Santa Clara, California: March 8, 2021
The Palisadoes Foundation’s Talawa project today announced its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization.
Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers student developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects over a three month period.
“Over the summer, Talawa Committers will mentor students that are sponsored by Google and will be working on many of our projects,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “The program helps us to not only get some great code written, but also to introduce students into Open Source development and hopefully recruit some new long-term Committers.”
Students are encouraged to discuss ideas with mentoring organizations and finalize proposals for projects of interest by the 13 April deadline. Palisadoes mentors have proposed numerous ideas for Talawa projects in mobile development, web applications, and practical API concepts. Students may choose from the Talawa “Ideas Page” or suggest their own project for approval. The Talawa softare repositories can be found on our organization’s GitHub page. Coding will begin 7 June and end 23 August.
“GSoC gives students the chance to work on industry-leading Open Source projects, collaborate with diverse communities, and gain real world experience related to their academic pursuits,” added Harrison. “We are proud to have mentored so many talented students over the years, and furthered our mission of providing software products for the public good. It’s a rewarding experience both for the students and the Talawa community at-large.”
Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has actively participated in furthering the education of software engineering students through its various programs. The Calico Challenge, modeled on GSoC, has mentored over 30 Jamaicans attending local universities. Like GSoC, students received stipends upon achieving predefined goals when contributing to the Foundation’s GitHub projects.
“This GSoC success would not have happened without the faith our Jamaican corporate sponsors had in our Calico vision. Their support since 2016 in terms of time, people and financing has been invaluable, ” Harrison explained, “The GSoC award is a clear vote of faith from arguably the world’s largest software company. This is a huge global endorsement of Jamaican software development skills”
Details on the Google Summer of Code is available at: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
About the Palisadoes Foundation
The California based Palisadoes Foundation aims to provide new avenues to promote Jamaica’s technology businesses and talent using a series of programs aimed at creating increased awareness of the island’s abilities in the global marketplace.