Bangalore, Karnataka, India - 14 Mar 2019: At the IBM India Developer Day, the company’s annual developer conference in India, IBM in co-operation with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Nasscom announced ‘India Developer Champions’, a new multi-year program that recognizes developer contributions to the open source community.

 

The program will create a single, unified platform to acknowledge outstanding developer work in open source, the key driving force behind groundbreaking technologies that are impacting millions of lives every day in India and around the world. Developers are today's engine of innovation in business and society and IBM expects thousands of nominations from individual developers, as well as those from enterprises and startups.

 

IBM Developer Day is a day-long event designed for developers to enhance their skills and gain hands-on experience with the latest open source technologies including Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Data & Analytics and Quantum. In her opening keynote, Chairman, President and CEO, Ginni Rometty reaffirmed IBM’s commitment to open source technologies and the ecosystem it supports while asserting three guiding principles: open governance, open collaboration and giving back to the open source community.

‘’IBM wants to put a spotlight on the 23 million developers and data scientists in the world who work across industries and who, through their creativity and skill, are making a real difference to society,” said Bob Lord, IBM Senior Vice President, Cognitive Applications and Developer Ecosystems. “The IBM Developer Champions program will help shine a light on the significant contributions coming from open source developers in India – a massively-important market.’’

Commenting on the initiative, Shri. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister - Electronics and Information Technology and Law and Justice said: "India’s software and technology industry has scaled great heights and we have the fastest growing concentration of software developers in the world. The Software Product Policy 2019 will further boost the demand for developers and India as a software product power can create 3.5 million jobs by 2025. It’s time to recognize, reward and showcase the developers who are making the vision of Digital India a reality."

“We are witnessing remarkable growth in the ecosystem propelled by innovative thinking where technology plays a revolutionary role. We believe that our association with IBM will not only catalyze the developer community but will also help design path-breaking solutions for disaster management and preparedness for society at large." KS Viswanathan, Vice President (Industry Initiatives), NASSCOM, Bangalore.

At IBM India Developer Day today, the company also announced another new program, Girls of Code, and the extension of existing initiatives, Call for Code and Code and Response, for developers and the tech ecosystem in India:

• Girls of Code – Early this week, IBM announced a collaboration with state governments across India to prepare 200,000+ girls and women in government schools over the next three years for “new collar” jobs through the exploration and study of STEM subjects in classrooms and online. A subset of this program, ‘Girls of Code’ will provide 50,000 top-performing female students a unique opportunity to participate in coding challenges and ‘Code and Response’ hackathons.
• Code and Response – In its first year of Code and Response, IBM announced that it will pilot Project Owl, the winning solution from Call for Code 2018, in disaster-struck regions like Kerala, Puerto Rico, North Carolina and Osaka. IBM’s Code and Response is a $25 million, four-year global deployment initiative to put open source technologies developed as part of coding challenges such as Call for Code in the communities where they are needed most. Code and Response includes resources to build, fortify, test, and implement solutions at scale -- including through the IBM Corporate Service Corps.
• Call for Code – Registrations for the 2019 round of the Call for Code Global Challenge are open. Call for Code is the largest and most ambitious effort bringing start-up, academic and enterprise developers together to leverage cloud, data and AI to develop technologies that improve health and community well-being for those impacted by natural disasters.

 

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