Marla Parker's Weblog

Grabbing Opportunities
One of my interns, Sonya Barry, has started the assignment that I thought would be most interesting when I wrote the job description: to pick a java.net project of personal interest to her, try to join it and make a contribution, write about the experience, identify any obstacles along the way, and work with the infrastructure or community leaders teams, as appropriate, to remove the obstacles.

java.net is a site for collaboration, so we wanted to run an experiment to see just how easy or hard it is for a random developer to come and collaborate. The java.net Editors decided that Sonya's experience could best be shared through a new blog.

The project she is working on is Mifos and I am sooooo jealous. I've been a fan of MicroFinance since reading The Price of a Dream : The Story of the Grameen Bank, by David Bornstein many years ago. Mifos is in fact a project of the Grameen Technology Center. What could be more cool - microfinance plus open source?