Community is at the center of two of our 5 core beliefs as a company:

1. We are a company in service of a community in service of a movement.
2. We build building blocks for builders.

Our open source community is our most important asset, above even our protocol and products. As a central part of the dweb movement, we believe in open, collaborative, and composale development. We’ve seen firsthand how rapidly a strong and engaged community can innovate, far outpacing what a single team can do itself.

Everyone on the team spends time with the community, we regularly sponsor projects or hire from the community, and everything we build is designed with the community in mind. We regularly host community calls, work in the open in Discord, and routinely host hackathons and other events.

Our vision is to build a fairer future by providing a better understanding of the past.

We believe that past mistakes shouldn’t determine future job prospects. Our team works with several organizations focused on re-entry and education programs operating inside prisons. We have an internal committee, Bounce Back To Work, that meets weekly to focus on outreach and collaboration with different organizations across the country, helping get people with criminal records back into the job market. Every quarter, a few engineers volunteer to help teach valuable software and coding skills to inmates at San Quentin, helping them earn 30x more money than with the typical manufacturing jobs available while incarcerated.

Fostering community is at the core of who we are as individuals and a company.

Our mission is to build strong communities that deliver stellar member experiences, so businesses can quantify the impact and become the next generation of community and Developer Relations leaders.

We’re currently a small team and each of us has deep ties to community engagement. Our co-founders Patrick and Josh have contributed to developer communities at companies like Algolia and Keen IO. Josh also maintains various open source projects and regularly speaks at community events. Together, they created the Orbit Model, an open source framework that helps organizations measure and grow their communities.

Nicolas, a software engineer based in Paris, expanded his engineering skill set thanks to community sharing of videos, online courses, and other content. He was driven to give back and started writing blogs, speaking at meetups, and attending conferences. This led him to found JAMstack Paris, a meetup group for dev engineers where he met Josh.

Alex is a junior software engineer who spent all of 2020 building her coding skills with the goal of making a career transition into web development. Along the way, she built a community by documenting her journey and blogging about her progress, as well as starting a podcast and email newsletter for other creative women along their own coding journeys. She's also a mentor for other early-career developers at The Collab Lab.

Chance is a senior software engineer based in San Francisco, CA. After spending the past five years building developer tools for companies like Librato, he’s convinced in the importance of growing developer communities. He believes the purpose of software is solving actual problems for people and will always advocate on behalf of the user.

At Orbit, we talk a lot about value capture versus value creation, with the goal being to encourage the latter. Patrick created the podcast Developer Love, to unpack how to build successful developer communities. Check out episode 6, where Patrick interviews Tim O’Reilly and discusses why it’s so important to create as much value as possible.

While COVID-19 has accelerated the remote-first trend, it’s one that is here to stay. You can now be part of a community regardless of where you are physically, which makes the work at Orbit more pressing than ever before. Engineers who join the team should be similarly passionate about engaging in the community and excited about helping businesses do so on an even larger scale. If that sounds like you, definitely reach out!

We celebrate diversity in our community.

Part of what makes SmugMug and Flickr so unique is our incredibly diverse community. The Flickr Commons represents our commitment to increasing access to publicly-held photography collections and encouraging public information sharing around these often historical and culturally significant works. We spotlight the different life experiences of our members regularly, such as celebrating Black photographers during Black History Month and the women who make our community so vibrant during International Women’s Month. We amplify under-represented voices and highlight their work via hashtags like #ThroughHerLens and features on our Explore page year-long. SmugMug Films spotlights the photographers who amaze and inspire us. Our podcast, The Photography Lounge, features conversations with inspirational photographers such as Jill Heinerth on underwater exploration photography, Lou Noble on portrait photography, and many others.

Still, it’s not enough to celebrate our community – we actively work to protect them. Our Trust & Safety team proactively strives to keep our platforms free of hate speech. With more people spending time online at home, the pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the online enticement of children. As part of our effort to eliminate Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) from the internet, we partner closely with organizations including Thorn and The Technology Coalition to ensure we’re leveraging the best technology available and continuing to improve our success in the fight against CSAM and other illegal content. You can learn more about the actions we’re taking here.

Finally, we encourage team members to participate in and give back to their communities around the world. We offer unique volunteer opportunities and encourage employees to spend some (work) time engaging in meaningful community service. For example, our teams have volunteered at coding camps in underserved communities and donated time to programs like Techtonica.

Money is personal and people aren’t algorithms, which is why education is key.

We’re an inclusive community and strongly believe our services shouldn’t be off-limits to people in need. For instance, during the height of the pandemic, we paused membership dues for those affected. We also have an awesome puzzle wall of donations and we give those funds to clients who need a little extra help.

In addition to 1-on-1 education through our formal training sessions, we also engage with the community by regularly hosting educational and fun meetups and events (which are open to anyone, not just clients) at our HQ in NYC. These events will also take place at our new LA, DC, and Brooklyn offices. For example, our “Wine and Learn” events include topics like Investing 101, The Art of Travel Hacking, and How to Meal Prep on a Budget. While they’ve been remote during COVID-19, we hope to be back in-person as soon as it’s safe to do so.

We also have monthly “Regional FinFit Group” meetups in various cities at bars or coworking spaces (again virtual for now). These are run by enthusiastic clients (anyone who wants to raise their hand) and we reimburse them for the costs. Engineers are more than welcome to participate in these events, in-person and remotely.

Finally, we also offer resources on our blog including articles about how to maximize your credit card perks and why you should still save for travel (even if you can’t go anywhere right now). You can also check out Martinis and Your Money, a podcast hosted by our CEO Shannon McLay, which covers topics like how to crush student loan debt and entrepreneurship. In particular, we recommend checking out the “Financially Naked” episodes (one of the podcast’s most popular series), which mimics what a client’s very first session with their trainer would be like. It’s a great place to start if you’re curious about how our mission can help people from all walks of life. We recommend this episode featuring Sean, one of our full-stack software developers.

Community is at the core of what we do.

We believe that no one is powerless and making change can be a part of everyday life. Change.org is an open platform that gives a voice to a wide range of perspectives so people everywhere can take action on the issues they care about. Every campaign you see on our platform is started by people in our community – people in your community. People and organizations around the world use Change.org to start campaigns, mobilize supporters, and work with decision makers to drive solutions. To that end, our campaign teams located in many different countries work directly with petition starters to provide them with the tools and support they need to amplify the impact in their local community or worldwide.

The passion for the product and the work we do at Change.org is contagious! We’re dedicated to making a meaningful impact on the world and it shows. Our weekly all team meetings, where employees from around the world call in, are just one of the many moments we get to celebrate victories from our petition starters and the work of our campaign teams on a regular basis.

You’ll interact directly with users and decide what we build to best serve our community.

Building a successful open source project is more than just writing code – it’s also about building an engaged and satisfied community. As a Founding Engineer at Grouparoo, not only will you be writing code, but you’ll also share your work with the community and determine what to build next. Everyone at Grouparoo interacts with our users and helps build our community. takes many forms. Whether it’s via blogging, conference talks, solving customer issues, or supporting their deployments, you’ll have a hand in crafting our community tools and platforms as we grow.

We see ourselves as denizens of a broader community.

As a company, we want to recognize the role tech plays in a greater context and create inclusive communities both internally and for our customers. We identify as denizens – part of the local and national community – working to protect privacy by making data access safe and secure for everyone. While this is our company’s mission and focus, we also want to do more. As a team, we commit time and effort to initiatives to help people vote, help run infrastructure for COVID-19 research, and have thoughtful company holidays like Election Day.

Our dedication to serving our greater community is something we’ve bonded over. Before we worked together on Indent, we collaborated on privacy-first tools to help people find their polling place and a ballot tool that encrypted your data so no one else could see your ballot. We helped around 3 million people get out to vote with Vote.org in 2018. While we’re no longer working on voter participation tools, this experience served as a launching point for how we can make products and decisions that align our business initiatives with meaningful improvements to the privacy of so many people.

Trade-offs: As a team, we participate in our communities and do what we can to advocate for accessible privacy as a right. We see our product as the sum of our abilities, perspectives, and beliefs to help restore trust in tech.

Our sense of community extends far beyond the walls of Instacart.

From an engineering perspective, we love talking about what we’re working on with the greater engineering community. We share best practices at our SF HQ and our Toronto engineering hubs; host popular podcasts (Kaushik Gopal, Senior Staff Engineer, is the co-host of the Android podcast, Fragmented); speak at and host multiple meetups a quarter (Women Who Code, RLadies, Bay Area Python, etc); demo and speak at conferences (Lesbians Who Tech, Pycon, DroidCon, ElastiCon, Collision); and regularly contribute to open source projects (Coil, Lore, Jardin, TrueTime, and more).

On the social impact front, we aim to nourish our communities by helping remove barriers to food access and providing grocery delivery to the most vulnerable of populations. All full-time employees do a shopper shift as a part of their New Hire Orientation and the pay rate for these shifts are automatically donated to Feeding America (a hunger relief organization). We also have Volunteer Time (we do an annual week of service at key times where support and volunteers are needed). Lastly, we also donate groceries to communities in times of need. For example, in 2018, we donated food and supplies to the firehouses in Butte County and LA County during the California Wildfires.

We’re always looking for feedback from our creators about how we can make their lives better.

Our mission is to empower everyone to build the internet, so it’s imperative that we listen closely to our creators. Our support lead Braley tracks things she’s hearing from the frontlines and compiles them to share every Monday during our all-hands kickoff call. These insights directly impact our product roadmap and the features we focus on. We also love seeing the passion people have for our product. A great example of this is when we brought on Braden – one of our most avid supporters who also happens to be a high school student – to join us part-time on our dedicated support team, after he reached out repeatedly to share his ideas. (And after spending some time with us, he’s expanded his role into our first engineering intern!)

When COVID-19 hit, we saw a huge influx of new creators, many of whom were now relying on Universe as a path to starting a business and generating income after losing a job in the pandemic. In addition to massively expanding our commerce tools (including the download block and shopping cart), we’ve now launched a lightweight, browser-based interface to build links in bios. We have many more exciting things coming up to continue serving our community of creators.

We are active members in our local communities in Colorado Springs.

Our CTO, Patrick, runs the local JavaScript meetup in Colorado Springs, where they discuss and engage in all things Web Dev once a month. Our engineers are encouraged to attend any conference they’re interested in, too. These are great opportunities to learn and share best practices with our greater community, and to network with our peers.

BombBomb also has a dedicated philanthropy twist. We have strong partnerships with local organizations like Mary's Home and Springs Rescue Mission (both of which focus on rehumanizing those who have been dehumanized in our community) and we offer 2 hours of Volunteer Time Off (VTO) every quarter. Every year, we participate in big events like helping Mary’s Home build a garden or participating in “trunk or treat” for their kiddos.

We are more motivated by impact than money.

Given our strong ties to WordPress and Tumblr, participating and making an impact in the web community has always been at the forefront of working at Automattic. One community-building staple: WordCamp, informal conferences organized locally by people in the WordPress community. Automatticians regularly attend, speak, or volunteer to help organize WordCamp, and if there isn’t a WordCamp within 60 miles/100 kilometers, we cover expenses for attending.

Automatticians getting involved in local or global communities, for software developers and beyond, including Head of Mobile Eli Budelli speaking at try! Swift, and JS Engineer Lena Morita, serving as a Director of the Tokyo chapter of Woman Who Code.

Giving back to the developer community — on WordPress and beyond — is a greater priority today than ever before in our company’s history. Understanding and improving diversity of all types in our hiring and team composition has taken center stage. We’re proud to share our recent study of how technical women can best navigate their careers, but that’s only a beginning. We work on diversity and inclusion each day, whether it’s participating in Mindset Month (a 6-module video series) with our partners at the CoachDiversity Institute, supporting internal committees, or continually iterating our approach to diversity and inclusion.

We encourage everyone to write blogs, give talks, and contribute to the community in any way.

Our team members speak at conferences all over the country including Railsconf, ElixirConf, QCon, O’Reilly, Strangeloop, SXSW, Lean Startup Conference, LeadDev Conference, among many others. Public speaking allows you to distill your knowledge into something that is accessible to others, become a part of the greater community, and mentor and inspire others in the community. We also provide assistance for travel. For example, one of our engineers, Anna, is on the board of RailsBridge and runs ElixirBridge, and we fly her around the country to do Elixir workshops on the weekends.

To many team members at Carbon Five, speaking at conferences is important on a personal level. Courtney, who supports a variety of initiatives like Railsbridge, Women Who Code, and Balanced Team, says, “I think seeing women on stage speaking about something that they know showcases that there is a body of work that a diverse set of humans is responsible for. To me, that is the greatest opposing argument to the anti-diversity mindset. Plus, it’s just fun.”

Locally, we also sponsor Meetups, speaker series, and hack nights that are open to the community. Check out our talks and events, you’re always welcome to attend.

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the community here.

The business landscape in Oakland is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and in the rest of Silicon Valley, and we like being a part of it. Oakland as a city is community-driven and grassroots. We embrace the diversity that exists in Oakland. We aim to leave our mark on the city through mentorship, creating jobs, and donations to local grassroots organizations.

We host monthly Coffee and Code meetups for the Oakland chapter of Girl Develop It. We’re partnering with Code Nation for annual summer internship programs. Code Nation equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. We highly recommend other companies to participate!

We empower our employees to come up with creative opportunities for diversity initiatives and community events to promote growth and education for all individuals by making resources available and inviting the community to participate. We offer gift matching, and encourage employees to use time to contribute to the non-profits they feel most passionately about.

LaunchDarkly also joined Pledge 1%, a global movement to create a new normal for companies of all sizes and stages to have a positive social impact through their business. We are pledging 1% of revenue to charitable causes and have partnered with local Oakland nonprofits that address homelessness and poverty.

We belong to the communities we serve.

All of us are impacted by the decisions that influence how we navigate our communities. This helps us empathize as we think about how changes made in our product will affect those around us. To build the best product we can, we engage with our community to broaden our understanding of the needs of its members. This could include hosting regional workshops to connect our transit planning community to each other, starting initiatives like Womxn in Urbanism to provide space to highlight the non-dominant voices in urbanism, or simply giving back to the community through programs like the Percent Pledge. Participating in our communities is a critical part of how we stay excited and accountable for building great products.