Want to help fight poverty? Grameen Foundation is updating the user manual for its Mifos software, an open source management information system (MIS) that helps microfinance institutions more efficiently deliver loans and other financial services to poor women around the world. The actual content of the new user manual is almost complete but there's tons to do to get it published in FLOSS Manuals. We need your help! This one-day sprint will be dedicated towards formatting, proofreading, and standardizing the text towards agreed-upon writing conventions. Read on to learn more!

WHAT: The Mifos Manual Book Sprint WHEN: 2010-04-02, 0930 to 1630 U.S. Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7) WHERE: Seattle (USA), #mifos IRC channel on FreeNode, tokbox (video conf) and over VoIP as necessary WHO: Mike Dash, Anita Anderson, Adam Monsen, Ed Cable, Van Mittal-Henkle Darwin Cruz, Charlene Balick, Adam Feuer, and you, hopefully!

WHY: To fight poverty, of course.

HOW: Keep reading!

UPDATE:

Our User Manual Sprint was a great success! We're in the final stretches of completing it but could still use some help adding in screenshots.  Screenshots where still needed are noted in CAPS, "INSERT XYZ".  Screenshots to be uploaded are located here: http://adammonsen.com/tmp/shots Great thanks goes out to members of our Mifos and FLOSS Manuals Community around the world. From India to across the US we had people working around the clock to help with the user manual. Special thanks to Adam Monsen for his rockstar effort in leading the Sprint in his track suit and thanks to all who contributed:

• Seattle, WA - Anita Anderson, Adam Feuer, Mike Dash, Kay Chau, Matt Duncan, Charlene Balick, Jeff Brewster, Ed Cable, & Sonia Lyris
• Portland, OR - Van Mittal-Henkle
• California - Tracy M, Forest Monsen
• India - Ajay Kumar, Krishnan Mani
• Edward Cherlin, Clytie Siddall

We've compiled the Flickr gallery below of people as they were Sprinting.  Send your User Manual Sprint photos to ecable at grameenfoundation.org if we left you out: [flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157623786534100"]

How to Get Involved:

1. Sign up for a free account on FLOSS Manuals: http://en.flossmanuals.net/register
2. Show up on the #Mifos IRC channel anytime on Friday, PDT.
3. Find a task to work on - they're being posted to this page on the Mifos Developer Wiki.
4. Read up on the Writing Conventions for the Mifos User Manual.
5. Feel free to reply to this thread to let us know you'll be participating

All the details for what to do and how to participate are here: http://www.mifos.org/developers/wiki/UserManualSprint

Can't make it on Friday PDT?

Join the Pre-Sprint! For others in timezones like IST, Krishnan from our Mifos community in India will be leading others in a couple of preliminary tasks like:

• Adding borders to all of our Screenshots in the manual
• Putting in HTML anchor tags for each of the section headers in our chapters.

How are you Helping the Poor?

• Learn about the Mifos Shared Vision of 3,000,000,000 Marie's and how each client and their family's lives are improved through microfinance.
• Click here to learn more about how Mifos is Used on a Day-to-Day Basis
• Watch this video to see how Mifos technology is helping MFIs serve more of the poor.