Our Mission – COMMON Education Foundation

As technology continues to evolve at an exponential rate, so does the demand for IT professionals. This growing need presents an unprecedented opportunity for students to embark upon an educational track to prepare them for a professional career in Information Technology.

The COMMON Education Foundation (CEF) is providing pathways to engage and educate a new generation of IT talent. One of CEF’s primary missions is to nurture the development and growth of future IT professionals who will manage and support the computing systems of tomorrow. CEF’s strategy is to encourage students and individuals (including those who have business experience and are considering career changes) to seek careers in the information technology industry, while providing them with supplementary educational opportunities along the way.

2019 Student Innovation Award Winner

The 2019 CEF Student Innovation Winner is Calvin Buckley of New Brunswick Community College. Calvin was able to attend POWERUp 2019 with his father and present on his award winning project.

A friend, knowing that Calvin was familiar with Mono codebase and had attempted port of it to another operating system, suggested Calvin try to make the port to the IBM i system. Calvin jumped into the project. During the project, Calvin ran into issues with the numerous endian and JIT issues but was able to solve the problems with a little help with a cooperative upstream and his own enjoyment of unfamiliar code.

Thanks to Calvin's hard work and innovation, the IBM i platform can now run the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework. It enables both a new class of developers and a new set of solutions. This will surely bring value to the IBM i community for years to come!