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.