Elastic Volunteering Time Off

Jorge Sanz | 2024-07-23 | 306 words | work, geo, community

♻ Repost

Elasticians give back to causes they care about — without taking PTO

by Elastic Culture

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My employer, Elastic, has a number of philanthropic initiatives but definitely the one I love the most is the Volunteering Time Off (VTO). We are given 40 hours per year from our working hours to contribute to projects and initiatives we care about. Employees have full freedom to choose what they want to do with that time and are encouraged to use it.

In my case, over this almost 5 years I have to admit I haven't used **all** that time every year but I tried to get the most of it. During COVID I did some remote work for a local NGO that works for fair trade, giving them a webinar about Open Source among other things (see update from [December 2019]({{< relref "../2019/2019-12.md">}}) and following months). I also spent a few days working on some admin tasks for the Open Source Geospatial Foundation[1] and I've already [written here]({{< relref "../2023/2023-01-14-email-training.md" >}}) about a couple sessions I did for Cibervoluntarios, training seniors and teens about safe browsing and email.

1: https://osgeo.org

Last week I was showcased[2] in the company blog, along with other colleagues, on different projects to contribute to. In my case, last year I joined the mapping efforts after the Morocco Earthquake[3] and took a full day mapping roads and streets of a rural area, as part of the coordinated efforts from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team (reported on my [October community update]({{< relref "../2023/2023-10.md">}})). I'm very happy to have this support from my employer to leave things aside when an emergency like this arises, granted there are no other urgent issues at work.

2: https://www.elastic.co/blog/culture-elasticians-vto-benefit

3: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2023_Morocco_Earthquake

As a personal call to action, I'd love to get back to Cibervoluntarios activities. This year has been quite busy; let's see after summer if there's room for getting out and engaging with them.