On July 28, 2017 the JPS Foundation held a combination meet up and corporate introduction to the Calico Challenge. The JPS Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Jamaica’s Energy Partner, the Jamaica Public Service (JPS). It is the main channel for employee outreach and community development projects, cementing its commitment to community and national development. The JPS Foundation, which has been a 2 year sponsor for the Calico Challenge, hosted the event to formally introduce Calico to the JPS family. It was the 3rd in a series of monthly meetups hosted by corporate sponsors for the Calico participants.

(L-R) Phillip Jarrett (JPS Foundation Board Member), Kevin White, Xavier Bryson, Luke Chen Shui, Scott Allen (RealDecoy), Jhamali Vassell, Jacinth Morgan-Collie (Manager JPS Foundation), Levor Dacosta (Marketing Researcher JPS Foundation)

The event began with Jacinth Morgan-Collie addressing the audience. She explained why the JPS Foundation got involved with the Calico project and how it aligns exactly with the goals of the foundation. This was directly followed by a video presentation by Alexander Nicholson, a past participant, explaining his experiences with Calico and how skills gained while working on the Material UI project taught him key concepts which he now uses at work.

Luke Chen Shui spoke briefly about his project JResume as well as his experience being a mentor & student. Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes, joined via a video call and gave a brief talk about Calico now and the direction it is heading.

There were small presentations by current Calico participants along with short demonstrations of the projects they are contributing to. Members of the audience were then given the opportunity to speak to persons individually. As the event came to a close Phillip Jarrett expressed the Board’s support in the partnership and reiterated sentiments previously expressed by Jacinth along with a vote of thanks to everyone for attending.

About the Calico Challenge
The Calico Challenge is an annual event where Jamaican university students work on large scale open source software projects with a Jamaican flavor. They are assigned a mentor and are provided with a stipend upon meeting predefined project goals.

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 School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Technology, Jamaica; the UWI Computing Society; and the University of Technology IEEE Students Branch.

About the JPS Foundation
The JPS Foundation expands the Jamaica Public Service Company’s role beyond a utility company to include community outreach and the consistent support of Jamaica’s National Development plans.

Since 2013 the JPS Foundation has been the philanthropic arm tasked with the responsibility to help create positive change and prosperity as the leader in Jamaica’s energy sector. Its mission is to improve lives and empower Jamaicans through charitable development projects in Energy Education, Conservation and Innovation.

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.

Reported by Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Volunteer

Yanika Miller is currently a final year Science major at the University of Technology, Jamaica. She plans to use her final year to gain more real world experience as a software engineer.

Whenever she has any free time she likes to read and research new topics. Particularly areas that help her make her life easier and allows her understand how the brain works. She is currently focused on learning more about digital marketing and programming.

She loves to express her creativity through graphic design and cooking. More than one of her friends have been used as guinea pigs to test new kitchen recipes, because Yanika is always trying to make the best dish she possibly can. In addition to wanting to become a better programmer, she wants to become entrepreneur and has several interesting business ideas that will allow her to fully utilize her creative spirit.

To her, a perfect career would be one that allows her to take on interesting challenges to improve her skills in addition to allowing her to travel and be exposed to new ideas, technologies, people and cultures. She firmly believes that, while external forces may have an effect on the trajectory of her life, she is ultimately the one who is accountable for how much of her potential she is able to unleash. That’s why her two favourite quotes are “The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment” by Tony Robbins and “It’s not over until I win.” by Les Brown.

The Palisadoes Foundation is actively pursuing the creation of an advisory board. Its aim is to guide us in setting the goals for the upcoming year, fund raising, strategy, marketing, Jamaican industry relations and faculty / student outreach. Each member would assist in one of these areas to expand our team beyond the current volunteer pool which tends to be transient. The initial focus is on Jamaica, but we intend to expand it to other islands by our fifth anniversary at which time we’d have got our operation fine tuned.

There will be a commitment to raise $2,500 dollars per member to cover our basic costs which would include corporate registration and tax filing fees, student stipends and possibly faculty grants for research. This can be done through a personal or company donation, but also by rallying Jamaicans and other interested parties to donate through the many employee donation matching schemes in which we participate. Fundraising would start in November / December so that we will have adequate funds in the bank by the end of March 2018.

We plan to have our first session on or near October 7, 2017 to kickoff the initiative.

Contact us through the website if you are interested in participating and we’ll call to discuss further details. Preference will be given to persons with large LinkedIn networks and visible volunteering experience with non-profit / NGO organizations.

(L-R) Ben Coughlin, Co-Founder Colovore LLC; Peter Harrison, Co-Founder Colovore LLC; Jordan Jones, Palisadoes Mentor Volunteer; Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Project Coordinator; Sean Holzknecht, Co-Founder Colovore LLC

Day 1 of my trip to California was very interesting we woke up very early to begin our first jam packed day. Peter Harrison our chaperone for the trip drove us first to Colovore his data centre where we were given a tour of the premises and a chance to see the servers the Palisadoes projects are housed on.

The drive around town showed the offices of many tech giants, a mixture of multiple cultures and lots of sun! Our first official meeting was with Mae Chan Director of Technical Project Management at Facebook who we had lunch with on the Facebook premises.

(L-R) Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Project Coordinator; Jordan Jones, Palisadoes Mentor Volunteer

We spoke briefly about Calico and our respective roles within Palisadoes, project management and internship opportunities which exist for students. (So much more that I didn’t know existed). I remember thinking this feels like a university campus! So many fresh faced teenagers and young persons like myself starting their first day of internship. After a quick tour of the office compound and pictures we were off to do some more exploring. A few dozen photos later and we were outside the offices of Comcast Communication to meet with Khem Raj (Embedded Linux Engineer) and Tennyson Williams (Senior Project Manager).

Peter Harrison, President, The Palisadoes Foundation; Khem Raj, Distinguished Engineer (Embedded Linux), Comcast; Jordan Jones, Palisadoes Mentor Volunteer; Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Project Coordinator; Tennyson Williams, Senior Project Manager, Comcast

Here we were introduced to Comcast and their conglomerate of offerings. We were especially impressed with the use of the Raspberry Pi to do streaming from YouTube and the open source tools used to do it. This showed us potential new projects which we could implement for the next year of Calico.

Among the best experiences of my life so far. Day 2 was considerably more hectic but nonetheless satisfying. We left again very early in the morning (you will see this is the recurring theme throughout the trip) and took the train into San Francisco. First impressions of San Francisco were there are so many buildings! So many people living on sharply inclined hills throughout the city. We walked through the city along the coast, saw the Golden Gate, Alcatraz, China Town, City Lights book shop, Mozilla’s head office before making our way to meet Cat Allan (Science Outreach and Open Source Program Manager) and Stefanie Taylor for lunch at Google.

(L-R) Jordan Jones, Palisadoes Mentor; Cat Allman, Science Outreach and Open Source Program Manager at Google; Stephanie Taylor, Progam Manager, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in; Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Foundation Project Coordinator.

We spoke about how far the Calico Challenge has come in its now two years, successes and issues we’d like to approve. We were given further advice on how to make the challenge better based on experiences from the Google Summer of Code which Calico is modelled from. I got so many cookies to take home with me in my goodie bag 😉. We ended our first day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Collette having fun at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The next set of meeting we had started Day 3 when we visited Therma where we were given a tour of the facility, saw the robots they use to laser giant sheets of metal and pipes. I remember thinking I had no clue so much when into the creation of pipes and venting.

Received the most epic card holder with my name engraved on it. I remember thinking this place is beautiful.

Collette, and Jordan with Scott Carstairs, Vice President of Manufacturing, Therma

Art hanging on every way, the cafeteria painted like ancient Greece, they even have a giant replica of David! We got a brief tour of Netflix’s head office took pictures with their many Emmy’s and lastly visited visited Cisco for an exclusive presentation from Larkland Morley and his team.

There was a great deal of sightseeing that was done, we saw what feels like everything from Muir Woods, wine tasting, the breath taking Lake Tahoe, the Castro, walked up and down Lombard Street, Monterey and its Aquarium.

Collette and Jordan at Netflix

Overall impressions of the Silicon Valley and San Francisco was how dynamic and fast paced everything was amazing cuisines (hands down favourite was Thai 3 cup chicken and shaved ice). Tech professionals were accommodating inviting and offered lots of meaningful advice not just tech wise but on life on a whole. The drive along the 17 mile drive was especially fun especially spotting whales breach and getting to feel the cold Pacific Ocean. I want to thank Peter and his wonderful family for adopting us for the time there. Only through Peter’s expert planning would we have been able to see and experience so much in our short visit. Shout out to Meraki a Cisco start up where I finally got to get my ice cream from Cisco 😊. Among the best experiences of my life so far.

Students have managed many aspects of the the Calico Challenge since it was conceived in 2015. The Palisadoes Foundation’s goal is to promote ICT in Jamaica, and the first idea to aid in doing this was to sponsor and manage a series of hackathons.

The executive teams of the UWI Computing Society and the UTech IEEE Students Branch clubs at the time had two primary concerns. The first was that students already participated in many hackathons and there would be limited meaningful value in the clubs organizing yet another. The second was that both clubs had a mandate to encourage the expansion of the computing community through collaboration. Hackathons in their opinion didn’t completely meet the fostering of a collaborative community.

Another option for creating was the creation of a software development prize, but in their opinion they didn’t have the resources to create a program that was sufficiently objective in judging each project.

(L-R) Jordan Jones, Palisadoes Mentor; Cat Allman, Science Outreach and Open Source Program Manager at Google; Stephanie Taylor, Progam Manager, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in; Collette Bailey, Palisadoes Foundation Project Coordinator.

Finally students suggested that it would be best to create a system similar to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) work study program where students get to work on Open Source software development projects under the guidance of a mentor. GSoC is sponsored by Google, thousands of students have participated in it since its inception in 2005.

Over many months, the student executives and the Palisadoes Foundation brainstormed ways to create a Jamaican version sponsored by private donations and sponsorships from Jamaican companies on the island and overseas. The ICT faculty and staff of UWI Mona and UTech were kept up to date on the development and provided support and space for events surrounding the soon to be Calico Challenge.

In January 2016, the Challenge was launched with major funding provided by the JPS Foundation, and the Joan Duncan Foundation in Jamaica with additional significant contributions from the Jamaica Diaspora.

Students reached out to the the GSoC team in Silicon Valley to see what suggestions they would have to make Calico a success. The aim was to see how Calico could become a feeder program into GSoC where students would get experience in Open Source software development through interaction with the Jamaican software community and its supporters. The next step would be students participating in GSoC.

The GSoC team, Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman even talked via Google Hangouts to students interested in learning more about the program as part of the initial Calico launch program!

Naturally when Collette Bailey our student volunteer Project Coordinator and Jordan Jones, student mentor and Palisadoes Foundation Open Source project lead visited the San Francisco Bay area, Cat and Stephanie had to be seen.

Cat Allman speaks to students at the launch of the 2016 Calico Challenge

Collette and Jordan discussed their roles with Palisadoes and the progress of the Calico Challenge. They wanted to know how Jamaicans at Google and the Open Source community could become more involved with the Calico. There was also discussions of how to keep volunteers engaged with their Palisadoes outreach.

An interesting point of discussion was that the Open Source community has had difficulty in attracting women coders with only an estimated 5%-10% participation rate. Collette and Jordan spoke about 80% of university classes being attended by women in Jamaica and that it would be a good talent pool to recruit for Open Source participation and beyond.

The informal link between the Palisadoes Foundation and the Google GSoC team continues to strengthen. Googlers have begun to reach out to us to find possible ways to assist.

There are many roles available for volunteers interested in helping the Palisadoes Foundation, most take only an hour or two per week. Contact us for more details.