Press Office

Jordan is one of our 2024 Calico Challenge participants working on our Talawa projects. He started participating earlier this year, and was formally accepted in May. He has been collaborating with other participants and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.

Welcome Jordan!

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Hi! I’m Jordan Campbell, a dedicated developer from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus in Jamaica, entering my third and final year in Computer Science. In my spare time, I enjoy watching TV shows, with ‘The 100’ currently at the top of my list, and I also like to play table tennis occasionally. At UWI, I’ve been recognized with awards for both academics and sports, and I’m committed to maintaining my outstanding academic record.

I’m actively involved in the Talawa open-source community, where I’m learning and contributing significantly. The community’s supportive atmosphere motivates me, and I look forward to furthering my work in Talawa and exploring opportunities in other open-source communities. My technical skills include Python and web development technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MongoDB, SQL, and Flask. I find web development particularly intriguing for its ability to solve real-world problems.

Technology, for me, represents a gateway to transforming ideas into impactful solutions. It’s this transformative power that drives my passion and fuels my desire to explore new possibilities in the digital realm. Through my experiences, particularly in open-source communities like Talawa, I’ve come to appreciate the collaborative spirit that underpins innovation. Working alongside like-minded individuals, I’ve seen how diverse perspectives can converge to solve complex challenges and create meaningful change.

Shaik is one of our 2024 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participants working on our Talawa projects. He started participating earlier this year, and was formally accepted as a GSoC participant in May. He has been collaborating with other participants and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.

Welcome Shaik!

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Hi! I am Shaik Mahammad Nabi Azad, a third-year student of computer science at Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in Andhra Pradesh, and I am having a great time. I’m excited to get started on the GSoC 2024 project, “Talawa Mobile Offline Capability Enhancement”!

Alright, let me to briefly introduce myself. You know, I’ve always been a huge tech fan. Like, how in the world do these 100-200 MB software programs manage to fix millions of people’s issues every single day? That question really sparked my interest in coding and other things.

I experimented with learning many programming languages in an attempt to comprehend the mysteries underlying these incredible apps. But hey, what do you know? Nothing made sense to me until I discovered open-source software. Open source really amazed me! It’s this global community of people working together to create useful products that are accessible to all.

For me, diving into open source went beyond just learning to code. It was similar to discovering an entirely new realm of collaboration and problem-solving. And so here I am, launching into the Talawa project and prepared to takle any constructive problems that may arise.

I really think that everybody with coding skills need to experiment with open source and Talawa is a great place to start. You won’t want to leave once you experience that collaborative vibe, I promise. It resembles an intense, never-ending creative and collaborative roller coaster!

Santa Clara, California: May 30, 2024: The Palisadoes Foundation today announced that Jordan Campbell is its awardee to participate in the 2024 annual Calico Challenge.

The Calico Challenge is a summer work study program for computer science students in Jamaica. Each selected student works on enhancing open source software used internationally under the guidance of a Jamaican mentor. Students receive a US$1500 stipend for their participation which is incrementally paid upon the achievement of specified milestones. Calico is also a feeder program for the similar Google Summer of Code.

Jordan will be working on enhancing session management for our Talawa Admin web application.

Our ninth anniversary is an important milestone in Jamaica’s growing international IT community role. The collaboration of so many diverse stakeholders, including academia, students, and businesses in both Jamaica and overseas is truly remarkable in getting us this far. I look forward to the future.

Peter Harrison, President of The Palisadoes Foundation

We received a large volume of applications and after a vigorous selection process, we selected a proposal was innovative, thoroughly researched, and well documented. Recent GitHub activity was also considered in the context of what we require.

We encourage Jamaican students in Jamaica to apply to the Calico Challenge next year!

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 these 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

About the Calico Challenge

Calico was conceived by The Palisadoes Foundation in conjunction with the Jamaica Diaspora Technology Task Force. Since its inception there has been close technical collaboration between the Foundation; the computing departments of Jamaica’s five universities, and various student clubs.

The Palisadoes Foundation works closely with Jamaica’s Technology & Digital Alliance (JTDA) in administering the Calico Challenge in Jamaica on its behalf.

About Palisadoes

Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has been assisting STEM students to become globally competitive in software engineering.

The Foundation promotes software engineering education internships for university students in under-served communities. Over 60 students have participated in its summer programs mentored by IT professionals.

Palisadoes has participated in the annual Google Summer of Code, the GitHub Externship, Google Season of Docs, Outreachy and the DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest programs.

About the JTDA

Jamaica’s Technology & Digital Alliance (JTDA) seeks to enable and empower I.T. professionals and citizens through the use of technology. The Alliance was created by the Jamaica Computer Society (JCS), which is the society for ICT Professionals in Jamaica. The role of the Alliance is to promote knowledge of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry and the effective and efficient utilisation of IT for the benefit of all. We are facilitators of the exchange of information and views, the Alliance fosters networking links between ICT industry experts, I.T. professionals, academia, enterprise, and I.T. enthusiasts to encourage new thinking, education, and career advancement opportunities.

It is time to announce the participants for in The Palisadoes Foundation’s 2024 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! We are very proud to announce the names of the 8 participants this year who will be funded by Google to work on our Talawa projects.

These recipients represent the very best of the many excellent proposals that we had to choose from. For those unfamiliar with the program, the Google Summer of Code brings together ambitious open source newcomers from around the world with open source developers by giving each mentoring organization funds to hire a set number of participants. These participants then write proposals, which they submit to a mentoring organization, in hopes of having their work funded.

There were many excellent proposals and the final selection was difficult. There were many worthy proposals and we could not select them all.

Congratulations to this group. We hope they and others will continue to contribute to the projects!

The hard work of our successful candidates has been rewarded. In no particular order they are:

1. Aman Singh Chandel for “Improved File Uploads and Security”
2. Disha Talreja for “Self Hosted Chat and Notification”
3. Shekhar Patel for “Event Attendance – Talawa Admin”
4. Glen Dsouza for “Hybrid: Volunteer management, tracking & leaderboard – Talawa Admin & Talawa Mobile”
5. Meetul Rathore for “Tag Management System”
6. Parag Gupta for “Enhancements for Talawa’s Event Plugin and new management feature for Talawa App”
7. Shaik Mahammad Nabi Azad for “Offline Capability Enhancement – Talawa Mobile”
8. Adarsh Tiwari for “Migration to postgreSQL and fixing code quality issues”

Our community will continue to work on making not only these but other project ideas viable. We all anxiously await the next steps.

Congratulations to the awardees, and those of you who helped build the foundations of a robust code base.

The 2024 Calico Challenge has begun! Jamaican students! Get familiar with our projects and what you need to do to apply.