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.

A common thread through all of us is a desire to make a tangible impact on real people.

At Alto, we have an overarching desire to “help the world,” and tackle an outrageously high medication non-adherence rate (the rate at which people don’t take their medication properly, or at all). However, we are largely motivated and inspired by connecting with the individuals we’re trying to help. That’s why we take so much pride in our Yelp reviews, have a Slack bot that posts every survey response we get from a patient, and why once a month, we volunteer at the SF Marin Food Bank. We want to be in touch with and give back to our community, personally and face-to-face. This is the common denominator across all members at Alto; we bond with one another as a result of bonding with our community, even when that means repackaging 3,000 pounds of cashews at the Food Bank.

We belong to the open source community ourselves and many of our consumers do too.

For us, there is little separation between our developer community, and ourselves. Additionally, we host Meet-ups in New York, San Francisco, and we recently announced our new meet-ups in Japan, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Bangalore. We hosted a Blockstack Summit in Berlin in March 2018, and announced the Decentralize the World Tour. (The next stop is Hong Kong!) Our larger community can be found on Github, Slack, Twitter, and our Blog, just to name a few.

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.

Our team regularly visits conferences, meetups, and other local events, sometimes also virtual events.

We try to engage with the community on to see where the development of the tools and frameworks we use will lead to, and also to exchange ideas with others. Conferences include the PHPBenelux Conference, Dutch PHP Conference, ConFoo and ZendCon. We also have a local PHP User Group in Mannheim that we support and sometimes host in our own offices. Organizing and hosting unKonf allows us to interact with, support, and help build up our community.

Last year, Stephan presented a session on NomadPHP, which is a virtual user group for developers that does not have a local user group in their area, as well as with NomadMage, a similar version but for the Magento Community. We have traveled to different user groups and conferences to demo our open source contributions as well as connect with the local communities.

At this stage, we work closely with every city planner and considering every person who uses public transit in that city. We belong to the communities we serve.

We love bringing together planners to share best practices. That’s why we’ve recently started working together with several of our customers to host Regional Workshops to connect our transit planning community to each other. We even hosted our first Bay Area Remix Training right here in our San Francisco office. When you live in a place with as many transit agencies as the Bay Area, ongoing coordination between agency staff is a critical element to provide seamless service to customers. We were joined by transit planners from seven agencies across the region including AC Transit, County Connection, Union City Transit, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, WestCat, and Santa Rosa Citybus. We spent an afternoon discussing local projects, Remix best practices, and even a bonus session on how Remix works, under the hood.

During the Remix best practices session, we opened up Remix maps in each participant’s city and talked through a project, garnering feedback from the group in terms of ideas and tips specific to Remix. The group also got to hear about a few secrets that we’ll be excited to share in more detail in just a few months.

Our relationship with our users can be best captured by how we came to hire Haris.

Haris was a PM at Curbside (a company in San Francisco), and also a Universe user. He loved the product so much and wanted to help grow the community of users who loved it as much as he did. When I, Joe, first met Haris, we weren’t hiring for a full-time community role, but after many conversations, we decided to create that role for Haris. Our 5th hire is devoted to building, supporting, and growing our community of users.

We are all users of our own product and we all interface with Universe’s other users every day. We all do customer support. We also have a tab in our app called Explore where we highlight some of the best creations from our users, and we have a lot more coming soon on this front.

What we’ve heard from our community is that they love their sites but they want more people to see them. They want to engage with other creators in our community. We’re now building out the ‘network’ side of Universe, so that creators can engage with each other and build their audiences inside of Universe.

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, Pluralsight Live, among many others. We have a group within the company called Outreach for people to help come up with ideas for talks and review talks. Speaking allows you to distill your knowledge down 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 of the developers 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.”

More locally, we also host a speaker series and hack night that is open to the community. We host many events and invite you to come.

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.

Good developers will always want to work with other good developers.

We encourage anyone here to talk in tech events and we help covering costs to make this happen. We learned from open source and now we want to give back to the current and next generation of developers, so anything built here can (and should!) be open sourced.

We are not happy with the current technical level that most events in Brazil sets, so we plan on making our own tech events and maybe even conferences to be able to spread sparse knowledge about what we and other companies built. By "sparse knowledge" we mean real life problems and solutions for large scale software.

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the business 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 a community-driven and grassroots. We often go to First Fridays every month together as a company (as it’s right down the street from our office), do our best to participate in building up Oakland’s tech community.

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’re connecting the unconnected.

Merakians take pride in giving back to our local communities and those in need all over the world. Meraki partners with Cisco’s Tactical Operations and Disaster Incident Response Teams to support public safety, continuity of government, and critical infrastructure during emergencies and disasters. A few recent disaster deployments included aid during the Northern California fires, Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey, as well as adding Wi-Fi networks and charging stations along migration routes for Syrian refugees. Our work with the international organization, NetHope, lends technical networking and problem-solving skills to communities in disaster relief and war-torn areas.

Making a difference in the world is an integral part of our culture. Meraki provides 40 VTO (volunteer time off) hours a year for you to contribute time to a cause you’re most passionate about. Meraki also encourages volunteering and fostering a sense of community through our many Employee Resource Organizations (EROs). We believe that we as a company, and as individuals, can bring forth positive change with our skills and make a real impact in our communities.

Left: employees make sandwiches for local homeless shelters. Right: Women of Meraki supplied some delicious treats for an event that they hosted!

We believe in being involved in the community and using our position to improve the places we live.

Our CEO sits on the board of a local nonprofit and every office has a budget they can use to support local causes and events they are passionate about. Our annual user group always has a raffle or donation request for a cause we believe in. Last year we asked all of our attendees to bring gloves or winter clothes for the Chill Foundation that helps inspire youth to overcome challenges through snowboarding. Learn more about how we volunteer at Inntopia!

Our mission wouldn’t be possible without regularly sharing facetime with the community.

The engineering team and executive team members all help with outreach. We have multiple Hackbright mentors, regularly volunteer together to help the elderly community, and participate in panels and conferences. For example, we recently launched our own annual conference where industry experts can share their knowledge about the aging community. This year, SAGE/2019 featured speakers with unique perspectives in their fields (doctors, policy experts, business owners, technologists, and more) came together in one room to ideate on how we can advance care that maintains dignity for the aging population. The conference was completely sold out and an important step for us to continue being leaders in what we do. You can also see a list of upcoming events featuring Honor panelists here.

We are more motivated by impact than money.

Given our strong ties to WordPress, 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 the work in diversity is just beginning. We’re working on it each day, whether it’s participating in Mindset Month (a 6-module video series) with our partners at the CoachDiversity Institute, or constantly iterating our approach to diversity and inclusion.

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.