Smart campus Initiative continues to Garner Praise
08 October 2021
On Tuesday, the campus received much acclaim when one of its network engineers, David Smith, was interviewed by Software engineer at Microsoft, Dona Sarkar during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021. The interview reflected on PowerBarbados 2020, a tech-forum hosted by the campus in partnership with Microsoft, last December.
Last year’s two-day workshop, which include a hackathon, gave young people across the globe an opportunity to develop app-based solutions to organisational challenges at various businesses and institutions.
At this week’s forum Sarkar had high praise for Smith’s work in spearheading the tech event and told the virtual audience she looked forward to Power Barbados 2021 being staged later this year.
“David is one of the most extraordinary people I’ve met in the Power Platform community because he not only learned Power Platform, he brought it to his university, his island and now we have a secret goal of growing a huge community of Power addicts and MVPs (most valuable professional) in the Caribbean region.
“David started this movement and he actually started a very interesting project for us called one Power addict in every country in the world, where we want to find a David-like person in every country in the world to work with you to organise local events, understand local context etc.,” Sarkar said.
Reflecting on PowerBarbados 2020, Smith noted he was proud of the organisers’ success in staging the event.
“[It was an achievement] to be able to do something like that in the midst of a pandemic. Even though in person we were constrained [in that] we could fit [only] 25 to 30 people in the room … by incorporating [Microsoft] Teams live we ended up with about 300 people. Then we had about 13 teams in the hackathon of which nine, I think, were virtual. So the ability to do that and have that energy coming from both the people in the room and the people online worked out very well,” he said.
Highlighting to the usefulness of the Power platform, Smith added that a team of engineering colleagues at Cave Hill, who did not participate in the workshop, are currently working on app-based innovative solutions to solve problems on campus as they prepare for PowerBarbados 2021.
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