Press Office

Santa Clara, California: April 14, 2021

The Palisadoes Foundation announces very high participation rates spurred by its Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects.

GSoC is an international program in which Google awards stipends to students who complete a free and open-source software coding project during a three month period. Details about the program can be found at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/. The Palisadoes Foundation was accepted as a GSoC mentoring organization in 2021.

“The interest in our projects has been outstanding. In the past months our Talawa projects have been forked (copied) hundreds of times,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “It’s also very encouraging to also see hundreds of fixed bugs and added features being created through our pull request process. Prior to GSoC we had less than a dozen of each.”

The statistics for each project provide more details of the recent progress:

• Talawa: 132 forks, 672 pull requests
• Talawa API: 77 forks, 230 pull requests
• Talawa Admin: 12 forks, 15 pull requests

“The professional developer community has been very supportive. We have 20 mentors actively participating in our coordinating activities.” added Harrison. “The Foundation has also received 59 GSoC applications from international students, more than double what we normally see for our previous summer programs.”

This success is the result of The Palisadoes Foundation’s efforts to promote Open Source software development through its various educational programs. Since 2016 it has been working with university students and their academic institutions to create sustainable projects that would be both relevant and useful to users in developing nations.

“Our all volunteer team is constantly working on requirements, fielding questions and reviewing code. It’s an international effort with mentors in India allowing us to support students 24 hours a day due to the time difference with the Americas,” 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 projects created with Jamaican software development skills. We are proud that our projects are now have global participation.”

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.

About Talawa
Talawa was created to help community based organizations collaborate with their membership. These organizations would include religious groups, non-profit charities, social groups and in limited cases, businesses. It has three main components:

• talawa: A mobile application with social media features
• talawa-api: An API providing access to user data and features
• talawa-admin: A web based administrative portal
• talawa-docs: The projects’ online documentation website

The projects’ software repositories can be found on our GitHub page at: https://github.com/PalisadoesFoundation

Dominic Henry discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on completely redesigning the Pattoo web application for a much better user experience.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.

Cargill Seiveright discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on creating and administrator portal for the pattoo application.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.

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.

Jason Gayle discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on making the installation of the pattoo application as easy as 1-2-3.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.