Email *used* to be a batch process, remember? I grew up with one phone line, and that bottleneck (usually) naturally limited my online time. That limit was completely removed by the time I started working professionally.

Unplugging, thinking deeply, and reinvesting in flesh-and-blood life is a pretty awesome thing, especially for us that get so addicted to that uber-seductive Inbox. After learning about Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows”, I decided to do an experiment. On Sundays, no Internet. It was quite difficult.

I like the idea of mobifying mifos, these will really take MFIs to the next step especially the ones in remote areas.

I would really like to be part of the initiave, I am based in Kenya on 0734138478.

Zayyad A. Said

I love you piece you have written. It is great. There is one thing that you can consider from Ryan’s view. Because there are a lot of people in Ghana who have great experiences in microfinance and can help in product and solution designing like myslef but haven’t really used Mifos before.
I have 8 years in managing IT solutions for microfinance but not necessarily on Mifos. I just got introduced to it but trust me, i have great ideas on how to tune Mifos properly and give direction in delivery great add-ons to clients.
To answer your question on whether you can get the human resource for your ideas. Yes you can get it. There are a lot of talents. I wish i have to time to talk to you personally.
There are a lot of opportunities in Ghana and West Africa.

Yep, definitely agree on the need there. While I don’t think the biz side will be the primary focus of this org, we would hit that to an extent in things like the Applications course by bringing in business students and getting them involved as well. I hadn’t thought explicitly about product management but you’re right about that one too and that fits a lot more closely.

Thanks for calling it out – good thing to add to list of things we should look at now or in the future.

One of the other areas I think to consider for this, at least in regards to potential mentorship, is the product/business development side – one of the major deficient areas we ran into with some Mifos specialists, where they had the developers but not that much experience on delivery appropriate and cost effective solutions to customers, on time. It’s the flip side to the mentoring of just the developers, but also mentoring Product and solution design, helping develop strong business analysis skills, delivery management, general project management, etc. I think that’s an area that MEST covers in their training as well.