## 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. 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.