## 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".