Press Office

If you’ve ever wanted to know what our Calico has been doing over the summer, you can now find out for yourself right here. All our 2017 Calico Challenge participants have submitted their final project reports for all to see. They show the positive impact of your Palisadoes Foundation contributions. Together we can make Jamaica’s IT industry globally competitive in previously unexplored areas.

 

Jhamali Vassell – Project DoRoad

DoRoad is a mobile app for Jamaican taxi drivers. Jhamali collaborated with the OneStop project team who contributed code for a companion application for taxi customers. The app is planned to be tested on the UWI shuttle bus system. Read more here: Jhamali Vassell – DoRoad – Calico Powerpoint.

 

---

Luke Chen Shui – Project Infoset-NG

Luke has successfully completed two years as a Calico participant. He worked on the Infoset-NG project which is used to collect and store data sent to it from various types of computer devices. It is useful in providing data that can be used to chart the performance of equipment which is valuable for computer systems administrators. Read more here: Luke Chen Shui – Infoset – Final Presentation

 

---

Xavier Bryson – Project Material-UI

Material-UI provides tools to help mobile app developers with the design and presentation of new features.  Xavier worked with Jamaican diaspora IT professionals Neil and Craig Gabbadon who use Material-UI in their business at Informant Tech. This is the second year that Neil and Craig have been Calico Challenge mentors. Read more here: Xavier Bryson – Material UI

 

---

Shanielle Williams – Project Swift

Shanielle is the current President of the UWI Computing Society. The UWI Computing Society has been a keen participant in the Calico Challenge from its inception. She worked with mentors Michael Dann and Che-Andre Gordon from Real Decoy on a mobile app to assist UWI students in finding classrooms on campus based on their current GPS location. The app used the Swift programming framework that is often used in iPhone app development. Read more here: Shanielle Williams – The Swift Experience

 

---

Matthew Stone – Project Aty

Matthew worked under the guidance of Alex Nicholson, a past Calico Challenge participant, to create Aty a Twitter app that specializes in promoting content created in Jamaica or by Jamaicans. He experimented with machine learning and GPS location tools to filter the news feeds. Matthew is the immediate past president of the UWI Computing Society. Read more here: Matthew Stone – Aty

 

---

Alex Leslie – Project JResume

Resume writing is always a challenge and Alex decided to create an online resume building tool that helps with the process. JResume is an open source project created by UTech students to make job searches much easier. Read more here: Alex Leslie – JResume – Final Presentation

 

---

 

About the Calico Challenge
The Calico Challenge is an annual event where Jamaican university students work on large scale open source software projects with a Jamaican flavor. They are assigned a mentor and are provided with a stipend upon meeting predefined project goals.

Calico was conceived by The Palisadoes Foundation in conjunction with the Jamaica Diaspora Technology Task Force. There has been close technical collaboration between the Foundation; the University of the West Indies (UWI) Department of Computing, Mona; the School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Technology, Jamaica; the UWI Computing Society; and the University of Technology IEEE Students Branch.

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.

Yanika Miller is currently a final year Science major at the University of Technology, Jamaica. She plans to use her final year to gain more real world experience as a software engineer.

Whenever she has any free time she likes to read and research new topics. Particularly areas that help her make her life easier and allows her understand how the brain works. She is currently focused on learning more about digital marketing and programming.

She loves to express her creativity through graphic design and cooking. More than one of her friends have been used as guinea pigs to test new kitchen recipes, because Yanika is always trying to make the best dish she possibly can. In addition to wanting to become a better programmer, she wants to become entrepreneur and has several interesting business ideas that will allow her to fully utilize her creative spirit.

To her, a perfect career would be one that allows her to take on interesting challenges to improve her skills in addition to allowing her to travel and be exposed to new ideas, technologies, people and cultures. She firmly believes that, while external forces may have an effect on the trajectory of her life, she is ultimately the one who is accountable for how much of her potential she is able to unleash. That’s why her two favourite quotes are “The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment” by Tony Robbins and “It’s not over until I win.” by Les Brown.

On August 25, 2017 members of the Jamaican Diaspora in Silicon Valley met at Google with the Jamaican Ambassador to the USA, the Honourable Audrey Marks.

Ambassador Marks spoke about the Government of Jamaica’s (GOJ) goal to achieve five percent growth in Gross Domestic Product within four years.  There will be a focus on a number of industrial sectors including, tourism, mining, and information and communications technology (ICT) . The group also discussed ICT related business process outsourcing (BPO) activities in call centers. She also outlined plans to strengthen ties with the Diaspora organization, and mentioned various ways in which the GOJ has historically assisted the group.

The Palisadoes Foundation

The board of The Palisadoes Foundation was invited. They took the opportunity to discuss the Foundation’s recent accomplishments and plans for the future.

Topics included:

• The rationale for the creation of Palisadoes three years ago,
• The success of the Calico Challenge, our signature program, in providing 14 students with paid summer internships to work on open source projects with a Jamaican flavor under the guidance of a mentor,
• The excellence of UWI and UTech in providing a well trained talent pool for Jamaica,
• The need to expand tertiary level student internships, like the Calico Challenge, to include exposure to modern collaborative software development tools and approaches so that they are immediately comfortable in using them when they begin their careers.
• The requirement for Jamaica to provide students with experience in international software development, a critical pre-requisite for the island to develop beyond traditional call centers and create complex software services,
• The very noticeable lack of involvement of women in the Calico Challenge program in spite of their numbers,
• The Foundation’s desire to donate computer server equipment to UWI and UTech through the Jamaica Computer Society to assist in student exposure to international collaboration.

Next Steps

The Foundation hopes for continued with the Jamaican Embassy to explore additional ways to strengthen the collaboration between the Jamaican Diaspora and the island.

We will also be working with the Jamaican Google team to explore new ways to collaborate on our major programs such as the Calico Challenge. There was great interest in finding ways to collaborate with a few suggestions on how to improve our operations.

About The Palisadoes Foundation

The Palisadoes Foundation was originally created to promote the use and development of ICT in Jamaica. Our signature Calico Challenge is a work study program where university students work on open source projects over the summer under the guidance of a mentor. Interest has been strong and we are actively investigating expanding the Challenge to the greater English speaking Caribbean.

The Palisadoes Foundation is actively pursuing the creation of an advisory board. Its aim is to guide us in setting the goals for the upcoming year, fund raising, strategy, marketing, Jamaican industry relations and faculty / student outreach. Each member would assist in one of these areas to expand our team beyond the current volunteer pool which tends to be transient. The initial focus is on Jamaica, but we intend to expand it to other islands by our fifth anniversary at which time we’d have got our operation fine tuned.

There will be a commitment to raise $2,500 dollars per member to cover our basic costs which would include corporate registration and tax filing fees, student stipends and possibly faculty grants for research. This can be done through a personal or company donation, but also by rallying Jamaicans and other interested parties to donate through the many employee donation matching schemes in which we participate. Fundraising would start in November / December so that we will have adequate funds in the bank by the end of March 2018.

We plan to have our first session on or near October 7, 2017 to kickoff the initiative.

Contact us through the website if you are interested in participating and we’ll call to discuss further details. Preference will be given to persons with large LinkedIn networks and visible volunteering experience with non-profit / NGO organizations.

We interview Jordan Jones one of the very first Palisadoes Foundation volunteers. He helped to create three Open Source projects for our Calico Challenge and mentored students over the summer for the Challenge in 2016 and 2017.