Each year the quality of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) proposals increases and 2023 was no exception. Thank you all for your hard work and our mentors wish you good luck. We start the evaluations in earnest now.
We had 61 proposals this year:
Admin: UI Redesign – 10 applicants
Admin: Improved Event Management – 8 applicants
Mobile App: Improved Member Management and News Feed – 7 applicants
Admin: Improved People and Newsfeed Management – 6 applicants
Mobile App: Creating new features and refactoring existing features into Plugins – 6 applicants
Hybrid: Hybrid Innovation – 5 applicants
Mobile App: Share Data Between Talawa and Other Application Suites – 4 applicants
API: Multi-Tenancy – 2 applicants
General: Basic Functionality – 2 applicants
API: Improved Backend Performance and Security – 2 applicants
API and Mobile App: E2E encryption and security improvement in Talawa and Talawa-API – 2 applicants
Admin: Multi-Tenancy (Cloud) – 1 applicant
The rest of the proposals had either miscellaneous titles or were not related to the Talawa projects. Some will be considered as Hybrid projects.
The decisions will be tough. We will evaluate the proposals against all factors as objectively as possible so that the truly best ones will triumph. Thanks again.
The Palisadoes Foundation announces its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization. Palisadoes previously participated in 2021 and 2022.
Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects. GSoC will run for nine months this year. The aim is to attract new contributors to be regular Open Source contributors
“From Summer to Autumn, many new contributors to our Talawa projects will benefit from this program. GSoC participants this year will include not only students but also industry professionals. This is an exceptional Google sponsored activity,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “The program helps us to not only get some great code written, but also to introduce developers into Open Source development and hopefully recruit some new long-term Committers.”
Participants are encouraged to discuss ideas with mentoring organizations and finalize proposals for projects by the April 4 deadline. Palisadoes mentors have proposed numerous ideas for Talawa projects in mobile development, web applications, and practical API concepts. Participants may choose from the Talawa “Ideas Page” or suggest their own project for approval. The Talawa software repositories can be found on our organization’s GitHub page. The GSoC website has a complete timeline that you can review. Participants can learn more about our projects on the Talawa GSoC FAQ page.
“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 second 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 acceptance 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”
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.
The Palisadoes Foundation met virtually with with students at the University of the West Indies (UWI). The following presentation was made to members of the UWI Computing Society club.
