Palisadoes: Calico Summer Student Internships

[palisadoes]

Palisadoes, (http://www.palisadoes.org) a Jamaica Diaspora initiative has launched the Calico program where students residing in Jamaica will have the opportunity to receive paid internships to work over the summer on a variety of open source projects. We currently have the support of the UWI Computing society, the Utech IEEE Student Branch and both local and international companies interested in tapping the talent pool.

Calico is closely modeled on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), whose team we have already contacted. We are working on making Calico a feeder program into GSoC. The aim is to promote Jamaica's high tech talent in the international market by partnering with a known success.

1. Calico will be fully funded by donations from interested Jamaicans and their companies. The amount of funding dictates the number of students we can fund. I'd like to solicit the forum's members to determine the best way to get donations either from companies in Jamaica or overseas.
2. I'd also like to get suggestions on how best to promote our FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ pages to spread awareness. Of course, the more people that mention it, the better.

Any suggestions or comments would be welcome.

[Chris]

Hi Peter - so in a nutshell my understanding is that the non-profit organization is seeking sponsors to offer a stipend to student programmers during the summer for specific coding challenges that they work on?

[palisadoes]

Yes, that's the primary challenge. Donations directly impact the number of stipends we can provide. The aim is to sponsor 20 students in Summer 2016 with a contribution of about US$1,500 per student.

Benefits would include:

1. training seminars on how to code for open source,
2. access to mentors in the open source community to provide guidance,
3. video conference calls with our advisory team of software engineers working for global web companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Dropbox

We also aiming to get participation recognized as contributing to coursework by at least some tertiary institutions.

Sponsorship will be key. We have at least four corporate sponsors so far, and a few individual donors, and we have many more to go.

I'd welcome any introductions to persons interested in providing assistance either as volunteers or donors.

It's a good cause.

[Chris]

That's a decent contribution per student that I'm sure many students would love to take up. I would also love to hear from others how to spread the word.

[Chris]

Just following up on this - any updates or takers? I hate to see opportunities like these squandered.

[palisadoes]

Things are progressing well. An opens source symposium is slated for February 11, with a Calico / Google Summer of Code meetup scheduled for the 18th. There will be three workshops showing students how to use git, the basics of the Linux CLI and the two open source projects we'll be working on over the summer. The ground work is being done all by students in JA. We are seeking sponsorships for up to 10 students

[Chris]

I received this email and thought to post it as a FYI.

Calico Launch on Thursday (February 18)
Hello,

This is an E-Mail notification for the launch of the Palisadoes pilot program Calico!

The launch will take place at a Google Summer of Code meetup this Thursday February 18 from 2:00PM – 4:00PM hosted by the UWI Mona Computing Society at the Computing Lecture Room in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the UWI Mona campus.

Calico is a program modeled on Google’s Summer of Code which offers post-secondary students around the world a chance to earn money by writing software code and learning about open source development, while being guided by a mentor.


Thank you for your continued support,
Palisadoes Team
info@palisadoes.org

[pezz]

I received this email and thought to post it as a FYI.

Hopefully people will take advantage of this.