Elastic Volunteering Time Off

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 and following months). I also spent a few days working on some admin tasks for the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and I’ve already written here about a couple sessions I did for Cibervoluntarios, training seniors and teens about safe browsing and email.

Last week I was showcased 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 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). 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.

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.

I know I haven’t updated this site in a while, I’ll write one soon! 😅