Today we feature Dominic Mills one of our 2019 Calico Challenge participants.

Dominic is a burgeoning mathematician and science enthusiast that has a vested interest in developing cost-effective educational tools to enhance science education and communication in the developing world. He has a BSc. from the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, a postgraduate diploma from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical physics and is currently pursing an M.Phil from the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in Kingston, Jamaica. He is a twice selected Leader of Tomorrow of the St. Gallen Symposium as well as the first Jamaican selected for the CERN Summer Student Programme. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society and has participated in many international programmes aimed at nurturing young scientists and thought leaders, such as the Think Summit Global Solutions, Heidelberg Laureate Forum and, most recently, the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.

Santa Clara, California: April 22, 2019: The Palisadoes Foundation today announced the 6 student awardees to participate in the fourth 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$500 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.

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 Calico Challenge students will be working on adding software features to:

• The insite Project Suite: Insite can track various types of data that vary over time. This includes, but is not limited to agricultural prices, computer performance and environmental conditions. The suite includes the insite web interface, system-server which stores the data, scrappi for data collection and the insite-api which allows the data to be retrieved by other computer programs over the internet.
• Project Quito: Member management software for use by clubs, religious institutions and more
• WordPress: A popular application for easily creating websites. This project is administered by WordPress in an informal partnership with the Palisadoes Foundation.

This year’s Calico Challenge awardees are:

• Tevon Davis – insite
• Matthew Patterson – insite-api
• Nathan Downer – Quito
• Phillip Llewellyn – Quito
• Dimitri Johnson – Quito
• Dominic Mills – Scrappi
• Ranil Wallace – system-server
• Rachelle Trottman – WordPress

“Our fourth anniversary is an important milestone in Jamaica’s growing international IT community role”, said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation, “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.”

About the Calico Challenge
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 UWI Computing Society; and the University of Technology IEEE Students Branch to identify open source projects, student sub-projects and mentors.

About the Palisadoes Foundation
The California-based Palisadoes Foundation aims to provide new avenues of promoting Jamaica’s technology businesses and talent by using a series of programs which create increased awareness of the island’s abilities in the global marketplace.

In keeping with our policy of transparency we have made the 2018 Calico Challenge Review is available for download here. It was our third year of running the event and much was learned.

• Sponsorships rose which allowed us to have a modest reserve fund in the event of unforeseen events that could impact donations.
• Our 2018 UTech student volunteers graduated and we successfully recruited new volunteers from UWI and UTech. This greatly helps with the continuity of our Calico Challenge outreach work.
• We hired a social media firm to handle our online promotions, but the results were disappointing. The general interest technology stories posted and updates on our activities didn’t receive the expected levels of engagement. This initiative was funded by contributions by members of the Board of Directors. We have since used our volunteers to update our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram pages on a regular basis. Postings include reminders about the Calico Challenge, more regional Caribbean technology content and interesting links learned from various Jamaican technology WhatsApp groups.
• Students engagement through technology clubs wasn’t as robust as in the past which, in addition to the low social media engagement, contributed to a lower number of applications and overall applicant quality. We have since created a WhatsApp group with university student club leaders across the island through which we announced our 2019 activities. This lead to a record number of 2019 applicants and noticeably better responses.
• The general uncertainty of both global and Jamaican economic growth is a continued risk to our donation stream. We have begun work on finding ways to provide revenue generating opportunities to sponsor our outreach by providing services to other non-profit organizations. This was the inspiration of the 2019 Calico Challenge’s Quito project which aims to provide an open source cloud membership management service for clubs and religious institutions.

We feel that 2018 was a turning point for the Calico Challenge, in which new approaches to our challenges were identified and successfully applied in the first half of 2019. The Palisadoes Foundation looks forward to further successes this year.

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:

1. Membership management
2. Donation management
3. Groups management
4. Event registrations
5. Recurring meetings
6. Facilities registrations
7. Volunteer and children checkins
8. Social media integrations
9. 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.