Santa Clara, California: May 30, 2024: The Palisadoes Foundation today announced that Jordan Campbell is its awardee to participate in the 2024 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$1500 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.
Jordan will be working on enhancing session management for our Talawa Admin web application.
Our ninth anniversary is an important milestone in Jamaica’s growing international IT community role. 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.
Peter Harrison, President of The Palisadoes Foundation
We received a large volume of applications and after a vigorous selection process, we selected a proposal was innovative, thoroughly researched, and well documented. Recent GitHub activity was also considered in the context of what we require.
We encourage Jamaican students in Jamaica to apply to the Calico Challenge next year!
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 these 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
About the Calico Challenge
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 Palisadoes Foundation works closely with Jamaica’s Technology & Digital Alliance (JTDA) in administering the Calico Challenge in Jamaica on its behalf.
About Palisadoes
Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has been assisting STEM students to become globally competitive in software engineering.
The Foundation promotes software engineering education internships for university students in under-served communities. Over 60 students have participated in its summer programs mentored by IT professionals.
Palisadoes has participated in the annual Google Summer of Code, the GitHub Externship, Google Season of Docs, Outreachy and the DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest programs.
About the JTDA
Jamaica’s Technology & Digital Alliance (JTDA) seeks to enable and empower I.T. professionals and citizens through the use of technology. The Alliance was created by the Jamaica Computer Society (JCS), which is the society for ICT Professionals in Jamaica. The role of the Alliance is to promote knowledge of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry and the effective and efficient utilisation of IT for the benefit of all. We are facilitators of the exchange of information and views, the Alliance fosters networking links between ICT industry experts, I.T. professionals, academia, enterprise, and I.T. enthusiasts to encourage new thinking, education, and career advancement opportunities.