The week of April 15 – April 21 is officially National Volunteer Week. We’d like to celebrate this week by doing two things. 1) Recognizing our volunteers for leading our community through our growth outside of the Grameen Foundation and 2) Calling upon new volunteers to help us scale towards the future.
Thanks to all our Volunteers
This past year the community has undergone a great deal of transition; we wouldn’t be where we are today without the passion, energy, and professional commitment of our volunteers worldwide. Making the leap beyond Grameen Foundation to being community-led could have been a trying ordeal but we’ve persevered thanks to your hard work. Each member of our community should feel honored to know that when called to lead, you answered above and beyond all expectations. Across all fronts from product feedback to peer support to platform development – the engagement and interaction amongst the community has been astounding. Keep up the great work as we’ve got a demanding 2012 ahead of us.
Get Involved – a Call to Action
Without a doubt, we have a strong and active core group of volunteers in our community. However this core is still quite small. For us to achieve the critical mass we need to respond to the need for technology for microfinance throughout the world, we must grow. We cannot achieve our shared vision alone and we must call upon volunteers from all professional backgrounds to join us in our movement. There are many ways to play your part and no contribution is too small.
Here some new (and old) ways for first-time (and existing) community members to get more involved.
Growing our Organization and Community
Regional Community Leads: On the ground in each region is where we need to be and where we need to stay connected to our users. You’ll serve as a liasion for your region and be the point person for contacts, support on the mailing list, and coordinating incoming product requirements. You will be the Mifos evangelist for your region making local collaboration happen and keeping MFIs, Specialists, and volunteers connected. You are free to take your own approach to building your regional community but we’d love to see you organize some virtual and in-person meetups and workshops to start.
Community Team Leads: Community teams are the foundation of all the work that gets done in the community. We are still looking for an infrastructure team lead and local support team lead. For infrastructure we need help building out and maintaining tools for collaboration. For local support you’ll shape our Specialist program and set in motion sustainable ways to locally support MFIs.
Volunteer Staff Positions: For the Community for Open Source Microfinance to stay small and lean but continue to propel the growth of our platform and community, we’re seeking volunteers to take on core operational responsibilities.
- Digital Community Intern: We need to stimulate interaction within our community and grow our movement across the general public. We’re seeking a bright and visionary individual that can not only develop a strategy for online and social media engagement but also is ready to get down in the details of making this strategy come to life.
- Product Marketing Manager: Mifos is cutting edge mission-critical technology for a userbase that is diverse and demanding in their needs. We’re seeking a seasoned individual to help us position Mifos at a global level and help our Specialists tailor a value proposition that is uniquely tied to their local market.
- Fundraising Coordinator: To power the core team and maintain the tools and resources to keep collaboration flowing in the community, we need help developing and implementing our fundraising strategy. We’re looking for experienced and energized individuals to help build our donor pipeline, bring in foundational grants, and initiative a comprehensive online giving strategy that helps
- Volunteer Coordinator: For us to scale, we need to both grow and deepen the footprint of our volunteers. We’re seeking an individual to help us identify, engage, and strengthen our relationships with volunteers. You will coordinate community members and match up needs with the available skillsets.
To apply for any of these volunteer positions, please send your resume and brief cover letter to info@openmf.org.
Sustaining the Platform and Community
Software Development
Head on over to the Contributor Kickstart page for how to get your development environment set up. Read on below for how to get involved.
- Fix bugs: First time coming here? This is how you get your feet wet. This list of bugs is a great place to start for new volunteers.
- Build new features: We’re connected to the MFIs using our software to serve the poor. They regularly tell us what they need and it makes its way into our Feature Requests pipeline. Look at what’s been requested and take on a project that suits your liking.
- Testing: Lukasz and the QA team are always in need of help – they’ll never turn down a bug report so get plugging away at the software and find those bugs!
Product Management and Documentation:
- Write Functional Specifications: Chetan and product management team would love your help in taking the suggestions and feedback of our users and writing these up as functional requirements documents that lay out how our developers should build these features.
- Documentation: Both technical and non-technical, our community needs documentation to know what to do and how to do it. Want to help users? Update our user manual as new features get released. Want to help new contributors come on board? We’re hosting a documentation sprint soon – let us know what we need to fix or better yet fix it on your own
- Case Studies: The best way for us to educate others on how to get the most value out of Mifos is by example. We need to shine the light on experiences of others successfully using Mifos – you’ll get to interact directly with these MFIs to tell their Mifos story to the world.
Translation
- Mifos is translated into ten different languages . There are dozens more needed – Arabic, Tagalog, Bengali to name a few. Our documentation is primarily in one language – English. We need to fix that. Want to start translating? Here’s how.
Why Should I Volunteer?
What’s the best way to learn what it’s like to volunteer in the Mifos community and the impact you can have? Let us show you by taking a look at our past volunteers. We regularly recognize a rock-star volunteer as our star contributor. Here are the stories – we’ll let them do the telling.
Join our Community Now!
REQUEST FOR PARTNERSHIP/ COLLABORATION
Association For Development-Assodev (NGO) is a duly registered NGO in Ghana mandated to render selfless social services to Humanity.
we are indeed grateful for this opportunity offered us to register our NGO- Association For development-Assodev with your esteem organization for PARTNERSHIP and collaboration to help the poor rural women and children.
Assodev. work with the rural poor women within local communities in Tamale. We train them in soap making, cake making, groundnuts oil extraction and Shea-butter extractions respectively. We want to improve upon their living standards and to enable them send their school dropouts back to school, particularly the girl child. Assodev solicits funding from philanthropist, foundations and charitable organizations to support our activities. Currently we operate with about 500 to 1000 rural women in self wealth creation activity. The women are put into groupings of 10 to 30 each and we advance small money as seed money for them to kick-start their trades after training. It is very viable, we need help in the form of funds to expand this noble program to reach out to more communities. We shall be most grateful if you could consider our humble request for collaboration to salvage the underprivileged, the poor and the unfortunate in the society to put smiles on their faces. To give them confidence in life, to improve upon their weak conditions.
Our programs are: Wealth creation/ micro finance, Child education, particularly the girl child, farmer demonstrations, Campaign against/ prevention of HIV/AIdS, Assodev food security, fight against child trafficking and poverty eradication activity.
We very much hope you will give our request the best of attention.
Please accept our best regards.