Dear Community,

Welcome to the very first issue of the Symphony Software Foundation newsletter. I'm excited to have this new channel available to the Community to help us shape the future of the Symphony ecosystem!

With the Foundation nearly one year old, I want to take a moment to thank our Community for all we have accomplished thus far. With over 30 projects (and growing!), three working groups and a very active Engineering Steering Committee (ESCo), your early support came through loud and clear for this open ecosystem we are building together. Be proud, this is what you have built.

This year has been a hell of a ride: from an energizing first members meeting to OpenFin joining the Foundation, from our first meetups to the launch of the Open Developer Platform (ODP), our Community has grown stronger and planted the seeds for a revolution in the way our firms collaborate and communicate.

It’s now time to bring our Community to the next level: with finserv facing healthy innovation-driven disruption, our Community presents a unique opportunity to improve productivity across the industry. We are clearing the remaining barriers to engagement through transparent governance, through the ODP and by forming an Open Source Readiness Working Group, but we need your active contribution to make this happen.

In this issue, we'll share our progress updates and member highlights, as well as information on how to engage with our Community. I hope you’ll find it useful and that you’ll get in touch with your feedback.

Thank you for a great year, and happy holidays. I'm looking forward to what 2017 has in store!

Gabriele Columbro
Executive Director - Symphony Software Foundation

Community Updates

Thinking about developing an open source project on Symphony? Contribute a new project or join an existing one and get developer access to Symphony through our Open Developer Platform.

How do we manage OSS projects? Learn about Project Governance here. The Foundation has significantly revised the content describing projects and their life cycles, the contribution process, project governance requirements and more. This material is based in large part upon a package of governance refinements approved by the ESCo in late November.

Wondering how the Foundation is governed? Check out our bylaws and explore our governing bodies!

Members Focus

An industry-inclusive Foundation: In September, the Board approved a new membership tiering system to attract smaller fintech firms and thought leaders to our Foundation through new silver and at-large membership tiers. See the overview of the new tiers and learn more about membership benefits.

The API Working Group has been ratified!
The group will work to help make the APIs more consistent across the Symphony Foundation open source platform, to ensure high-quality extensibility mechanisms through future contributions and to facilitate interoperability across a diverse messaging ecosystem.

Several member organizations helped to establish this group. We’d like to give a shoutout to Anthony Fabbricino from BNY Mellon for shepherding this through.

Please contact Anthony Fabbricino (chair) and/or Paul Teyssier (co-chair) if you wish to participate. Note: working group participation is restricted to members.

ESCo Advisors election
The Foundation is currently holding elections for ESCo Advisors representing the platinum and gold members.

Member Spotlight

Frank Tarsillo, IHS Markit  

Frank has been an incredibly active member of our Community, participating in the ESCo as well as leading one of our most-used projects. Learn more about him here and see for yourself how open source is changing financial services for the better.

Project Highlights

Multi-language developer tools

In this issue, we are focusing on developer productivity and how the Foundation can enable an idiomatic experience in the language of choice within the Symphony platform:

• Symphony-Java-Client: Java client library to interact with the Symphony APIs
• RestApiClient: Symphony .NET Agent API client
• clj-symphony: Clojure interface to the Symphony APIs
• Python-Symphony (New!): Python client for the Symphony Agent API. Thanks to Matt Joyce from Symphony for this project.

Latest Blog

FinJS London - an open and compliant ecosystem for financial services

Maurizio Pillitu, Director of DevOps, gave a talk at this year’s FinJS London about open source and the importance of compliance.

In the News

WatersTechnology - Symphony Foundation Releases APIs to Build Open-Source Community

Banking Technology - Symphony unveils open developer platform and access to API

FTF News - Symphony Messaging Foundation Releases Open Developer Platform

Events

The Foundation participated in, powered and sponsored a continuous drumbeat of events and developer meetups in 2016. From the New York edition of FinJS, where Executive Director Gabriele Columbro discussed the value of open source in finance, to FinDEVr Silicon Valley, where VP of Technology Peter Monks gave a talk on open source being the cornerstone of true collaboration, the Foundation has been a voice for open source within financial services across event stages globally. During Symphony Innovate, it was announced that Symphony will bring comprehensive integrations to the Foundation as early as this month!

At the New World Symphony hackathon, several teams competed to create a new bot, app or integration for the Symphony platform. Congratulations to Tick42 for winning! You can see some photos from the event below.

Leslie Spiro, CEO of Tick42, said, “People usually think of Symphony as being about chat between people. GLUE is about allowing your applications to talk to one another, and we therefore see Symphony as a way to extend GLUE so that my applications can chat to your applications over a secure and controlled channel. Our message is: Chat is not just for people.”

You can check out the open source project here.

Interested in hosting a developer event or meetup? We can sponsor and power development!

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