Announcing the Elastic Contributor Program
Open source contributions are foundational to Elastic — from Elasticsearch’s Apache Lucene core to the addition of open source Logstash and Kibana to form the Elastic Stack you’ve come to know and love. Over the years, the Elastic community has created over 90 Beats, shared use case tutorials like those from Volvo, T-Mobile, and Microsoft, and presented at hundreds upon hundreds of meetups. We created the Elastic Contributor Program, which we kicked off with a successful pilot year in Brazil, to recognize and reward the hard work of our awesome contributors, encourage knowledge sharing within the Elastic community, and build friendly competition around contributions. And, now, we’re excited to announce that the program will launch globally on September 1.
Participants in the pilot cited the opportunity to share knowledge and give back to the community as the key motivators for taking part in the program. These contributors are active members of their local communities — frequently organizing and presenting at meetups and conferences — and they value sharing their knowledge of the stack and contributing to the global Elastic community by recording video tutorials and engaging with Elastic users worldwide. Participants also shared that they were able to take the knowledge they gained during the program and apply it towards their personal and career growth goals.
"Elastic has contributed both directly and indirectly to my personal and professional growth since I started my career back in 2016. When I was just starting out, there wasn’t much content for beginners here in the community in Brazil, so I had to start from zero and teach myself. I wanted to help out the community, so I developed two projects to help new users get started. I feel so grateful to have been able to take part in the Elastic Contributor Program and help out other people on their own journeys, their own learning processes." – Felipe Queiroz, Gold contributor
During the pilot program, we received 443 submissions from 41 community members, of whom 18 were recognized as Bronze contributors, 9 as Silver contributors, and 3 as Gold contributors. Recognized contributors received swag, extended Elastic Cloud trials, training passes, and ElasticON São Paulo tickets. In March of this year, we also invited the Gold contributors to join us at ElasticON San Francisco. In addition to enjoying ElasticON, Gold contributors had the opportunity to visit our Mountain View office, meet with one of our solutions architects, and explore Silicon Valley on a day trip.
The pilot was a great success — Elastic User Group membership doubled in Brazil over the course of the program, and we saw an uptick in community submissions from the region. These community submissions even helped us to address our number one dev request in the Elastic UI Framework (EUI): to convert 100% of EUI components to TypeScript. Thanks to submissions from our community, many of them from Brazil, we’re going to be able to accomplish this massive task much sooner than expected.
All community members can take part in the newly launched global program, and a wide range of contributions are accepted. Here’s how it works: Points are awarded for code contributions, presentations, organizing events, and more. The top 30 contributors from each program region will be recognized. Winners will be announced for each region in March 2021.
Please refer to the program guidelines to determine if you’re eligible to participate. Thank you for being a part of the Elastic community — we’ll see you on the leaderboard!