The Palisadoes Foundation

The Palisadoes Foundation’s open-source software projects support community groups in organizing their daily activities. A significant proportion of our software contributions come from university students studying software engineering. Participants often come from under-served communities or geographic areas and are sponsored through our various programs. This prepares them for the competitive realities of the working world.

Life started for us in 2016 when a group of expatriate Jamaicans wanted to assist development of new and existing information technologies for the island’s social good. We knew academic and student leadership wanted greater practical exposure to the latest technology. In response, our pilot Calico program for Jamaican universities was created with the goal of addressing the issues graduates would face when employed.

After five years of success, members of the Jamaican diaspora suggested we expand our service area to be global. They saw similar needs in their own under-served communities where the digital divide is very visible and thought our experience in the developing world would be useful.

Since 2019 we have focused on creating a mobile app to help community organizations like ourselves better manage their membership. We saw the need for a social media component to keep in contact with our volunteers. We also felt these organizations often faced challenges with the project management of events and keeping track of volunteer abilities, roles, and responsibilities.

We want to make the app useful for any community-based organization such as clubs, small religious institutions, neighborhood groups, and volunteer associations. We also want to see how the open-source software could be installed as a multi-tenant, multi-site cloud hosted service as many of these organizations often don’t have sufficient IT skills to do so independently. We hope that our contributors will help us achieve this goal.