Re: Some common questions Fineract Gets

[James Dailey <ja...@gmail.com>]

Hi John - We would still like to have your comments and ideas for the
restructuring of the wiki and the FAQ.

What other questions are people asking ?   What kinds of things need to be
"up front" and what kinds of things need more clarity?

What sections need deprecating?

We get a number of questions on the list, but often it seems like people
haven't read the FAQ or don't understand what something means.

Please let me know within a week if you want to work on this.

Thanks
jdailey


On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 9:18 AM James Dailey <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> Great.  As a first step, maybe just comment here on the list what kinds of
> changes to the FAQ you would propose.   Feel free to edit and restructure.
>
> My process four years ago:
>
>    - Read the listservs and slack channels you may have access to
>    - Check out how confluence is structured
>    - Write a draft FAQ and post to the listserv
>    - Get feedback
>    - Make proposed changes to Confluence pages (I'll help you with this
>    when we get to that stage)
>
>
> You can review the listserv here ==>
> https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@fineract.apache.org
>
> and also you may want to get onto Slack channels run by Mifos to see what
> kinds of questions are there too.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 1:43 AM John Gathogo <jo...@fiter.io> wrote:
>
>> 🖐, please share details of how I go about this.
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 11:25 PM James Dailey <ja...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> This is our current FAQ.   Anything missing, needs updating?
>>>
>>> Documentation and organizing content is a useful contribution as well.
>>>
>>> Anyone want to volunteer to work on this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *What is this project about? *
>>> 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.
>>> Fineract is aimed at innovative mobile and cloud-based solutions, and
>>> enables digital transaction accounts for all.
>>>
>>> The domain of fineract includes accounts, held by customers, with
>>> transactions made to those accounts. The types of accounts include credit
>>> accounts (e.g. loans to customers) and debit accounts (current accounts and
>>> savings accounts), and for credit accounts there are different kinds of
>>> interest rate schemes or shared profit schemes.  There is other
>>> functionality that supports use cases for teller operations, basic treasury
>>> management, accounting, portfolio management, authentication, account
>>> opening (including KYC), and similar topics that are common to a retail
>>> banking operation.
>>>
>>> Initially aimed at Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), Savings
>>> Cooperatives, and Credit Unions, the fineract solution is not limited to
>>> those specific institutions.  A number of finTech innovators have used
>>> fineract as their backend solution for offering "Direct Banking" or
>>> "Neo-Banking" solutions as well as for "Agent Management" in some contexts.
>>> The backend account transaction system is a common requirement in many
>>> systems in financial services.
>>>
>>> Fineract was donated by Mifos.org, a US based charity with a financial
>>> inclusion mission which had developed the fully featured MifosX and
>>> released as open source in 2010 (which was generation 2 of the Mifos
>>> software). While many members of the PMC trace their involvement to the
>>> project to financial inclusion, the intent of the project is to attract a
>>> range of innovators involved in offering account services to consumers
>>> everywhere. Financial services should be available to all.
>>>
>>> Open source allows for the project to build the needed building blocks
>>> that all kinds of financial institutions can use but we anticipate an
>>> ecosystem of providers taking this code and building solutions on top of
>>> it.  We encourage that and fully expect those builders to send their
>>> development priorities and in-house dev teams to the project.  We require
>>> that virtuous cycle.
>>>
>>> We imagine a world where financial services are offered by a wide range
>>> of providers using commodity open source software utilizing the most modern
>>> approaches.
>>>
>>>
>>> *Who is using fineract?*
>>>
>>> (For clarity, those using the mifos.org released solutions, prior to
>>> incubation at apache foundation, are not counted in this project.) Fineract
>>> is used by many small to medium sized financial institutions in dozens of
>>> countries.  Larger institutions are considering the use of fineract
>>> side-by-side with their existing core banking solution (CBS). The
>>> side-by-side strategy allows for innovative offerings to be done without
>>> the licensing costs usually associated with commercial CBS. Fineract has
>>> also been adopted by finTechs to be the backend transaction account engine,
>>> and is being used in testing-lab environments to assist with system
>>> integrations.
>>>
>>> With proper hosting and front end dev, Fineract is suitable to Credit
>>> Unions, Microfinance Institutions, Agent Banking solutions, Savings
>>> Associations, Building Societies, Cooperatives, small Commercial Banks,
>>> NeoBanks, and Direct Banking solutions.  Our vision is that these
>>> institutions may download and use directly, but perhaps more likely, to
>>> hire a provider or integrator to provide the complete solution to them. Our
>>> users are thus both the institutions where fineract is in place and the
>>> system integrators and vendors where fineract is a significant part of
>>> their offering.
>>>
>>> *Is this Mifos? *
>>>
>>> The Mifos Initiative, a 501c3 US Charity, contributed the code that
>>> forms the basis of fineract (this was developed by a community of mifos
>>> developers over several years), and the Mifos Initiative remains involved
>>> with a number of front end implementations (project wrapper in apache
>>> parlance) and other systems that run "on top of" fineract, including a
>>> payment hub and API management.  Many of the developers are on both
>>> listservs. However, if you are looking for information on the latest mifos
>>> release, please proceed to:
>>> https://mifos.org/take-action/get-mifos/#download.  Please understand
>>> that devs at fineract may not respond to questions about mifos code.
>>>
>>> *Is there a front end? Where are the reports? *
>>>
>>> Fineract just contains the back-end platform and APIs. Front end
>>> development is intentionally left out of the fineract1.x project to
>>> encourage the use of software integrators to develop their own front end
>>> solutions.  Mifos has a number of open source front end User Interfaces
>>> (UIs) projects for reference that sit on top of fineract1.x including
>>> MifosX Community app (AngularJS project), reporting through Pentaho and
>>> there are also client and staff-facing mobile apps.  Note that demo servers
>>> running Fineract will often be packaged with the open source front end of
>>> Mifos (see openmf.github.org) and that front end may not  include all
>>> of the most recent features developed in fineract.   Fineract-CN does have
>>> a web front end UI under development, intended as a demo.
>>>
>>> *What is the difference between Fineract and Fineract-CN? *
>>>
>>> Fineract 1.x is a mature platform with open APIs, while Fineract CN is a
>>> cloud native, microservice architecture also supporting open banking APIs.
>>>
>>> Fineract1.x is a completely different code project from fineract-CN.  In
>>> terms of github repositories, fineract1.x is contained in one repo, while
>>> fineract-CN is held in dozens of separate github repos - one for each
>>> microservice.  In Fineract1.x the packages encapsulate the different
>>> functional blocks - e.g. accounts vs transactions, while in Fineract-CN
>>> these are separate microservices.
>>>
>>> Fineract1.x, prior to its donation to Apache was called mifosX, and
>>> by-design consists of a "headless" solution.  That is, fineract1.x is all
>>> about the APIs.  Front end applications can be developed separately and
>>> connected to fineract1.x  (For clarity, Mifos at
>>> https://github.com/openmf has a number of front ends to illustrate
>>> available functionality; these are not maintained by fineract, and devs on
>>> fineract will not respond to issues related to the front ends there.)
>>>
>>> Fineract CN operates on the principle that financial services are an
>>> innovative space and so each fineract microservice encapsulates a domain
>>> that can be combined with other microservices to create new platform
>>> offerings. Fineract CN microservices can be combined to create new software
>>> platforms for digital financial service providers. Fineract CN is still in
>>> its early days, but preliminary tests have shown that a simple
>>> single-instance laptop deployment of Fineract CN can process over 1000
>>> transactions/second. Fineract CN also includes a fully Apache-licensed
>>> backoffice UI.
>>>
>>> *Do I have to get the code to use the solution? *
>>>
>>> If all you want is to use the solution, or to demo it, we recommend you
>>> use one of the available builds rather than setting up a development
>>> environment yourself.  The builds, found at http://fineract.apache.org/
>>> (Downloads) are provided for convenience and should not be used in a
>>> production environment without fully working out details of operations
>>> (e.g. data backup) and security.  Also, Mifos volunteers continue to post
>>> builds for specific hosting solutions at
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifos_X  (e.g. Azure and AWS).
>>>
>>> What is the process for getting the code and setting up a development
>>> environment?
>>>
>>> Please see Contributor's Zone, essentially you need to get your
>>> environment ready, then download from the github source and use one of the
>>> common IDEs.
>>>
>>> In general we ask that you take the time to read the instructions and
>>> familiarize yourself with the listserv before posting questions about
>>> building the solution.  You can search the listserv archives at
>>> https://lists.apache.org/list.html?fineract.apache.org .  If you find
>>> something missing from the instructions, we welcome contributions of that
>>> sort as well.  Note that the listserv search is timebound, so that for
>>> example this search gets 24 months:
>>> https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@fineract.apache.org:lte=24M:pentaho
>>> (see lte=24M) and search term is "pentaho".
>>>
>>> How do I get up to speed on development tasks?
>>>
>>> *Please see Contributor's Zone *
>>>
>>> There are two issue trackers.
>>>
>>> fineract1.x  at https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/FINERACT/summary
>>> fineract-CN at
>>> https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/FINCN/issues/FINCN-26?filter=allopenissues
>>>
>>> A good thing to do is to review an open ticket, especially one with back
>>> and forth between devs on the listserv or one that is scheduled for an
>>> upcoming release. It is also useful to review existing pull requests (PRs).
>>> Pull Requests (PRs) are found here →
>>> https://github.com/apache/fineract/pulls
>>>
>>> *What is our Consensus approach?  *
>>>
>>> Every open source project has to adopt some way to come to agreement on
>>> new features, new code enhancements, new project directions and fineract
>>> now uses a lazy consensus approach.  In this approach, the changes and
>>> issues are raised and people are given time to reject or discuss the
>>> changes, and we rely on contributors to fully vett changes in an
>>> appropriate way and have their code reviewed.
>>>
>>> This is documented at Committer's Zone and Changing Processes .  Please
>>> note that we expect discussion on the listserv to be the primary mode of
>>> communication.  "If it didn't happen on the list, it didn't happen."
>>>
>>> *I'm new to Open Source, what is this all about? *
>>>
>>> Welcome.  You may want to first read something about how open source
>>> projects function (like this) and in particular how the Apache Foundation
>>> works. https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html.  If you are
>>> interested in contributing to the project, a good way to get started is to
>>> subscribe to the listserv, review the functional specs on this wiki, browse
>>> the issue tickets, and start to play around with a build of the software.
>>> Open source can be a great way to find your community, contribute and get
>>> feedback, and put your work into public view.  This is true for both code
>>> and the variety of other content needed.
>>>
>>> *Where do I find .... *
>>>
>>> We get a lot of questions about where to find documentation or the
>>> answer to a specific thing.  We do appreciate when people take the time to
>>> try to find the answer before asking.  Once you have new content to
>>> propose, a ticket or an improvement to documentation, we encourage you to
>>> get involved on that. Not all contributions are code, take, for example,
>>> this FAQ.
>>>
>>> *Where do I get the Pentaho Reports? *
>>>
>>> Fineract does not ship Pentaho reports or the related libraries, due to
>>> compliance issues with Apache licence.  Please head over to the Mifos
>>> community who maintains distributions of Fineract that include pentaho.
>>>
>>> *How do I set this up on my machine? *
>>>
>>> First, are you a developer?  If you are not, then you may not want to
>>> run fineract on your local machine.  Instead you may want to find one of
>>> the demo environments already established or make use of one of the
>>> existing cloud deployments.  Also, fineract does not come with a native
>>> front end UX.  The UX is part of the distributions that are provided by
>>> third parties, including the aforementioned Mifos Community.
>>>
>>> If you are a developer, then please see how to set up sections on the
>>> wiki.
>>>
>>> Fineract1.x Fineract User Zone
>>>
>>> FneractCN  FINERACT CN
>>>
>>> *How do I get something changed in the code?  How do I get a feature
>>> added? *
>>>
>>> The project is always interested in ideas about features. That said, we
>>> notice some people expect that a feature requested is automatically
>>> developed and incorporated. That is not the case. If you have code to
>>> suggest, first discuss on the list, add an issue to the issue tracker, and
>>> then find someone to help you contribute that feature.  You are still not
>>> guaranteed that your feature will make it in, because it must also be
>>> accepted by the community.
>>>
>>> I have a great idea for a collaboration tool for the community, how do I
>>> make that happen?
>>>
>>> We know there are lots of great collaboration tools.  To keep things
>>> consistent across Apache, there is a philosophy of using current tools
>>> rather than cutting edge, while acknowledging there's always something new
>>> and cool. We use email listservs for their backwards compatibility,
>>> searchability, and simplicity. This wiki has hooks to the issue tracker
>>> (JIRA) and github commit entries hook to the same JIRA tickets for all Pull
>>> Requests (PRs).  A good flow is:
>>>
>>> email discourse >> wiki entry |or| issue (JIRA)
>>>
>>> development sprint >> Pull Request >> email list for review and
>>> confirmation
>>>
>>> *I represent a Company and want to contribute, how do I do that? *
>>>
>>> As stated on  http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html,
>>> "companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those
>>> resources will be used for the public benefit".  If you have developers
>>> working at your company, you may encourage them to work on the project, but
>>> note that "All of the ASF including the board, the other officers, the
>>> committers, and the members, are participating as individuals."  and
>>> further "the ASF does not allow corporations to participate directly in
>>> Apache project management or other governance activities at the ASF; only
>>> individuals." http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html
>>>
>>> *I found a security flaw, where do I report that? *
>>>
>>> Security is a mandatory feature in Apache projects. Please report your
>>> bug to security AT fineract.apache.org.
>>>
>>> *How do I raise a difficult or sensitive topic? *
>>>
>>> In general, you are invited to discuss problems you see with the
>>> Fineract project openly, on the dev@fineract.apache.org list.  In some
>>> limited cases, please send an email to private @ fineract.apache.org.
>>> Addressing problems early and openly will keep most problems from becoming
>>> too large to handle. A good rule of thumb is to compose and then wait
>>> overnight before firing off that flame.
>>>
>>>