MY INTERNSHIP PROJECT



Hey Guys, it's the 5th week of my Outreachy internship. Wow how time flies. This week I will be talking to you about my project. I am interning at Mifos Initiative on the project "SETUP DISCOURSE FORUM AND MIGRATE USERS AND CONTENT FROM MAILING LIST".

Mifos Initiative is a US based non-profit initiative who's mission is to speed the elimination of poverty by coordinating a global community that builds, supports and uses Mifos X, a free and open source platform that enables financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world's 2 billion poor and unbanked. This community is made up of developers who work on the Mifos X application as well as the Users who make use of the application. What a large community right...

The Mailing list is the primary way of communication in the Mifos community.  There is a non-technical List (Mifos Users Mailing list) for the users of Mifos to ask questions related to how the Mifos X app is used or being stuck while installing the app and a technical List (Mifos Developer Mailing List) for developers interaction. Mifos also has a question and answer platform to compliment the mailing list known as Mifos connect. This brings us to the question why so many separate communication platforms when we can actually incorporate all in one platform called Discourse. The discourse forum is a 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It can be used as a mailing list, discussion forum as well as long-form chat room. Discourse pares all the complexity away and puts just the essential stuff on the screen that is the conversations you care most about, based on your participation. Amazing right...

My project during this summer warrants me to setup a discourse forum for Mifos Initiative and then migrate all the users and data from the mailing list to the new collaboration platform. I will also be migrating the data from Mifos connect into this platform and in future I will integrate the gitter and slack channels with the discourse forum. Its the first time I will be working on a complete real life project which will be used on a daily basis by a larger community and that's exciting and fascinating for me. So far I have learned alot especially when it comes to working on the cloud :)  and I know I will learn alot more by the end of this awesome three months.




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