A Letter to the Community -
I have just returned from the ASF's Community Over Code event in Halifax along with about 15 Fineract'ers. This is the annual Global/North American event and participation is capped at about 450. There is also an annual Asian Event that attracts thousands. Next year this Event is planned for Denver in October and a European event in Bratislava in June. (Apache) Fineract is one of about 200 top level Apache projects, although I think we are a bit different. At this Community Over Code event (note - was previously called ApacheCON), we were fortunate to have key contributors to the Fineract project as well as important users. In the Fintech track most of the talks were about Fineract directly or indirectly. As Fineract, we also held a "Birds of a Feather" meeting one evening, where we could discuss some steps to take to strengthen the project and our community. Javier, who for the fourth year)?) served again as Track Chair, will be posting the videos of the talks on the Community Over Code website and (presumably) providing a summary of the track. We had a few ideas about the roadmap for Fineract, but the main topics were about organizing our community better, making the project more approachable, improving documentation, solving for an abundance of unresolved tickets, and working on security. I hope we will see specific proposals soon from participants and anyone on this listserv. Most of the other tracks were highly technical at an infrastructure, data processing and tooling level. What makes Fineract unique is that we are aimed at a specific business application space. To illustrate, when compared to the typical Apache project, rather than a database technology, cloud infrastructure, or data abstraction library, we are focused on providing end user benefit at a specific type of enterprise. Often, we forget how unique this is, and the Community Over Code was a good reminder. What does it mean Community Over Code? It means we co-create. The Apache "way" values meritocracy - and contributions of code, tests, code reviews, security fixes, requirements, and documentation are key to making a project work and give Merit. Users can inspire us, give us reasons for contributing, but that's insufficient for building a community. We should be highlighting the many contributions that are coming in and celebrating how this is evolving our project. We can also celebrate the users and their stories, and we should. The best contributors are those that are also Users of the software, i.e. running it for an enterprise or helping an enterprise run it, and the best Users are those that are contributing their improvements upstream. If you are using Fineract in production, I encourage you to use the "Powered By Apache Fineract®" logo found on our wiki. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract%28R%29+Trademarks+Usage+and+Policy All the best Jdailey
