GSoC 2021 Spurs High Participation Rates in Palisadoes Foundation Software Projects

Santa Clara, California: April 14, 2021

The Palisadoes Foundation announces very high participation rates spurred by its Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects.

GSoC is an international program in which Google awards stipends to students who complete a free and open-source software coding project during a three month period. Details about the program can be found at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/. The Palisadoes Foundation was accepted as a GSoC mentoring organization in 2021.

“The interest in our projects has been outstanding. In the past months our Talawa projects have been forked (copied) hundreds of times,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “It’s also very encouraging to also see hundreds of fixed bugs and added features being created through our pull request process. Prior to GSoC we had less than a dozen of each.”

The statistics for each project provide more details of the recent progress:

  • Talawa: 132 forks, 672 pull requests
  • Talawa API: 77 forks, 230 pull requests
  • Talawa Admin: 12 forks, 15 pull requests

“The professional developer community has been very supportive. We have 20 mentors actively participating in our coordinating activities.” added Harrison. “The Foundation has also received 59 GSoC applications from international students, more than double what we normally see for our previous summer programs.”

This success is the result of The Palisadoes Foundation’s efforts to promote Open Source software development through its various educational programs. Since 2016 it has been working with university students and their academic institutions to create sustainable projects that would be both relevant and useful to users in developing nations.

“Our all volunteer team is constantly working on requirements, fielding questions and reviewing code. It’s an international effort with mentors in India allowing us to support students 24 hours a day due to the time difference with the Americas,” Harrison explained, “The GSoC award is a clear vote of faith from arguably the world’s largest software company. This is a huge global endorsement of projects created with Jamaican software development skills. We are proud that our projects are now have global participation.”

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.

About Talawa
Talawa was created to help community based organizations collaborate with their membership. These organizations would include religious groups, non-profit charities, social groups and in limited cases, businesses. It has three main components:

  • talawa: A mobile application with social media features
  • talawa-api: An API providing access to user data and features
  • talawa-admin: A web based administrative portal
  • talawa-docs: The projects’ online documentation website

The projects’ software repositories can be found on our GitHub page at: https://github.com/PalisadoesFoundation

Pattoo Web Redesign Review

Dominic Henry discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on completely redesigning the Pattoo web application for a much better user experience.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.