Post edited 2:30 pm – February 18, 2011 by wspademan
CGB IT Update 2/17/2011
Kurt King, Albert Bupp, Guy Berliner, Alex Volfson, and William Spademan met by Skype.
We discussed briefly the possibility of applying for Google Summer of Code (after 2/28).
We then spent the bulk of the hour discussing last week's demo of Harland's web-based UBanking software. The six of us who also attended the demo were impressed with the range of features and usability. We agreed that it would be best to use such software (instead of building our own) if
we can make it work for us AND
we can afford it (pricey)
We discussed possible ways of handling virtual hybrid accounts, based on Harland's software. They provide a web-services API that would give us real-time access to the live data. The conceptual building blocks we considered are:
an adjustable amount of reserve credit
automatic conditional account sweeps
"dummy" accounts that we use for internal data associated with individuals members, but that are not used for money, from the bank's point of view.
The most likely close fit would be to use the reserve credit amount to represent each member's mutual credit plus the amount of CGB stock they own. This makes logical sense, because that is the amount of credit that all the members together are formally extending to the individual member — it agrees with reality. Draft details about how this could work appears in a separate post.
We will want to verify this possibility both with Harland and other companies we consider. Specifically, we need to know whether we can programatically adjust reserve credit amounts when our subroutine receives such requests from a non-bank entity hosted elsewhere (the Members Association).
We decided to hold onto our Mifos connection, but put that angle on hold until we evaluate possibilities after the FISERV demo.
We decided to ask one of the IT team members who missed the meeting today to arrange a demo from Fidelity Financial Services.
Sam Cooley offered to give an informal more in-depth demo of some related software. That sounds promising and we will ask Sam for a more specific invitation (what platform and what business model).
Next week's FISERV demo (Friday 2/25 3-5 Eastern US Time) will supplant our regular Thursday meeting (no meeting 2/24).
Kurt King, Albert Bupp, Guy Berliner, Dave Peterson, Alex Volfson, and William Spademan met by Skype.
Guy has submitted a request to FISERV for a demo of their "acumen" deposit account management software. No response yet. He will aim for Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday (11am or 3pm) the week of 2/13. Guy has also identified a Mifos bug that would be suitable for him to attack with Dave: bug #4599.
Guy attended a state bank movement meeting in Portland, OR. People wanted to know how they could be supportive but Guy did not know what to tell them. We need to have something simple that people can tell people to do.
Albert contacted Harland and COCC. We probably don't want to actually use Harland, since they are Microsoft-based, but Albert will arrange a Harland "you-banking" demo for Thursday or Friday (11am or 3pm) next week. Someone will record the demo with a digital camera (who?)
One of the bank software people mentioned that it may be easier these days to buy a bank than to get a new charter. (We need to find out how hard it is to change the charter of a bought bank.) He also explained that 80% of their software development time is spent coding to handle decision-making and information tracking to conform to regulations (not, for example, for regulatory reporting).
Post edited 8:13 pm – January 27, 2011 by wspademan
CGB IT Update 1/27/2011
Dave Peterson, Kurt King, Albert Bupp, Guy Berliner, and William Spademan met by Skype. We discussed our nascent alignment with the Mifos project, our proposed Software Requirements Specification (SRS), and the financial appendices to the CGB business plan.
Guy and Dave will continue to work towards making useful contributions to the Mifos codebase as a first step in collaborating there.
Guy will contact FISERV to seek a demo of their deposit account management software, based on the SRS as it stands. Abert will contact one or two other bank software companies (such as Harland and COCC) for a demo. William will add an "expand all" link to the SRS page.
We agreed that Kurt's original design considerations document is still an important overall checklist for what our design must cover.
William will ask tech writer Liz Castro to work with him to develop a story-based approach to the Software Requirements Specification — for example, what happens when someone makes a deposit.
We decided at our 1/6 meeting that William will draft functional specifications, based partly on Kurt's outline, and run those specifications by the bankers on the team as well as our lead strategists and the IT group. This is a necessary step before seeking a demo of standard banking software and before going further toward a collaboration with the Mifos folks.
Post edited 8:58 am – December 24, 2010 by wspademan
CGB IT Update 12/22/2010
At our meeting on 12/15 we recognized that our next crucial step is to see a hands-on demo of standard banking software. Mike is working on arranging that.
Post edited 11:12 pm – December 8, 2010 by wspademan
CGB IT update 12/8/2010.
Present: Guy Berliner, David Pearson, Kurt King, William Spademan
We decided, tentatively, to investigate whether we can sensibly make CGB IT work based on one of the high end accounting packages that Albert is investigating (for general accounting and possibly for the deposit side of the bank) and Mifos (for lending and possibly for the deposit side).
In order to pursue this possibility responsibly:
Guy will look at Mifos code to assess its cleanness.
Guy will also ask Ryzn to give us a demo of their loan servicing software. That will allow us to assess simultaneously the suitability of Ryzn software AND the universe of possible features that we may need to code (or buy). We may decide later to ask for a demo of LAPS as well.
David will draft a short email to Neige and Mike (our bank IT consultants) to ask what sort of regulations and features we may be neglecting by rolling our own deposit management system and loan features. In particular, on the loan side, is William's speculation correct that nearly all of the relevant mercurial regulations have to do with how the advertising department, loan officer, account reps, and printed disclosures relate to the public, rather than to how the loan agreements are structured or how the deposits are managed? (that is, those regulations would have little effect on software, so necessary regulatory updates would
be small and infrequent, right?)
We will ask Albert to recommend the most suitable accounting package from among those he has looked at: (1) for straightforward GAAP accounting, (2) given that we will want to track activity by community as well as for the bank as a whole, and (3) to be modified to manage deposit accounts (and transactions) in all four situations — bank, mutual credit system, stock transfer company, and hybrid account summing the first three.
Guy will also continue to investigate Forbis, which may or may not be an open source banking solution.
Finally, (slightly off-topic) we discussed plans for zero interest loans, based on CGB communities acquiring income-producing assets to offset costs (see the Interest-Free Loans proposal).
Post edited 3:20 pm – December 15, 2010 by wspademan
IT update 11/24 and 12/1/2010.
Present: (at one or the other meeting) Guy Berliner, Albert Bupp, David Pearson, Kurt King, Alex Volfson, William Spademan
Here is a brief update on where we stand, after those two meetings, with regard to our research and CGB IT planning.
In the past two weeks, we have been researching options for loan servicing software, fancy accounting software, and mutual credit software (XO Limited), as well as continuing to seek open source bank or credit union software development projects. For check clearing, we chose "Electronic Payments Network (EPN) aka The Clearing House".
Mutual credit software. We determined that the mutual
credit software is not close enough to what we want, to merit adapting it (thanks Kurt, David, and Albert for the research!).
Loans. The only open source loan servicing software we have found (thanks Alex!)
that merits consideration is Mifos, the Grameen Foundation's microfinance software project, which looks very promising. There are also some commercial lending packages that we could have to pay to have modified (as well as paying to use) or write front ends to (thanks Guy, Alex, and Jonathan for the research!). We do not know yet whether any of them stands out as being better than Mifos for our purposes. The latest research for this is available on the spreadsheet (thanks Guy and Alex!).
Open source banking software. Forbis is a possibility. Needs more investigation.
Accounting. Adapting a standard high end open source accounting package looks very promising (thanks Albert!). Here, for example, is a response from the opentaps
people:
Yes, I believe that the core ledger of opentaps can be adapted to your particular requirements. Handling account holder transactions such as deposit, withdrawal, and interest and fees should be fairly straightforward. The system can also be customized to handle more complex GAAP accounting requirements for investments and loans as well. We generally do not provide the services directly, but we would support one of our partners who would work with your bank.
In the meetings Albert discussed some of the features of JFire found from research on their website. These features include underlying open-source, java-based nature of the software which is oriented towards the accounting needs of a conventional business. There are modules for managing sales and purchasing, billing and accounting and CRM. The software is designed to use freely available and open source software libraries and components, such as MySQL for database hosting, JBoss as an application server and JDO for java-based interaction w/ the data. The company which makes the software is based in Germany and appears to be small, w/ less than 5 full-time developers.
Here is a brief update on where we stand, with regard to our research and CGB IT planning.
In
the past two weeks, we have been researching options for loan servicing
software, fancy accounting software, and mutual credit software (XO
Limited), as well as continuing to seek open source bank or credit union
software development projects. For check clearing, we chose "Electronic
Payments Network (EPN) aka The Clearing House".
Mutual credit software. We determined that the mutual
credit software is not close enough to what we want, to merit adapting
it (thanks Kurt, David, and Albert for the research!).
Loans. The
only open source loan servicing software we have found (thanks Alex!)
that merits consideration is Mifos, the Grameen Foundation's
microfinance software project, which looks very promising. There are
also some commercial lending packages that we could have to pay to have
modified (as well as paying to use) or write front ends to (thanks Guy,
Alex, and Jonathan for the research!). We do not know yet whether any
of them stands out as being better than Mifos for our purposes. The
latest research for this is available on the spreadsheet (thanks Guy and Alex!).
Open source banking software. Forbis is a possibility. Needs more investigation.
Accounting. Adapting
a standard high end open source accounting package looks very promising
(thanks Albert!). Here, for example, is a response from the opentaps
people:
Yes, I believe that the core ledger of opentaps can be adapted to your
particular requirements. Handling account holder transactions such as
deposit, withdrawal, and interest and fees should be fairly
straightforward. The system can also be customized to handle more complex
GAAP accounting requirements for investments and loans as well.
We generally do not provide the services directly, but we would support
one of our partners who would work with your bank.
Post edited 9:23 am – November 18, 2010 by wspademan
IT Update: Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Mtg Attendees: Alex Volfson, William Spademan, Kurt King, Jonathan Brief, David Pearson, Sam Cooley, Guy Berliner, Albert Bupp
Jonathan reported on progress researching options for loan servicing software.
We also discussed XO Limited mutual credit (and related) software and how it might fit with the Common Good Bank plan.
Guy will search for additional open source loan servicing software options and/or will call one or more of the following loan servicing software companies to inquire about features: PG Realty, CFS, ForPost and/or will call NLS about pricing.
Albert will look at one or more of our top ERP choices to evaluate (roughly) their suitability for our purposes:
Mtg Attendees: Alex Volfson, William Spademan, Kurt King, Jonathan Brief
Richard Kerver has stepped back from involvement in the IT group for the present, so someone will need to pick up his work researching "2b" open source accounting software. We have tentatively assigned that task to David Pearson and Sam Cooley, subject to David's approval.
Last week Alex developed a spreadsheet for loan servicing software research and began investigating them. One company, The Mortgage Office, had an excellent brochure (see the screenshot for that sheet) that listed loan servicing functionality.
This week Alex developed a set of questions to ask software companies (both traditional and open source) about their software's capabilities. We decided to consider only browser-based solutions at this time, but will note any Linux-based solutions as a second choice, in case no browser-based open source solutions are available.
Jonathan (C++ programmer ten years back) is new to our IT team, so today we spent a few minutes bringing him up to speed.
Alex and Jonathan will split the calls and will seek additional candidates for loan servicing software, by searching for "open source loan servicing software" or the like.
William will propose IT design milestones for consideration next week.
Attendees: Dave Pearson, Alex, Richard Kerver, William Spademan, Sarah Noyes
AGENDA
Choosing up tasks for the coming week.
An overview of the Common Good Bank model.
A. We looked at some the five categories of CGB IT Design
1a) depositor services, including transfers, checking, cards
1b) inter-bank transaction processing, statements to customers
Richard continues to work on 2a. He points out that 1a and 1b contain a whole host of questions that we need to resolve this before going onto the other parts of the list. We need to look at service providers and know how much they can do AND what we want to outsource (including cost factor) before knowing what we have left to do. He also suggests getting one of the finance people on the CGF team to help decipher much of this (we have two in the wings, on the IT team).
William wants us to talk to other banking software companies and ask them what it will cost to add what CGB wants. David speculates that they probably provide exactly the sort of hooks (APIs) that we need, as a matter of course.
David will look at both sides of #1.
William and David will create a framework for 1a and 1b that will make it easier for others to participate in that research.
3) loans
William will schedule a talk with Alex and one of our bankers to talk about either outsourcing or building in house, prior to further research.
B. Discussion on Cloud Computing
Richard says Google trying to forge a new cloud-computing model. Spring Source is partnering with Google, which, along with the rock-bottom pricing, makes them a very attractive choice. David sees some red flags here, that may warrant a separate discussion.
Unfortunately, none of the ERP packages that Richard has identified as viable candidates can be deployed to the Google Cloud. Still, we could deploy any of them to the Amazon cloud. That would be more work and more expense.
C. COMMON GOOD BANK MODEL
William described the model, following up on the links sent out earlier in the day: economic democracy is central. Q&A followed.
Post edited 4:25 pm – September 9, 2010 by wspademan
CGB IT Meeting: September 8th 2010, 11am Eastern US Time
Present: George Gluck, William Spademan, Alex Volfson, David Pearson, Richard Kerver, Kurt King, and Sarah Noyes (minutes)
Agenda
Introduction of any new participants (George)
Updates
Continued discussion of the compensation policy proposal (postponed)
Continued discussion of Elements of CGB IT Design
Updates
Richard looking into the IT in a cohesive way. Wants more meaningful dialogue about different sources of GL software.
Richard looked into grants and found some possibilities (including the "Institute for New Economic Thinking", a Soros project). Sarah, Richard, and William to discuss further.
The class has started to train CDOs. Some of our IT team would like an introductory training — a half-hour "intro to the CGB Project" session for IT folks, with Q&A. William will put together a written FAQ (or perhaps links to relevant website pages or posts) prior to next week's meeting and will present an introduction to CGB.
Continued discussion of Elements of CGB IT Design
Richard recommends taking a step back and take a big picture view, as outlined on the online CGB IT Design discussion: what do we
outsource and what do we do ourselves? Where do we want to be in two years?
Recommended to invite an audit, early on, before fully adopting a platform. The auditing aspect should be thoroughly fleshed out as much as possible.
William: we should automate the reporting and audit process as much as we can. For example, we can have those receiving loans do some of their own reporting in a structured way digitally.
There needs to be detailed research on each of the 5 points.
Richard recommends starting with 2a) choosing an open source development framework for the CGB accounting system, because that is where we have the highest level of agreement. He is focusing his efforts there, looking (so far without success) for a solution that satisfies these criteria:
- framework must be deployable to the cloud
- enterprise class financial system
- based on Java EE SOA
- tight WS-security (preferably SpringSource Spring Security)
How can new IT team members get their feet wet and get involved in a useful way? Sarah suggests using agreed upon criteria and investigating different platforms accordingly. For example, for 2a use that information to fill out this spreadsheet on the options. This sounded reasonable to everyone, but Richard suggests that this is NOT a good way to handle 2a because he is already several months into the research on that item and anyone else would have to get up to speed before making a useful contribution. Richard (the only team member who has put in much time and effort in the last two months, beyond attending the meetings) proposes that people first commit 5 or more hours a week to the project, then take on the task of researching one of the other numbered items. This disagreement was left unresolved, but we will at least try the spreadsheet approach for the items other than 2a. Criteria will expand upon the Strengths and Weaknesses as needed, as research progresses (any developer can add a new criterion row in the Strengths or Weaknesses sections).
Richard invites anyone who wants to work on 2a to commit a substantial amount of time and begin with a conversation with him.
It would be good to have an auditor with experience in banking active on our IT team. William proposes having an auditor make recommendations as needed.
Our future CEO is happy to participate as needed. His expertise is in a wide variety of banking responsibilities. There are additional banking experts on the board. Ideally, they would come in about mid-process of analyzing software — maybe even help define the criteria.
Post edited 4:28 pm – September 4, 2010 by wspademan
01-Sep-2010 11:00 AM Eastern US Time, by Skype, Minutes; David Pearson, Alex Volfson, George Gluck, Sarah Noyes, Kurt King, William Spademan, and Richard Kerver (taking notes, presented here in his voice)
Agenda:
1. Brief Introductions
2. Brief review of where we are organizationally and in IT planning
My summary from our compensation conversation is that we want several CGB advances by the end of the year:
1> a CGB-IT Plan,
2> a compensation policy for doing the development work, and
3> funding.
I have taken the lead on the CGB-IT Plan, using Kurt's outline as my starting point, and based on extensive current research. I invite your tolerance for having assumed the lead and invite any contributions you might have.
William has taken the lead on acquiring funding, through initiation of a membership/capital campaign. I recommended that we add two dimensions to funding: a business loan and application for a grant.
The compensation policy proposal is a joint all round current active discussion.
Suggested action for this week:
1> Read the compensation policy thread and add commentary; (if you're part of the CGB-IT team, the compensation policy must be acceptable to YOU)
2> Move forward on CGB-IT planning – visit the CGB IT Design page for an outline and to contribute to the plan.
25-Aug-2010 11:00 AM to 12:20 PM, Skype, William Spademan and Richard Kerver (notes)
Agenda:
1. Round table updates
2. Minutes of the meeting 18-Aug,
discussion & approval
3. Common Good Bank Project Development,
Updated 8/21/2010
4. Involving more people in early phase development activities
follow thru on William's short list of 4 people, and others, any takers
so far?
5. The CGB-IT draft proposal
discuss aspects
of CGB-IT, as proposed above
6. The web application development framework, refined
Spring + Google Web Tools (GWT) + Java DataObjects (JDO) + app-engine restrictions
7. Formalization
of the CGB-IT Team and the CGB-IT Plan
—
1. Round table
updates
William:
- working on CGB organization, followup from summer stakeholder
sessions, proposal for a way forward
- met with commercial banker and
Credit Union CEO, with a partnership proposal, for meeting with CU's in
Pioneer Valley
- Word is that CU's feel threatened by the CGB concept; we want to turn that
around if we can
- commercial banker was supportive; suggests
dropping the idea of partnerships with other banks; says CGB could be
explosive, if done right; very encouraging
- also working on the training class for community division organizers,
meeting with trainer Karen Ribeiro; contract is out for organizers, want commitment
through opening of the bank, and a financial stake; organizers will get paid $150
to complete the course; optimistic that it will help recruit members; is
getting materials ready, membership flyer, etc.
- we have a lawyer who wants to volunteer time; not bar approved in MA
-
Jill Stein, wants to include CGB in her Gubernatorial platform
- on
IT front, not done much; see <4> for updates on people
- no followup on Mifos, but will soon
- S2BE Board member
died on Sunday, long-standing; a mentor in alternative economics, a
good friend – condolences
Richard: just continuing with R&D work
– see below
—
3. Common Good Bank Project Development, Updated 8/21/2010
as
incorporated by William, 21-Aug:
A+B+C → F. IT Plan. A team of
qualified volunteers has been actively discussing various open-source
technologies and formalizing best practices for Common Good Bank systems
and operations. A formal CGB-IT Plan will be completed before the end
of 2010, to guide production engineering over the course of 2011. A
mature open-source web application development framework will be
selected. The Apache Foundation's Opentaps and the Grameen Foundation's
Mifos open source projects are examples of projects being actively
considered for adoption, among others. Additional team members skilled
in the implementation of the chosen framework will be brought on to the
project. (Once funding is available, major contributors to the CGB-IT
Plan,
knowledgeable with the underlying technologies, will be hired for its
implementation. See N "IT Development", below.)
F+M → N. IT
Development. Hire a qualified development team (as described in F "IT
Plan", above) to implement the IT Plan.
Consensus on topic; great work!
—
4. Involving more
people in early phase development activities
Updates on people:
-
William – David Pearson – has a lunch meeting set up for Thursday; a
senior technical engineer
- Sam C, not until September
- will continue actively recruiting
technical folks
- talked with Alex V, he's still thinking about it; follow up
-
Richard spoke with someone who may be interested
formalizing fair compensation for services
-
various ways of doing this: stock options, deferred salary, getting a
loan for operational expense
- now's the time to try to formalize something; need a "standard" fair
package for everyone, with flexibility to set terms
- come up with a
proposal & get buy-in, need formal agreement from functional
steering committee (when assembled)
delegate recruitment of others (past volunteer work)?
- William
not sure, might be useful; may want Richard K to give dave & barry a
call
Networking is very useful to finding & recruiting
people
- finding technical people is core to what we're doing
- Linkedin, suggests using it to connect specific people
- send CGB
newsletter to 2600 list
- someone William knows who wrote book on CSS
& HTML; may not herself, but may be able to refer
- job boards,
post there when some compensation package is ready to go
- a community event focusing on current and emerging technologies
in the Enterprise Java space, has opened its call for submissions,
seeking presenters and presentations for TSSJS Vegas, March 16th-18th,
2011.
- Deadline: Latest date to submit proposals: Friday, September 10th,
2010
- suggest sending a proposal; if accepted and we accept back,
then will need to raise & expend funds to attend
- think of this a
necessary networking, to find & enlist developers in our project -
this is the right group
- OK by William, do the draft & send around for comments
—
5.
The CGB-IT draft proposal, aspects of CGB-IT
The aspects of
CGB-IT (overview):
1> depositor services, including transfers, checking, cards,
transaction processing, statements, etc.
2> the CGB accounting system, CRM, GL, HR/PR, Procurement, etc
this is where the question of open-source ERP comes into play; need
to make that decision because it is core
3> loans
this is what makes the bank interesting and fun
where the question of mifos, micro-finance, alternative currencies,
etc.
what distinguishes CGB from all other banks is us doing something
unique with the money entrusted to us
in terms of who, what, where and why – the sustainability agenda
4> partnerships, banking relationships, related services
ultimately, a full-featured bank would offer a variety of services
here's where the SAP vision for a universal SOA architecture comes
into play
the CGB is both a consumer and provider of SOA services
we succeed or fail on whether we remain competitive in this
dimension, so architecture and industry standards are important
some significant buy-in of business-to-business, bank-to-bank,
brokered trade
5> everything else that Kurt outlines in the original CGB-IT proposal
that he worked on
state regulatory authority, reporting requirements
business intelligence, decision support, etc.
Time-line:
<1> and <2> out of the gate, done ASAP, no latter than May,
2011
suggests outsourcing <1> completely
suggests straight forward adoption & implementation of the
open-source ERP candidates:
> JFire (adding this a candidate,
new)
– because it can be deployed to Google Cloud (see next)
> Opentaps
> Adempiere
> Openbravo
<3> is where we invest most of the early work – its our market
differentiators, so has to be done really well
by the end of 2012 (1 year of development, 1 yr of production
repair)
<4> and <5> would also need to be completed early, within
the first year of bank operation
meeting our first bank audit (both internal and external) would need
to be a high priority for everyone involved
Discussion:
- another piece to accounting puzzle is need for separate accounting for
depositors association; ability to treat stock as deposits; so outsourcing <1> completely may be problematic (provider will have to customize their software for us, but this will be necessary for Common Good Accounts at CUs in any case)
- really need a CFO as part of the discussion, for acceptable banking
practice
- key decision is who we outsource to
CGB-IT Plan is where we put all this together
just a proposal right now, for further discussion
Kurt's list, line by line, useful exercise
Can have the best vision … but without ability to execute … so
that's still top priority
—
6. The web application
development framework, refined
Spring + GWT + JDO +
app-engine restrictions
- introduce Google's cloud – app-engine, the concept of state-less data
-
The restrictions simplify the development paradigm – this is good; just
need to live with the restrictions.
Richard: The beauty
of the Google App-engine, using the JDO approach to data persistence, is
that it doesn't lock us in. We can move the data latter if we need
to. I'm not suggesting that we would need to, or should. Its a matter
of choosing a cloud vendor well to begin with, and sticking to that
decision through implementation & production deployment. The
primary reason I foresee is that it might not pass a banking regulation
IT audit, simply because it is too new and their unfamiliarity with it
would cause them to rule it out. Then we'd have no choice. Doing so,
however, would not mean we lose any development work. JDO mediates
persistence for us, no matter what's on the back-end. That could be an
RDBMS like PostgreSQL, or a private data cloud. The advantage is
up-front. By choosing the Google public data cloud we don't have to be
concerned about data management early on, so are not invested in making
all that infrastructure happen – it's handled for us.
—
7. Formalization of the CGB-IT Team and the CGB-IT Plan
out of time (trying to limit meetings to one hour), so discuss next week
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