Over the past three months, we’ve been focusing on setting the foundations to achieve a strong and vibrant community. In pursuing this goal, we’re aiming to grow a pool of contributors who will contribute to the development of the Mojaloop Open Source Software. This approach will help rapidly advance financial inclusion because it is publicly accessible for anyone to view, modify, and share.

The foundations we’ve been working on can be summarized as follows:

  1. Recruiting and Operationalizing a Community Leadership Committee
  2. Developing a Community Code of Conduct
  3. Developing a Contributor License Agreement
  4. Drafting Community Strategic Targets

The Community Leadership Committee is envisioned to be the representative governing authority of the Mojaloop Foundation Community and is entrusted with defining community strategy and responding to non-technical community needs.

The Community Leadership Committee is currently made up of the following people:

Mojaloop Foundation Megan Cannon
Coil Donovan Changfoot
Crosslake Lewis Daly
Dav/Ventures Jonas David
Modusbox Miguel de Barros
ModusBox Nico Duvenage
ModusBox Steve Haley
ModusBox Sam Kummary
Crosslake Godfrey Kutumela
ModusBox Rajiv Mothilal
Mojaloop Foundation Simeon Oriko
Deloitte Graham Pampel
ModusBox Michael Richards
Hemamo Investments (Pty) Ltd Masego Mbaakanyi
ModusBox Bryan Schneider
Crosslake Kim Walters

One of the recent accomplishments of the Community Leadership Committee (CLC) is drafting the Community Code of Conduct (CoC) and Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Both of these documents have been submitted to the Technical Governing Board (TGB) for their approval.

Both the Community Code of Conduct and Contributor License Agreement have been posted on the Mojaloop Community Forum for community discussion and input. We welcome reviews and suggestions from the community which will be discussed by the CLC and if approved, worked into future revisions.

  1. Community Code of Conduct discussion thread
  2. Contributor License Agreement discussion thread

The Community Strategic Targets are a raft of recommendations and a plan of action aimed at building a strong and diverse community of participants around Mojaloop.These are drafted by the Community Leadership Committee (CLC) and the community is welcome to contribute by sharing their ideas in this thread in the Mojaloop Community Forums.

Some of the strategic targets include the following:

  • Shared ideals: Community mission, vision, values and guiding principles
  • Community Membership Model: A clear definition of membership profiles within the community, how people acquire membership and the terms of engagement
  • Community Working Structures: A plan that describes community workflows and recommendations to improve its effectiveness
  • Stakeholder Engagement: A strategy on how to create awareness and position the Mojaloop Community as a thought leader in the ecosystem

In addition to community updates, we’ve been working to improve the onboarding experience for new open source developers seeking to contribute to Mojaloop. We’re developing a new “Dev Hub” aimed at providing an easy, streamlined entry point to the Mojaloop Documentation.

Content draft for the Dev Hub is available here and we invite the community to collaborate with us on developing and reviewing it through this discussion thread on the Mojaloop Community Forum.

Looking Ahead

In the coming weeks, the community will focus on the following areas:

  1. Advocacy and Outreach
    1. We will develop tools to enable community members run hackathons aimed at expanding our contributor community
  2. Governance:
    1. We will formalize community membership structures and workflows to improve contributor efficiency and effectiveness
    2. We will restructure the community governance committees i.e. the Community Leadership Committee, the Design Authority (DA) and the Change Control Board (CCB) to better meet the demands and needs of the community
  3. Ecosystem Development:
    1. We will proactively engage entrepreneurs who are interested in deploying or adapting Mojaloop to identify and better understand their needs and develop interventions to meet them.

In the work that lies ahead, we’re aiming to create more avenues for people who are aligned with Mojaloops’ ideals and financial inclusion principles to participate in accelerating financial inclusion through advocacy. We believe this will grow Mojaloops’ influence in the ecosystem.