A big welcome to Gabrielle Higgins, our latest volunteer!
My name is Gabrielle Higgins. I am a second year student at UWI, Mona pursuing a BSc in Computer Science. Originally my plan had been to major in Biochemistry and minor in either Computer Science, but the more I practiced programming the more I fell in love with it. Last semester I was very conflicted about whether I would drop Biochemistry or not because doing two programs did not give me enough flexibility to learn as much as I would like to. In the end I chose Computer Science over Biochemistry and I don’t regret doing that.
I really appreciate organizations like The Palisadoes Foundation because they drive the development of the country. Palisadoes has done very well in providing opportunities to university students. It serves as a source of inspiration even to students who do not apply or get through. The message is simple but powerful. “Open source software is essential.” To go through such lengths to encourage students to develop open source software communicates how important the Foundation believes it to be. I strongly agree with them. No doubt, every software developer has used open source software at some point in their journey. Looking forward, I’m excited to be a part of the team that helps to build a Caribbean presence in the Open Source community.
We’ll keep you all posted about her activities and more.
Quito is a new project for the 2019 Calico Challenge. It is a modular open source project to manage the member operations of religious institutions, not necessarily limited to churches.
The project aims to provide churches with better demographic data of their congregations, improved facilities management, easier recall of volunteer skills, and more. There are many commercially available software services for churches, but we have found no actively updated “free to use” open source software. There is also an opportunity to tailor the project’s software to operate better in the Caribbean context where most users are connected to the Internet through their phones.
This Palisadoes Foundation project is in keeping with our goal of promoting technology adoption in Jamaica, and is aimed at helping fellow charitable organizations contribute more fully to society.
Core features to be developed include:
Membership management
Donation management
Groups management
Event registrations
Recurring meetings
Facilities registrations
Volunteer and children checkins
Social media integrations
Service planning and scheduling
It will be written in the Python programming language that is taught at most university level undergraduate programs in Jamaica. We are working on supporting requirements and design documentation for students to use. You can view the latest updates on our Palisadoes Foundation GitHub account. Code will start to be added as soon as Challenge kicks off. Contact the project mentor David Bain at Alteroo for details.
If you are a student and are interested in working on this project then apply to the 2019 Calico Challenge. Applications close on Tuesday March 26, 2019. Details can be found on the Calico Challenge web page.
The RealDecoy team at the UTech IEEE student branch club meeting where the Calico Challenge was discussed.
We’ve started the New Year with great news! In January we visited both the UTech and UWI student computing clubs in which staff from RealDecoy discussed the key skills software developers will need to be successful in their careers. The need to be up to date and curious about how the latest technologies work was very clearly highlighted. Che’-Andre Gordon from RealDecoy spoke about the need for students to be visible on professional social media sites like LinkedIn to promote resume related information, and GitHub to showcase working software students have written.
During the trip we also visited the Caribbean Maritime Institute, Northern Caribbean University, the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean and the Vector Technology Institute. This triples the number of institutions in Jamaica that have been introduced to the Palisadoes Foundation and the Calico Challenge.
Our 2019 programming projects include core data collection applications, now in their fourth year of development, and a new project named “Quito” aimed at making the member management of churches and other religious institutions easier.
UTech also received a second shipment of Dell computer hardware from us to be used to support student labs. We are grateful to our benefactors who so graciously donated this equipment to our work in Jamaica.
You may have also noticed that our social media posts have become more regular to provide interesting regional news on ICT that you normally won’t find on major technology or general news websites. This has strengthened our connection with those interested in our work.
We also have two new volunteers helping us in Jamaica this year. Shanell Hopkins and Gabrielle Higgins. We’ll have more updates about them soon.
This is the Calico Challenge’s fourth year. We look forward to many more!
#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration.
Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and the widely recognized shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving.
There are many ways to get involved. The Palisadoes Foundation will be listed on your company’s donation portal and you can also visit our donation page to help.
Shannika is a Kingston based student of technology who holds a BSc. in Psychology and a Graduate Diploma in Information Technology. She presently pursues an MSc. in Computer Science from the University of the West Indies and has worked for eight years as a Business Analyst with the Jamaica Public Service Company where she documented and digitized the returned bill process. She also established a framework for trans promotional advertising via their printed and electronic customer bills, earning the company 5M in profit in two years with zero added capital. Shannika currently works to implement a Business Intelligence and Analytics platform as part of the Analytics and Enterprise Solutions Team. She enjoys cooking, creative writing and the hypnotic sounds of Macy Gray. Her most immediate endeavours include the development and expansion of her skills in programming, data analytics and writing poetry. View Shannika’s Final Presentation (PDF)
Jhamali Vassell
Jhamali went to Glenmuir High from 2008 to 2015 and attended University of the West Indies(UWI), Mona, majoring in Computer Science and Electronics. He became a Palisadoes Foundation volunteer in September 2017. He has a wide area of interests, but his main main goal is to get into the field of robotics and AI development. Though most people are still skeptical about smart machines, he believes they are necessary for continued advancement, which may eventually become stagnate due to human limitations. He feels that if machines are designed well they would be able to complete tasks with more precision and speed than humans, increasing the speed of research and development. He’s especially interested in robotic body parts for the disabled, such as spine alignment technology, new limbs, and even eyes. His current focus in on low level software development, embedded systems and the communication between them. He’s hoping to eventually go to Japan, where robotic development is occurring on a large scale, and at a fairly fast pace. View Jhamali’s Final Presentaion (PDF)
Cleon Mullings
Cleon is now a second year student at the University of the West Indies who pursuing a double major in Software Engineering and Medical Physics. He enjoys math, and tinkering with electronics. He recently started learning LATEX, and Jupyter Notebooks, which will be useful in the future for his second-year physics courses which will require him to do graphs and other types of data analysis. He’s looking forward to his second-year as he will begin the courses specific to his majors. He will also begin his tenure as the Technical Advisor for the UWI Computing Society and pass on his knowledge to the incoming first years. He plans to use his experiences and knowledge in Software and Medical Physics to contribute to the respective fields in Jamaica. View PDF
About The Calico Challenge
Calico is a Palisadoes summer internship program for Jamaican university student programmers. Their work is supervised by software industry volunteers with an interest in helping students transition into the work world. Calico stipends are paid when students achieve of pre-defined goals assigned by their mentors. The software code our Calico students produce are actually contributions to various open source software projects. The results of their work are public on the GitHub website and publicly show the quality of their work. This can be used by potential employers as an addition to the students’ resumes.
Open source software is created through the collaboration of volunteer programmers to make apps that are free for use by all. Popular open source projects include the Chrome and Firefox web browsers, the Android operating system used by 80% of all mobile phones, the freely available LibreOffice and OpenOffice alternatives to Microsoft Office, and many of the free apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Calico is very closely modeled on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative. Google has run GSoC for over ten years and in 2016 over 1,500 students around the world are expected to participate. A primary goal for Palisadoes is to make Calico a feeder program for GSoC.
A big welcome to Gabrielle Higgins, our latest volunteer!
Quito is a new project for the 2019 Calico Challenge. It is a modular open source project to manage the member operations of religious institutions, not necessarily limited to churches.
