as new contributors from companies using Fineract for commercial purposes have been giving back to the community. This is seen as the activities on Dev and issue lists have increased. There is more than a 100% rise in the code contributions over the past few months.
## 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 (5 years ago) There are currently 45 committers and 19 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - Benura was added as committer on 2021-11-03 - Javier Borkenztain was added as committer on 2021-11-06 - Manoj Mohanan was added as a committer on 2022-01-01 ## Project Activity: Fineract 1.5 was released in May 2021. Release for Fineract 1.6 is tentatively planned for Q1 of 2022. Mike updating his demo instance provided to the community as issues arise so that the community has an updated bleeding edge version of Fineract running all the time. Mifos Initiative also has an alternate demo instance available for testing with the latest Mifos X versions. Petri has improved the following components over the past few weeks: Moved our CI pipeline to Github action away from Travis which has made us see an improvement in review and build time on Github. Upgrade from Jersey 1.x to 2.x containing the latest changes and improvements making Fineract more stable. Improved test coverage of key components, Upgrade to Spring Boot 2.6.x, Moved us away from XML-based config to Java Configuration which offers better code maintenance. Automatic inclusion of 3rd party licenses in the distribution, Completely ditch the use of Drizzle JDBC Driver Petri, Aleks, and Mike have been actively reviewing pull requests from other contributors over the past few months. We have also had Francis Guchie doing QA and testing the functionalities together with the UI. Members of the community have been having important discussions around creating a roadmap of important features to be implemented over the next year especially around Fineract 1.x which is currently on active support given it has hundreds of deployments around the world. We have had contributors work to improve the build time of Fineract 1.x so that speed of development will reduce. ## Community Health: The community is healthy. We have seen an increase in the number of issues opened and closed as members of the community over the holidays have had time to contribute more than the usually do during peak day job working periods.
## 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: ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (4 years ago) There are currently 42 committers and 19 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - Victor Romero was added as committer on 2021-07-30 ## Project Activity: Fineract 1.5 was released in May 2021. Release for Fineract 1.6 is been planned for the end of 2021. Fineract 1.5.0 was released on 2021-05-25. Fineract 1.4.0 was released on 2020-09-18. Fineract 1.3.0 was released on 2019-04-30. Several members of the community have been making code contributions to fix issues found in Email Notification, Bulk Import, Loans and Dependency updates. James Dailey led efforts to conduct a community survey to gauge how people feel about the Fineract project and gain insides into the contributor profiles and solutions built on top of Apache Fineract 1.x , Fineract CN. Results from this survey were very positive and encouraging. The findings have been published on Confluence and shared on the public mailing list. It also highlighted a few barriers of entry which the community is looking to handle over the coming months. Audrey Ndum, one of our Outreachy Interns from the December 2020 session has been very active over the past few weeks contributing feature such as: Semi-Monthly Loan configurations, ability to add Holiday Rescheduling and Net Disbursal Amount on loans, She also upgraded the Bulk import tool to be compatible with the rest of Fineract 1.x. Avik Ganguly , Manoj Mohanan and Victor Romero have been consistently contributing features and enhancements to both Fineract CN and Fineract 1.x especially around loan configurations, changing the MySQL driver for better performance, better encoding schemes for the database system as well as upgrading Fineract 1.x to the recently released Java 17 LTS. Petri Tuomola, Manthan Surkar, Nasser and other committers have continued reviewing code changes while Francis Guchie and Bharath Gowda have consistently done QA and Functional tests to verify that changes actually work as expected. There have been discussions on the Mailing List about the road map for Fineract CN and how to reduce barrier of entry for new contributors. There are also discussions around the architecture of Fineract CN and why its important to update the libraries and do an initial release. Fineract was included in the ApacheCON@home for the second year in a row. The event was developed by the Track chair in early 2021, who first called for participation on March 26, 2021 on list. https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r54be0953f95399fbd28d124c6643a568e70fc9c631bf61b10e78833b%40%3Cdev.fineract.apache.org%3E The various presentations and panels were advertised on list, and the schedule was posted in social media and on the fineract wiki. By design, nearly half of the twenty sessions were panel discussions and more than half were about topics related to emerging technologies in financial services or ancillary to the Fineract platform. The various participants, speakers, and panelists were from Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas, making Fineract track one of the most geographically diverse tracks in the ApacheCon @home 2021. Birds of a Feather events were useful to many Fineract community members and a summary was provided on list https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r52d0439a64ce3a6d4061d2ce382f94b1f9ac8868e09b95b8718aac1e%40%3Cdev.fineract.apache.org%3E We plan to link to the YouTube recordings once they are uploaded by the organizers. A curated list of the talks from the Fineract track can be found here - ApacheCon 2021 Fineract and Fintech track videos and a YouTube playlist of the Fineract Fintech Track at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAfz_RVd88FqxR4wE7VuAajcPHa2LonW2 Thank you to Rich Bowen, Brian Proffit, and Ruth Suehle for your support and to Javier Borkenztain for serving as Track Chair. All five of our Google Summer of Code interns successfully passed the program. Linked below are their gist final reports: Kinar Shah and Fineract CN Mobile Wallet - https://gist.github.com/EGOR-IND/e13db2d9bcbb221d46741ec3644e800c Benura Abeywardena and Collateral Module - https://gist.github.com/BLasan/9c624bf4e5230b17c1dc4711301097f6 Yemdjih Kaze Nasser and Machine Learning Scorecard for Credit Risk Assessment - https://gist.github.com/xurror/bba79ecbf063dd8eae8ee9c24732701e Varun Jain and Fineract CN Mobile - https://gist.github.com/varsvat/be08d5234770b1c22d809177564a6276 Danish Jamaland Android SDK & Client - https://gist.github.com/danishjamal104/ddb099d5f7985dc08537db658c178a81 ## Community Health: Community is general healthy even though we are having some heated debates about the future of Apache Fineract CN. These have mostly been constructive and collaborative in nature. A drastic increase of more than 130% in the number of emails hitting the public Dev List can be attributed to GSoC activities, bug fixes, Q&A as a result of the new release of Fineract 1.5 in May. As well as ApacheCon 2021 activities. Number of reported issues are up by 130% due to new bugs discovered in the new release. These are already been addressed for Fineract 1.6. Issues closed grow by the same rate as more contributors for companies using Fineract are helping to fix issues in the new release. There has been a significant increase of 400% in the number of contributors over the past 3 months mainly due to GSoC activities and individuals using Fineract for profit are giving back to the community. We are already discussing adding new committers based on this data so as to refresh the community.
## 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 (4 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: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - No new committers. Last addition was Percy Enoabane on 2020-10-02. ## Project Activity: Fineract 1.5.0 was released on May 24, 2021 including 90+ enhancements/bug fixes. Thanks to Aleks Vidakovic and Petri Tuomola for serving as release managers. Luis Espinoza from Fiter has been trying to more effectively utilize the JIRA agile management tools to help to better organize the community across development sprints leading up to the next release. Ed Cable will align this with his ongoing efforts to enable several partners in the ecosystem to contribute feature enhancements they've been working on. Javier Borkenztain has organized and arranged a full 3 day fintech track for ApacheCon and all speakers have been notified and are planning their tasks. Joseph Makara has been making important updates to improve the Security and Robustness of Fineract 1.x with help and reviews from Petri. The PMC is currently having discussions on adding new committers over the next few months to reinvigorate the community. Alot of support questions by users are been answered in a timely manner. *CVE-2020-17514: Disabled Hostname verification for HTTPS * was fixed by Michael Vorburger and the fix announced by James Dailey # GSoC Updates and Details: Five interns were selected by Apache Fineract for Google Summer of Code and all are on track with their projects. A write-up done by Mifos Initiative welcoming them to the community can be found at https://mifos.org/blog/gsoc-2021/ Danish Jamal Android SDK & Fineract Client Mentor(s): Chinmay Kulkarni & Shashank Priyadarshi Project to update the Android SDK and have the Android client consume it is on track. Kinar Sharma Mobile Wallet – Fineract-CN Mentor(s): Devansh Aggarwal, Garvit Agarwal, Victor Romero, Shivansh Tiwari Update: Project to implement a mobile wallet app directly connecting to Fineract CN is on track with architecture for app implemented and now Fineract CN APIs being made securely available via API gateway. Varun Jain Fineract CN Mobile app Mentor(s): Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi and Rajan Maurya Update: Project to enhance mobile field operations app for Fineract CN is on track. Progress has been documented in this gist Yemdjih Nasser Machine Learning Credit Scorecards Mentor(s): Lalit Mohan, Aaashish Sawhney, Abhijit Ramesh, Jeremy Engelbrecht and Rahul Goel Update: Project to extend and productize the credit scoring module as an external plugin is on track. Benura Abeywardena Fineract Backlog & Collateral Management Module Mentor(s): Bharath Gowda, Chaitanya Nuthalapati, Manthan Surkar, Sanyam Goel Update: progress is proceeding ahead of schedule on collateral module ## Community Health: Community is healthy with a slide decline in mailing list and GitHub Activities over the past few months. This is probably due to the Software getting more stable and people getting a better understanding on how Fineract works. There has been an increase in the mailing list and GitHub activities over the past 1 month relative to 2 months ago as GSoC student continue to contribute to the project. dev@fineract.apache.org had a 9% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (96 emails compared to 105) issues@fineract.apache.org had a 74% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (222 emails compared to 846) 13 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-77% change) 8 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-77% change) 66 commits in the past quarter (-42% change) 5 code contributors in the past quarter (-64% change) 91 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-57% change) 95 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-33% change)
## 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 (4 years ago) There are currently 41 committers and 20 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - No new committers. Last addition was Percy Enoabane on 2020-10-02. ## Project Activity: 1.4.0 was released on 2020-09-18. 1.5.0 is under review but not yet released. Release Manager Aleksandar Vidakovic is doing the final triage for 1.5.0 release of Fineract 1.x which will also address an outstanding security Vulnerability. We may also release other security enhancements which Joseph Makara and Petri Tuomola are working on. Activity of developers fixing bugs and adding features are regularly reported on list by Michael Vorburger. Over the past two quarters there has been a gradual uptick in contributions from individuals at organizations building commercial solutions powered by Fineract, positive signs of moving towards a more functional contribution model with upstream development being followed. Community members led by Javier Borkenztain are organizing for ApacheCon2021 with a dedicated Fintech/Fineract track once again. There are a number of GSOC projects being proposed and discussed. At this point in time we anticipate requesting 5 to 6 slots with strong candidates applying for the 4th phase of our machine learning credit scorecards, improvements and enhancements to Fineract from our backlog, ongoing work to the Android SDK and client, mapping of the Fineract APIs to Open Banking APIs, and Fineract CN mobile. Aspiring GSoC students are making contributions to the code base as we receive applicants for projects. New Contributor: Joseph Makara is making some significant contributions and making sure Fineract is more secure and robust. Petri Tuomola and Manthan Surkar have been providing feedback to assist him. ## Community Health: Over the past 3 months, there has been a gradual decline in activities on the mailing list, JIRA issues. This is something we have seen over the past 6 months probably due to the effects of covid-19. The increase in pull request and code contributors over the past 3 months is due to the upcoming release we plan to make in a few weeks. So everyone is sending in fixes for what they like to see in the new release. Overall, the community is healthy with end users asking support questions on list and contributors helping them out. Mailing list had a 57% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (121 emails compared to 285) 53 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-37% decrease) 33 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-42% decrease) 102 commits in the past quarter (-38% decrease) 16 code contributors in the past quarter (33% increase) 188 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (24% increase) 124 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-28% decrease)
## 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 at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (4 years ago) There are currently 41 committers and 20 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11. - No new committers. Last addition was Percy Enoabane on 2020-10-02. ## Project Activity: We have had a lot of end user questions around Fineract 1.x probably due to people deploying the latest 1.4 release we did in late September. Customer support questions now account for more than 50% of the emails we get on our Dev list. These issues or questions are being addressed in a timely fashion and those that cannot be fixed immediately are logged on JIRA for volunteer developers to pick up and fix. We are beginning to have conversations around reorganizing the mailing lists: adding back the dedicated users list which we disabled back in 2018. This discussion is ongoing and we have not yet come to a consensus. Alek, Mike and Petri worked a lot on expanding the swagger documentation and create sample SDK clients for Fineract over the past few months. Fineract 1.5.0 has been planned for the first quarter of 2021. Given the moderate rate of contributions, we think it makes sense to release a new version once every 3 months. Rahul Pawar, one of our GSoC 2020 intern kept working on his Credit Bureau Integration into Fineract projecct by adding more features which enables Financial Institutions to check credit histories of customers before processing loan applications Fineract CN:- We currently have 1 Outreachy intern working to improve Fineract CN. Audrey Ndum under the supervision of Committer Kaze Nasser is working to upgrade the deprecated dependencies in Fineract CN. So far she has update a few microservices left over when the project started. We think she will be done with all this by February. ## Community Health: Both Fineract 1.x and Fineract CN remain healthy as we see traction the the Dev list and JIRA. There is a sharp decrease (above 50%) in email traffic on our Dev List probably due to holiday seasons in December. Number of issues reported have also dropped sharply probably as a result of the recently released Fineract 1.4 which may have fixed some issues for end users. Code Contributors, PRs opened and commits made have drops by more than 40% as the solution gets more stable and vacation in December. We need to do better to get more people engaged with the community.
## 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 20 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 on 18 September 2020. 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.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Vishwas Babu A J (vishwasbabu) to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Vishwas Babu A J from the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache Fineract project has chosen by vote to recommend Awasum Yannick (awasum) as the successor to the post; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Vishwas Babu A J is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Awasum Yannick be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7B, Change the Apache Fineract Project Chair, was approved by General Consent.
## Description: Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (~3 years ago) There are currently 37 committers and 18 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - 1 new committer - Yemdjih Kaze Nasser ## Project Activity: The Fineract community maintains two active projects. Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used. Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active development and has not been officially released - Fineract 1.x The 1.4 release is still pending as the community is working to find volunteer release managers and maintainers to help cut the release. The community is still anticipating a number of significant contributions for the 1.5 release so would like to urgently get the 1.4 release shipped. The community recognizes that for the contribution model and upstream development to work properly, contributions need to come from the individuals and committers belonging to organizations building and using the software in production environments (e.g. commercial solutions powered by Fineract). Despite a recent uptick since April 2020 in contributions from volunteers and interns, contributions from the ecosystem, especially ongoing maintenance and release management from the ecosystem of expert fineract "users", is at relatively low levels. Three intern candidates have been brought on directly through Apache Software Foundation for Google Summer of Code and are making great progress on implementing checkstyles, refactoring the code, hardening the codebase, upgrading core dependencies, implementing live API docs, migrating to EclipseLink and more. In addition there is one Outreachy intern working on some Fineract issues and several of the seventeen Mifos GSOC interns who are contributing to Apache Fineract via Fineract CN Mobile, Credit Bureau integration module, and more. To learn more about each intern, visit this blog post from the Mifos Initiative at https://mifos.org/blog/gsoc-2020/. PMC members, Awasum Yannick and Michael Vorburger are continuing to do timely reviews of pull requests being submitted and have overseen a 5x increase in the number of resolved ticket over the past quarter. Great work to their leadership, hard work, and strong example they're setting for the rest of the community. - Fineract-CN The community is still trying to push towards a stable first release of Fineract CN centered around a minimum set of mature and stable microservices. There is discussion regarding the twin goals of a) deployable MVP solution, and b) base level of libraries to ensure upstream contribution models from the organizations using the code in production. Progress is still slow on getting the few organizations, actively using the codebase, and their expert "users", to contribute back. Focus is currently on sufficient deployment tools to make the project more approachable for new devs. Work is still ongoing to get the public demo server live. GSOC projects related to live API documentation as well as additional UIs on top of Fineract CN are in progress. Work is ongoing to provide an Open Banking API layer on top of Fineract CN to all third party and trusted first-party apps to securely connect. ## Community Health: Both projects continue to retain healthy discussion with 534 mails sent to our dev mailing list, which amounts to a minor seasonal (~25%) increase in traffic compared to the previous quarter (425) Activity rates on JIRA have seen a sharp increase (nearly 5x) thanks to the tireless efforts of Michael Vorburger to encourage contributions, review pull requests in a timely manner and recognize incoming contributions in a weekly Fineract Weekly Resolved Issues update and Dashboard on JIRA. Thanks as well to Petri and Awasum for their contributions, mentorship and reviews of code along with our Fineract interns. - Fineract 1.x. - 200 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (50 in the previous quarter) - 129 JIRA tickets resolved in last 3 months (26 in the previous quarter) - Fineract CN - 8 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (29 in the previous quarter) - 0 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (3 in the previous quarter) Community members, Javier Borkenztain and Edward Cable, are working with the ApacheCon committee to plan out a Fineract track for ApacheCon @Home.
## Description: Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (~3 years ago) There are currently 36 committers and 18 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No changes ## Project Activity: The Fineract community maintains two active projects. Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used. Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active development and has not been officially released - Fineract 1.x The 1.4 release is still pending as the community is working to find volunteer release managers and maintainers to help cut the release. The community is anticipating a number of significant contributions for the 1.5 release so would like to urgently get the 1.4 release shipped. Several intern candidates are being evaluated for projects related to hardening of the codebase, upgrading of core dependencies. PMC members, Awasum Yannick and Michael Vorburger are continuing to do timely reviews of pull requests being submitted. - Fineract-CN There is growing momentum around Fineract-CN with individuals from several organizations looking to contribute back features and enhancements for the deployments and ongoing projects. The current focus and aim of the committers around Fineract CN is to identify the minimum set of mature and stable libraries needed to establish a foundational framework, a minimum set of functionality that can demonstrate an end to end solution on top of the framework and sufficient DevOps tooling and scripts to more easily deploy the framework. Work is still ongoing to get the public demo server live. GSOC projects related to live API documentation as well as additional UIs on top of Fineract CN are being explored. Work is ongoing to provide an Open Banking API layer on top of Fineract CN to all third party and trusted first-party apps to securely connect. ## Community Health: Both projects continue to remain healthy with 425 mails sent to our dev mailing list, which amounts to a minor seasonal (~4%) decrease in traffic compared to the previous quarter. Activity rates on Jira also remain stable - Fineract 1.X - 50 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (24 in the previous quarter) - 26 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (22 in the previous quarter) - Fineract CN - 29 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (15 in the previous quarter) - 3 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (39 in the previous quarter) Community members, Javier Borkenztain and Edward Cable, are working the ApacheCon committee to plan out a Fineract track for ApacheCon North America.
## Description: Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (~3 years ago) There are currently 36 committers and 18 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1. Community changes, past quarter: - Juhan Aasaru was added to the PMC on 2019-11-18. - Mohit Sinha was added as committer on 2019-12-02. ## Project Activity: The Fineract community maintains two active projects. Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used. Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active development and has not been officially released - Fineract 1.x We are expecting to ship a major release (1.4) by the end of the month. - Fineract-CN Ongoing work around stabilizing containerization and deployment options. ## Community Health: Both projects continue to remain healthy with 442 mails sent to our dev mailing list, which amounts to a minor seasonal (~6%) decrease in traffic compared to the previous quarter. Activity rates on Jira also remain stable - Fineract 1.X - 24 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (21 in the previous quarter) - 22 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (18 in the previous quarter) - Fineract CN - 16 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (15 in the previous quarter) - 39 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (10 in the previous quarter)
## Description: Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (2 years ago) There are currently 35 committers and 17 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 9:5. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Courage Angeh on 2019-05-13. - No new committers. Last addition was Angel Cajas on 2019-04-26. ## Project Activity: The Fineract community maintains two active projects. Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used. Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active development and has not been officially released - Fineract 1.x Shipping of release 1.4 has been delayed. Over the past quarter, merged changes have been limited mostly to updates to versions of project dependencies. There is ongoing work around migrating API documentation to swagger (GSOC project) , fixing flakiness around test cases and integrating open banking API's which are expected to be merged in the near future. - Fineract-CN Major progress towards resolving pending category X dependencies , namely - RDBMS migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL - Hibernate dependencies replaced with EclipseLink (GSOC project) Further, thanks to Juhan Aasaru , major simplifications have been made with regards to the containerization and the provisioning process. ## Community Health: Both projects continue to remain healthy with 494 mails sent to our dev mailing list. While the traffic was slightly higher in the previous quarter, the same was attributed to a seasonal spike linked to activity around Google Summer Of Code. Activity rates on Jira also remain stable - Fineract 1.X - 21 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (26 in the previous quarter) - 18 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (14 in the previous quarter) - Fineract CN - 15 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months (20 in the previous quarter) - 10 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months (10 in the previous quarter)
## Description:
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as
a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for
entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer
financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
## Activity:
The Fineract community maintains two active projects.
Fineract 1.x - Current generation product which is widely used.
Fineract-CN - Next Generation framework which is still under active
development and has not been officially released
- Fineract 1.x
A new major release (1.3) was shipped.
Ongoing work (shout-out to Michael Vorburger) around updating to newer
versions of dependencies for the next major release (1.4), likely to be
shipped in this quarter.
We have a GSOC student working on migrating our API documentation to Swagger.
- Fineract-CN
Ongoing activity and discussions around ensuring license compliance in
preparation for an initial release. Additional details follow
- Thanks to Juhan Aasaru, JFrog artifactory has been setup for all Fineract
CN projects. This greatly simplifies our build process.
- GSOC student working on migrating our RDBMS from MySQL to PostgreSQL and
our ORM from Hibernate to another Apache compliant library
## Health report:
Both projects continue to remain healthy.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 17 PMC members.
- New PMC members:
- Courage Angeh was added to the PMC on Tue May 14 2019
- Isaac Kamga was added to the PMC on Thu Apr 25 2019
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 35 committers.
- New committers:
- Angel Cajas was added as a committer on Sat Apr 27 2019
- Juhan Aasaru was added as a committer on Fri Apr 19 2019
## Releases:
- Last release was 1.3.0 on Tue Apr 30 2019
## Mailing list activity:
No major changes in mailing list traffic
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 342 subscribers (up 9 in the last 3 months):
- 637 emails sent to list (707 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 16 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months):
- 369 emails sent to list (688 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
No change in activity rates around both projects
- Fineract 1.X
- 26 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 14 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
- Fineract CN
- 20 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 10 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description:
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as
a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for
entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer
financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
## Activity:
The Fineract community maintains two active projects Fineract 1.x - Current
generation product which is widely used FIneract-CN - Next Generation
framework which is still under active development and has not been officially
released
- Fineract 1.x A planned major release (1.3) was delayed with bug reports.
This release is now in the voting phase and is expected to ship shortly.
- FIneract-CN Ongoing activity around ensuring license compliance in
preparation for an initial release. Additional details follow
- POC for switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL in place
- Ongoing activity related to improving the build process (setting up an
artifactory)
- Ongoing discussions and activity around simplifying the deployment
process and setting up a demo server
## Health report:
Both projects continue to remain healthy.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 16 PMC members.
- New PMC members:
- James Dailey was added to the PMC on Sun Mar 31 2019
- Santosh Math was added to the PMC on Sat Mar 23 2019
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 33 committers.
- New commmitters:
- Chirag Gupta was added as a committer on Wed Jan 30 2019
- Sanyam Goel was added as a committer on Wed Jan 30 2019
## Releases:
- Last release was 1.2.0 on Thu Dec 06 2018
## Mailing list activity:
Increased activity in the mailing lists can be largely attributed to our
participation in Google Summer Of Code.
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 330 subscribers (up 49 in the last 3 months):
- 782 emails sent to list (437 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 16 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months):
- 695 emails sent to list (778 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
Increased activity around issue creation across both projects is linked to our
participation in GSOC
- Fineract 1.X
- 58 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 34 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
- Fineract CN
- 35 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 6 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description:
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as
a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for
entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer
financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
The Fineract community maintains two active projects Fineract 1.x - Current
generation product which is widely used FIneract-CN (including microservices
front end UI) - Next Generation framework which is still under active
development and has been officially released Release management on Fineract
1.x was largely led by contributors associated with "The Mifos Initiative".
For 2019, the indications are that these contributors shall be shifting their
attention to Fineract-CN. The PMC shall be closely monitoring the impact of
the same on the ability of the community to continue shipping timely releases
and responding to security issues raised around Fineract 1.x.
Signs of disengagement have been observed within the community due to lack of
clarity on the long term plans around Fineract 1.x and on-going delays in
releasing the initial version of Fineract-CN. Committers are initiating work
on publishing a roadmap for Fineract-CN which would answer key questions like
"would Fineract-CN be a drop-in replacement for Fineract 1.* ?" and provide
target timelines for key feature availability (and possibly feature parity
with commonly used modules in Fineract 1.x) on Fineract-CN.
## Activity:
Fineract 1.x A major release (1.2) has been shipped and committers are working
on shipping version 1.3 targeted for the 2nd week of January 2019
Fineract-CN Ongoing activity led by Isaac Kamga around improving build time
and ensuring license compliance in preparation for an initial release.
## Health report:
Both active projects continue to remain healthy.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 14 PMC members.
- Mexina Daniel was added to the PMC on Tue Oct 30 2018
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 31 committers.
- New commmitters:
- Mark van Veen was added as a committer on Mon Oct 22 2018
- James Dailey was added as a committer on Fri Oct 05 2018
- Cabrel Kemfang was added as a committer on Fri Oct 26 2018
## Releases:
- Fineract 1.2.0 was released on Thu Dec 06 2018
## Mailing list activity:
The user list has been merged into the more active dev list, which explains
the slight uptick in activity observed here.
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 277 subscribers (up 13 in the last 3 months):
- 462 emails sent to list (440 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 16 subscribers (down -1 in the last 3 months):
- 781 emails sent to list (258 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
Fineract 1.X Slight uptick in issue creation and marked increase in issue
resolution
- 27 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 64 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months Fineract CN Marked
decrease in both issue creation and resolution
- 12 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 10 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Myrle Krantz (myrle) to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Myrle Krantz from the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache Fineract project has chosen by vote to recommend Vishwas Babu A J (vishwasbabu) as the successor to the post; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Myrle Krantz is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Vishwas Babu A J be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7I, Change the Apache Fineract Project Chair, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
## Description Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues Pull request backlog for Fineract 1.x: there are 28 open pull requests. ## Activity Two active development areas: Fineract 1.x FIneract-CN (including microservices front end UI) GSOC is winding down. Fineract has four GSoC interns: Dilpreet Singh Ebenezer Graham Ruphine Kengne Pembe Miriam Newly selected committer, Aleksander Vidakovic is configuring the Apache VM infrastructure for a public demo server for Fineract CN - a request for additional infrastructure was made to Apache board and approved. Progress is slow because we're all doing it in our free time. OSCON - Fineract attendees included Myrle and Ed, both gave talks that included Fineract articulation. ApacheCon, keynote, three talks and a dinnertime meetup. Fineract is especially grateful that so many members of our project could attend on TAC. Fineract CN APIs documentation initiated Lowering barriers to contribution is being discussed, with the idea that non-committers can also review pull requests. Lazy consensus has been adopted and documented in Committer's Zone Fineract 1.x was moved to gitbox to make merging PR's easier. ## Health report Community development is ticking along, PR's are coming in. On Fineract CN they are mostly being merged; on Fineract 1.x we need to improve. On the whole, we're doing well. ## PMC changes - Currently 13 PMC members. - No new PMC members added in the last 3 months - Last PMC addition was Awasum Yannick on Thu Apr 19 2018 ## Committer base changes - Currently 29 committers. - New commmitters: - James Dailey was added as a committer on Sat Oct 06 2018 - Shruthi Rajaram was added as a committer on Tue Sep 18 2018 ## Releases - 1.1.0 was released on Wed Apr 18 2018 ## Mailing list activity: - dev@fineract.apache.org: - 264 subscribers (up 5 in the last 3 months): - 448 emails sent to list (709 in previous quarter) - issues@fineract.apache.org: - 17 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months): - 296 emails sent to list (302 in previous quarter) - user@fineract.apache.org: - 207 subscribers (up 10 in the last 3 months): - 47 emails sent to list (39 in previous quarter) ## JIRA activity: FINERACT 1.x & Fineract-CN together 373 open issues, many of these stale and assigned to non-active members. Cumulative Flow Report shows increasing volume of "to dos", a tiny percentage of "in progress" and a relatively stable number of "done". FINERACT project Jira creation is down and resolution is up. - 14 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months - 12 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months FINCN project tickets weren't previously being captured. With FINCN added, the numbers now look like this. Future comparisons should be against these numbers. - 35 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months - 26 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues PR backlog continues to grow including contributions from 2017 GSOC interns and delays in moving towards a monthly release cycle for the 1.2 release and beyond. There was little availability of PMC members to take on this burden so a dedicated and funded individual is being supplied from the community to take on these responsibilities. ## Activity GSOC interns 4 interns are currently heads-down on their projects: Dilpreet Singh of India is working on version 2 of the Fineract CN Mobile Field Operations app including converting over to Kotlin, refactoring, and adding in new features. Ebenezer Graham of Mauritius is working on a SMS/Email microservice for Fineract CN Ruphine Kenge of Cameroon is implementing the back-components for group management on Fineract CN Pembe Miriam of Cameroon is implementing the web user interface for group-based lending and microfinance services on Fineract CN. Newly selected committer, Aleksander Vidakovic is configuring the Apache VM infrastructure for a public demo server for Fineract CN - a request for additional infrastructure is being made to Apache board. Marketing: Myrle co-presented with Justin McLean on Fineract and the Incubator at FOSS Backstage.. Myrle promoted Fineract via feathercast with many thanks to Rich Bowen. At least 5 members of the community will be in attendance at ApacheCon and two talks including a keynote will be given. Talks are being prepared now. Fineract CN APIs have been documented using Spring REST Docs by Isaac Kamga and are temporarily available on http://smartfinance.tech/fineract-cn-api-docs/. ## Health report PR's backlog continues to be an issue. ## PMC changes - Currently 14 PMC members. - Awasum Yannick was added to the PMC on Thu Apr 19 2018 ## Committer base changes - Currently 27 committers. - New commmitters: - Aleksandar Vidakovic was added as a committer on Sat Apr 28 2018 - Courage Angeh was added as a committer on Thu Apr 12 2018 - Steve Conrad was added as a committer on Wed Mar 28 2018 ## Releases - 1.1.0 was released on Wed Apr 18 2018 ## Mailing list activity: Mailing list activity is down slightly across all lists. This is a little surprising; with the additional traffic from the GSoC interns I would have expected *more* emails not less. - dev@fineract.apache.org: - 257 subscribers (up 14 in the last 3 months): - 709 emails sent to list (752 in previous quarter) - issues@fineract.apache.org: - 17 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months): - 302 emails sent to list (333 in previous quarter) - user@fineract.apache.org: - 195 subscribers (up 15 in the last 3 months): - 39 emails sent to list (55 in previous quarter) ## JIRA activity: Jira activity is up significantly from last quarter, but nowhere close to the activity of the quarter before that. - 27 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months - 9 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues ## Activity We've added committers. We've started adapting Fineract CN (formerly mifos i/o) to its new home at Apache. There is still a lot of work to do, and it isn't all captured in tickets yet. In particular, Fineract CN is not yet through IP clearance with the incubator. Those committers interested in Fineract CN are having trouble keeping up with the significant interest from contributors. We've almost released 1.1 containing the following major improvements: -- Integration of data import tool and enhancements for usability and better performance -- Integration of staff notifications framework including the introduction of a topic-subscriber model architecture -- Support for two-factor authentication with OTP delivery via SMS or email and the configuration of remember-me tokens -- Create and schedule ad-hoc queries to run and generate reports. -- Support for equal installments with equal amortization of principal and interest. ## Health report We are struggling again with unmerged pull requests. Currently, the oldest open pull request is from May 2016.The number of open pull requests has increased from from 16 to 23. Of these, only 9 have received no comment. The oldest of those 9 is from November 2017. However it is not that these are lacking attention as we've tagged several of these pull requests for the next release, Fineract 1.2, but are still awaiting review of these from committers who have little time to do so yet. In an effort to move towards more regular time-driven releases (monthly), we successfully transferred knowledge about the release process to several additional committers but have still become bottlenecked in release management with committers not having time to review the tagged pull requests. Efforts are also under way to utilize Apache virtual machine infrastructure to set up a publicly accessible demonstration instance for Fineract CN. Progress is stalled though as the committers who have volunteered for the effort don't have the requisite knowledge to complete the task and the volunteers willing and able to do the work need to be added as committers. Discussion led by Yannick Awasum has begun around addressing the hibernate dependency in Fineract CN which needs to be addressed prior to any release; unfortunately there has been little to no participation from other community members in this regard. Functional discussion around features for the Fineract CN roadmap have begun but are also proceeding more slowly than desired. Discussion related to key components for migration of users of Fineract 1.x to Fineract CN (i.e. group lending support, data migration tools, etc.) has been lacking and once again it relates to low input from our PMC and older committers. Discussion led by individual product management volunteers around domain areas such as machine learning and credit analysis, reporting, regulatory compliance, etc. is ongoing but slow as well. Documentation for Fineract CN is growing and Isaac Kamga has led a webinar on customizing a microservice. He is also leading work on live documentation of APIs via Spring REST Docs which will be made available in the upcoming quarter. Nonetheless, more documentation is needed and we continue to recruit volunteers to take on these tasks. Evaluation of students for Google Summer of Code is taking place with an emphasis on projects related to Fineract CN including a data import tool, additional microservices, containerization, enhancements to Fineract CN mobile, and support for group-based lending operations. We continue to add committers at a steady clip. We haven't had any new PMC members in a while however. The addition of new committers and ideally the addition of new PMC members is essential right now as a good proportion of the current base of our PMC (primarily the original set of PMC members adding during incubation) have been idle and providing little active contribution. New committers and PMC members have been taking up additional work loads but are being overwhelmed with requests to assist. ## PMC changes - Currently 13 PMC members. - No new PMC members added in the last 3 months - Last PMC addition was Avik Ganguly on Sat Oct 14 2017 ## Committer base changes - Currently 25 committers. - New commmitters: - Courage Angeh was added as a committer on Thu Apr 12 2018 - Steve Conrad was added as a committer on Wed Mar 28 2018 - Isaac Kamga was added as a committer on Mon Mar 19 2018 - Rajan Maurya was added as a committer on Mon Mar 05 2018 ## Releases - 1.1.0 was released on Wed Apr 18 2018 ## Mailing list activity: - Subscriber counts to dev, user, and issues have been steadily increasing. - For the first time in two quarters email counts actually are comparable with previous quarters after our mid-September rearrangement of what e-mails are sent to which lists. - dev@fineract.apache.org: - 243 subscribers (up 39 in the last 3 months): - 807 emails sent to list (664 in previous quarter) - issues@fineract.apache.org: - 17 subscribers (up 5 in the last 3 months): - 342 emails sent to list (247 in previous quarter) - user@fineract.apache.org: - 179 subscribers (up 18 in the last 3 months): - 59 emails sent to list (146 in previous quarter) ## JIRA activity: - Jira ticket creation has been down significantly, but the existing JIRA tickets are getting more traffic than in the last quarter. - 19 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months - 4 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description: Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues:
## Description
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as
a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for
entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer
financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues
## Activity
We've added committers.
We've voted on and accepted Fineract CN (formerly mifos i/o) and imported the
code into gitbox repositories. We've made progress in deciding how to do
issue tracking, and release management on this code.
We announced the SQL-injection security vulnerability (CVE-2017-5663) which
was fixed in Apache Fineract 1.0.0.
The Mifos Initiative has involved us in Google Code In so we've had the
pleasure of making the acquaintance of many young, up-and-coming programmers
who are introducing themselves on our list. To date we've interacted with 245
students who are all working on a wide range of coding and non-coding
projects.
The Apache Fineract 1.1.0 release is soon to be ready for a vote. The
community has been doing extensive QA cycles. It will include a number of the
GSOC projects including the data import tool enhancements, two-factor
authentication, notifications framework, static analysis and more.
A vote to accept in a code donation from the Mifos Initiative of the Fineract
CN Mobile app developed by Apache Fineract 2017 GSOC intern, Rajan Maurya is
underway and should be complete before the January 17 board meeting.
Google Summer of Code 2018 applications are open now for mentoring
organizations. The Mifos Initiative plans to apply to mentor projects on both
Mifos X and Apache Fineract 1.0/CN which would be in addition to any
participation under Apache Software Foundation as an umbrella organization.
## Health report
We've made progress on our unmerged pull requests. Documenting the process
for merging and closing pull requests in the Fineract confluence seems to have
helped. At the time of our last board report, the oldest open pull request
was from March 2016. Currently, we've reduced the number of open pull requests
from 47 to 16. Unfortunately many had to be closed without merging. Those
that remain are still quite old.
We also were able to resolve several outstanding issues with respect to
committers for whom ICLAs or Apache ids were missing, so that there are no
longer any voted in committers who are not on the roster. Several of the
committers listed below in "committer base changes" were voted in and
announced significantly earlier.
## PMC changes
- Currently 13 PMC members.
- Avik Ganguly was added to the PMC on Sat Oct 14 2017
## Committer base changes
- Currently 22 committers.
- New commmitters:
- Avik Ganguly was added as a committer on Tue Oct 03 2017
- Awasum Yannick was added as a committer on Mon Nov 20 2017
- Ayuk Etta was added as a committer on Wed Nov 15 2017
- Mexina Daniel was added as a committer on Wed Nov 15 2017
- Nayan Ambali was added as a committer on Fri Nov 17 2017
- Nikhil Pawar was added as a committer on Wed Oct 04 2017
- Thynn Win was added as a committer on Tue Dec 12 2017
- Zayyad A. Said was added as a committer on Fri Nov 17 2017
## Releases
- Released version 1.0.0
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/fineract/1.0.0/ on June 1, 2017.
## Mailing list activity:
- Subscriber counts to dev and user have been slightly but steadily
increasing. The number of new subscribers who introduce themselves has seen
a significant uptick, but is mostly Google Code In students. Not all of
them will remain with the project.
- Email counts are not completely comparable with previous quarters because in
mid-September we rearranged what e-mails are sent to which lists. Those
changes may have also driven changes in subscriber count to the issues and
commits mailing lists. Hopefully, those changes will also make our dev list
more attractive for newcomers. This was also mentioned in our previous
report
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 199 subscribers (up 39 in the last 3 months):
- 659 emails sent to list (712 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 12 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months):
- 241 emails sent to list (204 in previous quarter)
- user@fineract.apache.org:
- 160 subscribers (up 17 in the last 3 months):
- 143 emails sent to list (106 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- Jira activity has been up slightly.
- 55 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 28 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. ## Issues - Respond to the board's question: "If Mifos I/O was always intended for Fineract, why wasn't it part of the project from its inception?" Before I answer, first some history about Mifos I/O: Markus has been thinking about and planning a rearchitecting of MifosX since before it entered incubation at Apache under the name Fineract in December 2015. Besides his other duties he spent much of the time up till March 2016 gathering stakeholder support. In March, the Mifos Initiative sponsored Mifos Tech Days in Amsterdam to which all Fineract committers were invited (though not all could attend). At that conference, Markus introduced his architecture, and early versions of some of the command processing code. Videos of those talks were made and put online. Then Markus and Myrle went into heads-down mode designing the security concept, the accounting module, and other basic building blocks for the new architecture. In August Mark joined us and started work on a new UI designed to be capable of being ALV2 licensed according to the ASF's constraints, unlike the current Mifos community app. During this period we wanted to work with just the three of us in order to develop a clear architectural vision before we presented it to the community. We were new to Apache (Fineract was still in incubating), and didn't realize that we were violating the spirit of the "no off-list communications" rule. The code we were producing is not part of Fineract, and we never planned to introduce it without community buy-in, so it seemed a reasonable way to work to us. Early 2017, we changed the code to a public repository. We did a renaming and restructuring at the same time, during which we gave up the commit history. For this reason, you won't see the history before that point. In March Markus, Mark, and Myrle switched to a new employer named Kuelap, founded as a for-profit with the intention of making the same social mission that Mifos pursues fiscally sustainable. We have continued to work on the source code of Mifos I/O, preparing it for deployment. Mifos I/O currently consists of nearly 30 github repositories. When we first addressed this structure on our mailing list, we understood Greg Stein's response to be a veto against spreading code across multiple repositories for a project. Not long after those comments from Greg, Greg took charge of Apache Infra. For this reason, Myrle put careful consideration into the question of why we actually wish to work this way and produced an in-depth explanation which she presented at ApacheCon in November 2016 in Seville. Before it was clear that Apache would accept a multiple repo approach, this was a technical obstacle to introducing the code to the community. In April of 2017 Fineract graduated to a top-level project at Apache. Between the funding pressures of founding a start-up, the customer pressures involved in pilots, and the time-pressures that graduating a top-level project have produced, we haven't had the time to campaign for community buy-in that we'd like. At this point the source-code is extensive. The community wouldn't work if we just threw this into everyone's lap and said: "here: this is your new code-base". Even if we got the votes, people wouldn't be able to work effectively. So we're slowly trying to collect the community and help them understand the new code well enough to make an informed decision about whether they wish to accept it. While we have done considerable development off-list, we've been quite open about this fact. We are not quietly introducing off-list code into the code-base without community buy-in. Myrle has already made clear that she hopes to get *all* committers on board before we begin the process of IP clearance and code moving. ## Activity We've added three new committers and one new PMC member. We've added new moderators to the mailing lists. GSoC projects have finished, and are waiting to be merged. These projects which were led by interns on the Mifos Initiative and Apache include two-factor authentication, a notifications framework, data import tool enhancements, credit bureau integration, GSIM/GLIM, security fixes from static analysis, and changes made to API structure for Swagger API documentation. We are looking towards participating in GCI (google code in) and digital ocean's Hacktoberfest. We've begun discussions on bringing the Fineract CN code into the Fineract code base. Kuelap is hosting a demo-server for those who want to see what it looks like. We're also considering a point release which will contain some of these changes. The Mifos Initiative has engaged a number of individual volunteers who are working across the community on the following projects but not directly contributing code: Denila Philip, product management volunteer, has taken over guiding requirements and product managing the mobile money gateway which is a critical project for Apache Fineract but has dragged on for a couple of years and through two GSoC internship cycles. Ramesh Padmanabhan, an executive-level network engineer, is conducting interviews with partners across the community to document their cloud configuration and hosting environments to help build out toolkits, documentation containerization and hosting of forthcoming cloud-native architectures. Kristen Perchal, a BCG consultant, who is conducting interviews with individuals across the community to understand their roadmap development process and document previous strengths and weaknesses of engagement with the community on roadmaps to help advance a collective community-driven roadmap process with the ongoing transitions in the software and community. Aditya Oturkar, a project manager at Analog Devices, on documenting requirements for Drag and Drop/Ad-Hoc style reporting in Apache Fineract. Mabawonku Bolarinwa, a business analyst/microfinance practitioner from Nigeria, on documenting the credit bureau integration requirements for Nigeria. ## Health report The biggest threat to our project is the long list of unmerged pull requests on the Fineract code base. The oldest open pull request is still from March 2016. This problem is worsening with the contributions of the recent GSoC interns added to the "pile". We hope that the addition of several new committers who have experience and are still actively developing on Apache Fineract 1.0 will lead to progress on this issue. Avik in particular has started reviewing and commenting on older pull requests. While adding to the backlog of pull requests a positive sign of health in the community are the contributions of code from a number of new partners in the community including several modifications made by the BOWPI team from Guatemala, GSIM/GLIM changes made by the iDT Labs team in Sierra Leone, and changes made by R116 Solutions for Mentors International in Latin America. The addition of the Fineract CN code base, though not yet voted in, is also both a sign of activity, and a contributor to the problem. We're a small community and only about a third of the committer base are active coders. Those of us who are programmers have been splitting our efforts between two code bases. We still need more committers. Should we vote in the Fineract CN codebase, we cannot afford to let pull requests there linger too. In all though, the increase in discussion around the health of our project, and the addition of Fineract CN indicates there is a baseline of interest by contributors in our project that can continue to drive the project. ## PMC changes - Currently 13 PMC members. - Last PMC addition was Avik Ganguly last week. ## Committer base changes - Currently 18 committers. - New committers: - Avik Ganguly was added as a committer on Tue Oct 03 2017 - Ippez Robert was added as a committer on Mon Aug 21 2017 - Nikhil Pawar was added as a committer on Wed Oct 04 2017 - Santosh Math was added as a committer on Fri Aug 18 2017 plus two committers not in the Apache records: Zayyad Said (who was voted in in March, and has not yet returned an ICLA) and Nayan Ambali (who has provided an ICLA, but has not yet received an Apache ID). ## Releases - Released version 1.0.0 https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/fineract/1.0.0/ on June 1, 2017. - The Mifos Initiative has issued a Mifos X release based on the current Apache Fineract code. ## Mailing list activity - Subscriber counts to dev and user have been slightly but steadily increasing. The number of new subscribers who introduce themselves has seen a slight uptick, which is nice. - Email counts are not completely comparable with previous quarters because in mid-September we rearranged what e-mails are sent to which lists. Those changes may have also driven changes in subscriber count to the issues and commits mailing lists. Hopefully, those changes will also make our dev list more attractive for newcomers. - dev@fineract.apache.org: - 160 subscribers (up 16 in the last 3 months): - 707 emails sent to list (969 in previous quarter) - issues@fineract.apache.org: - 12 subscribers (up 4 in the last 3 months): - 200 emails sent to list (248 in previous quarter) - user@fineract.apache.org: - 140 subscribers (up 15 in the last 3 months): - 106 emails sent to list (41 in previous quarter) ## JIRA activity - Jira activity has been down somewhat. - 44 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months - 20 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description:
- Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core
banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable
solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to
offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
## Activity:
- Feature work includes additional reports, blocks and holds for savings
accounts, rescheduling bulk loans, pre-defining customer sms and e-mails
notification, improvements in credit bureau integration, support for
surveys, and support for two factor authentication.
- GSOC interns on Apache Fineract and the Mifos Initiative are making good
progress on their projects related to the platform.
Alex Ivanov is ahead of schedule on the Two Factor Authentication project
under mentorship of Avik Ganguly
Thisura Philips has been making multiple pull requests to fix issues found
during his static analysis of the code base under mentorship of Mark
Reynolds
Sanyam Goel is continuing to integrate the APIs with Swagger for live API
documentation under the mentorship of Aleksandar Vidakovic
Nikhil Pawar is finalizing integration with the Equifax Credit Bureau as
part of his project under the mentorship of Nazeer Sheik.
Courage Angeh is adding in additional back-end support for our
notifications framework to deliver staff notifications across various apps
powered by Apache Fineract with the guidance of Pranjal Goswami.
Vladimir Fomene is implementing a brand new database design for a mobile
money bridge integrating with Apache Fineract with support from Ayuk Etta
and Antony Omeri
Developers from R116 with support from Mentors International have built and
added in enhancements to building reports directly via SQL queries in the
platform.
- The community has begun discussing taking over the Mifos I/O code base
(https://github.com/mifosio). This code has, from its inception, been
intended for Apache Fineract. Still, there are a few issues that need to be
resolved before we're ready for this.
- Adoptions and deployments of Apache Fineract in Guatemala, Germany, and
Nigeria are proceeding along smoothly and beginning to scale on the
platform. Members of those terms are working with the community on their
implementations.
## Health report:
- The project remains healthy. Activity levels on mailing lists, git and
JIRA remain mostly constant, or have very slight upticks.
- Many community functions are filled by only one person. The mailing
list has only one moderator; all merges are being performed by one
committer; only one committer is serving as a release manager.
- We have 38 open pull requests stretching back over a year. We need to do
a better job of reacting to pull requests.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 12 PMC members.
- No new PMC members added in the last 3 months
- Last PMC addition was Jim Jagielski on November 3rd, 2016.
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 15 committers.
- One addition still getting setup: Santosh Math was voted in and
announced this week.
- Last committer additions before that were Zayyad Said and Robert Ippez
on March 13th, 2017.
## Releases:
- Released version 1.0.0
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/fineract/1.0.0/ on June 1 2017.
- The Mifos Initiative has issued a Mifos release based on the current
Apache Fineract code.
## Mailing list activity:
Requests for help on the user list continue to be answered in a prompt and
friendly manner.
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 148 subscribers (up 9 in the last 3 months):
- 1046 emails sent to list (783 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 8 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months):
- 262 emails sent to list (167 in previous quarter)
- user@fineract.apache.org:
- 124 subscribers (up 9 in the last 3 months):
- 66 emails sent to list (65 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- 50 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 44 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
No report was submitted.
@Brett: pursue a report for Fineract
## Description:
- Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core
banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and
affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and
service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion
underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
- There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
## Activity:
- Released version 1.0.0.
- Mentoring GSOC interns
## Health report:
- The project remains healthy. Activity levels on mailing lists, git
and JIRA remain mostly constant. Release voting was a little slow.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 12 PMC members.
- No new PMC members added in the last 3 months
- Last PMC addition was Jim Jagielski on November 3rd, 2016.
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 14 committers.
- No changes (the PMC was established in the last 3 months)
- Last committer additions were Zayyad Said and Robert Ippez on March
13th, 2017.
## Releases:
- Released version 1.0.0
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/fineract/1.0.0/ on June 1.
## Mailing list activity:
Requests for help on the user list continue to be answered in a prompt
and friendly manner.
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 144 subscribers (up 21 in the last 3 months):
- 938 emails sent to list (1138 in previous quarter)
- issues@fineract.apache.org:
- 8 subscribers (up 0 in the last 3 months):
- 212 emails sent to list (180 in previous quarter)
- user@fineract.apache.org:
- 123 subscribers (up 19 in the last 3 months):
- 39 emails sent to list (102 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
Tickets created and tickets closed are holding parity.
- 60 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 59 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Description:
Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a
platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable
solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service
providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion
underbanked and unbanked.
## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
## Activity:
Apache Fineract graduated on April 19, 2017 and has been engaged in press work
to announce the graduation, content work to remove incubation disclaimers, and
coordination with Infra for the necessary adjustments there.
Apache Fineract will be mentoring three students for the 2017 Google Summer of
Code. Rajan Maurya from India will be working on a new Android field officer app
based on use cases in Latin America. Sanyam Goel from India will be working on
live REST API documentation using Swagger. Nikhil Pawar from the USA will be
working on extended and enhancing the credit bureau integration module.
## Health report:
The project remains healthy. Activity levels on mailing lists, git and
JIRA remain constant.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 12 PMC members.
- No new PMC members added in the last 3 months.
- Last PMC addition was Jim Jagielski on November 3rd, 2016.
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 14 committers.
- 2 new committers added in the last 3 months.
- Last committer additions were Zayyad Said and Robert Ippez on March 13th, 2017.
## Releases:
The last release was announced on January 17th, 2017,
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/incubator/fineract/0.6.0-incubating/
We have started the process of next release.
## Mailing list activity:
- dev@fineract.apache.org:
- 141 subscribers (up 27 in the last 3 months):
- 860 emails sent to list (864 in previous quarter)
- user@fineract.apache.org:
- 113 subscribers (up 15 in the last 3 months):
- 65 emails sent to list (71 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- 73 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 69 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of open-source software, for distribution at no charge to the public, 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. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache Fineract Project", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache Fineract Project be and hereby is responsible for 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; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Fineract" be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Apache Fineract Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache Fineract Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache Fineract Project: * Vishwas Babu AJ <vishwasbabu@apache.org> * Edward Cable <edcable@apache.org> * Markus Geiss <mage@apache.org> * Sander van der Heyden <sheyden@apache.org> * Ishan Khanna <ishan1604@apache.org> * Myrle Krantz <myrle@apache.org> * Terence Monteiro <terencemo@apache.org> * Adi Nayaran Raju <rajuan@apache.org> * Gaurav Saini <gsaini@apache.org> * Nazeer Hussain Shaik <nazeer1100126@apache.org> * Jim Jagielski <jim@apache.org> * Michael Vorburger <vorburger@apache.org> NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Myrle Krantz be appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Fineract, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Fineract PMC be and hereby is tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to encourage open development and increased participation in the Apache Fineract Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache Fineract Project be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Incubator Fineract podling; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibilities pertaining to the Apache Incubator Fineract podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator Project are hereafter discharged. Special Order 7D, Establish the Apache Fineract Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Addressing areas of concern raised by community based on our Maturity
Evaluation including:
* Full documentation of our release management process
* Implementation of Findbugs to show commitment to quality of code
* Preparation of our community to respond any security threats or
vulnerabilities that are reported.
* Improvement of backwards compatibility of APIs and communication of
breaking changes with each release.
* Updating Apache Fineract webpage with latest releases.
2. Adding new committers and contributors to the project.
3. Continuing to move over additional documentation and providing full
clarity to our community on how and where to report issues via the
issue tracker.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
How has the community developed since the last report?
* Community continues to stay strongly engaged on the mailing lists with
active reporting of issues via the mailing list and issue tracker.
How has the project developed since the last report?
* The community has made 2 additional releases since the last report.
* Our second release was made on December 21, 2016 with three binding
votes from the community.
* Our third release was made on January 17, 2017 with three binding
votes from the community.
Date of last release:
2017-01-17
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
2016-05-16
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. With the first official incubation release out, we want to work on
getting frequent successful incubation releases shipped to the community
on a monthly basis.
2. Adding new committers and contributors to the project along with
empowering volunteers and support partner organizations in the community
to contribute to the codebase while using the project infrastructure.
3. Resolving the questions around introduction of a rework of the original
code – in particular repository/infrastructure/release questions which
result from the microservice architecture
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
How has the community developed since the last report?
* With the first official incubation release out, we look add several new
committers who have worked on modules and features that will soon be
merged into the release.
* The community is more involved and engaged in asking questions on the
developer and user mailing lists. We are working to ensure that all
inquiries are actively addressed and more discussions regarding
functionality and design occur on the mailing lists.
How has the project developed since the last report?
* Our first release was made on October 25, 2016. We received 4 binding
votes from the community.
* Significant work was led by the Mifos core development team to address the
licensing issues with a dependency on Hibernate and replacing it with
OpenJPA - details on the code changes made and the challenges overcome can
be found at https://youtu.be/C4lXtXY-MY4
Date of last release:
2016-10-25
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
2016-05-05
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[X](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Shepherd/Mentor notes:
Roman Shaposhnik:
Next item on the immediate TODO list for the community is to master
releases of binary convenience artifacts.
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Getting a first release out – we are still inhibited by Hibernate issues
which are more deeply rooted than we realized.
2. Moving the community from the Mifos infrastructure to the Apache
infrastructure – most discussions are taking place out of public view.
3. Resolving the questions around introduction of a rework of the original
code – in particular repository/infrastructure/release questions which
result from the microservice architecture.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
The person who creates and submits the board reports will cease to perform
this task until the code rework is ready to be introduced to the community.
It is possible that this will endanger the board reports.
How has the community developed since the last report?
Several prospective new committers have recently joined the Mifos community
through Google Summer of Code and as new partners that we are working to
add as committers to the Apache Fineract.
How has the project developed since the last report?
We have tried and failed to produce an apache release again. A release was
produced by the mifos community outside of apache and announced on the
apache fineract user list.
The release included work intended to move us closer to apache policies.
In particular, the removal of Hibernate annotations from the code uncovered
a circular dependency in the data structure which was not caught in
testing. Two production systems from early adopters are out-of-service
today.
Date of last release:
XXXX-XX-XX
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
Jim Jagielski was added as a mentor.
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
[ ](fineract) Jim Jagielski
Shepherd/Mentor notes:
Roman Shaposhnik:
I'll be following up with the community on the report generation point
which clearly needs to be clarified.
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Finalizing the initial release
2. Addressing with the VP of Legal our Hibernate dependency and how to
remedy (removal, exception, etc.)
3. Continue to encourage participation in Fineract collaboration and
communication infrastructure by bringing offline interactions online
and directing collaboration to occur in right channels.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware
of?
None
How has the community developed since the last report?
- Participated in and selected one intern for Google Summer of Code
working on the India Unified Payments Interface.
- Community members attended LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA and
encouraged developers to get involved in the Apache Fineract community.
- Discussion of requirements is taking place via mailing lists for major
enhancements community is anticipating over next quarter.
- Jim Jagielski has joined the ranks of Fineracts mentors.
How has the project developed since the last report?
More communications are happening on the appropriate lists as we have been
directing conversations to happen in the public mailing lists and outside
of previous community silos.
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
N/A
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
[X](fineract) Jim Jagielski
Shepherd/Mentor notes:
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Finalising the initial release
2. Improve the communication around the differences between the previous
MifosX project and the new Fineract project, especially in the MifosX
community, website etc.
3. With the first initial release, encourage the community to use the
proper infastructure (mailing lists, issue tracker) for the ongoing
collaboration within the community.
4. Change management towards less 'key-man' dependency on previous
tech/community leaders from MifosX, more towards community driven
consensus.
5. Reduce clutter on mailinglist from JIRA updates etc.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
On the mailinglist there have been discussions around the lack of traffic
on it. This is part of the switchover from the current MifosX community
and mailinglists towards the new Fineract lists. At the same time the
recent meet-up of Mifosx and Fineract devs and people interested in it
(see community development), has also triggered a lot of offline
interaction.
How has the community developed since the last report?
While activity on the mailinglist has been pretty low, we've had a great
meet-up in Amsterdam where a nice mix of existing MifosX community members
and a group of new interested people was present. This has boosted
interest in Fineract.
We have a high level of interest from new contributors throughout Africa -
we are working to properly engage them and guide them to the correct
collaboration channels in our Fineract community.
How has the project developed since the last report?
Individual members of the leading partner organizations building solutions
using the Fineract platform have begun to effectively use the Fineract
issue tracker to communicate and track the requirements and enhancements
they're building and contributing to Fineract. These individuals are
setting a good example that other individuals from our partner community
should follow.
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
N/A
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Inform the non-technical part of the existing Mifos.org community of
the change in project structure
2. Getting licensing issues figured out for our first release
3. Replacing dependencies that are not compliant with the license policies
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
None, currently.
How has the community developed since the last report?
Since the code was initially pushed over, the community is working on the
first release.
In addition to the initial committer new contributors started to work on
the project.
There is a technical conference in Amsterdam in the second week of March
during which some contributors and some community members will be
introduced to developing under the Apache model.
How has the project developed since the last report?
The initial code is now available and the work to meet the license
policies has started.
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
N/A
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Inform the non-technical part of the existing Mifos.org community of
the change in project structure
2. Getting new committers up to speed on Apache processes and philosophy
3. Replacing dependencies that are not compliant with the license policies
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
None, currently
How has the community developed since the last report?
Since the code was initially pushed over, the community is working on the
first release.
In addition to the initial committer new contributors started to work on
the project.
How has the project developed since the last report?
The initial code is now available and the work to meet the license
policies has started.
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[ ](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Shepherd/Mentor notes:
Fineract is an open source system for core banking as a platform.
Fineract has been incubating since 2015-12-15.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Push the initial source code to Apache
2. Inform the non-technical part of the existing Mifos.org community of
the change in project structure
3. Getting new committers up to speed on Apache processes and philosophy
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
None, currently.
How has the community developed since the last report?
The project just has started. All members of the initial community are
taking their first steps into the Apache Way. The larger Mifos.org
community is still operating as it was before, and is a mix of 'clients'
who use the platform and services provided by Mifos.org and partners who
leverage more on the platform and extend on it. Most partners have already
been involved and informed about the plans to become an Apache project,
most of whom are part of the current Fineract Apache community.
How has the project developed since the last report?
This is the first report.
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
Given the early state and missing code base, no additional commiters or
PMC members were elected.
Signed-off-by:
[ ](fineract) Ross Gardler
[X](fineract) Greg Stein
[X](fineract) Roman Shaposhnik
Shepherd/Mentor notes: