Apply for an Elastic{ON} Opportunity Grant Today!
For the past few years, our developer relations team has been running an informal scholarship program of sorts to help folks from underrepresented groups in technology attend Elastic{ON}. Last year, this program brought ten individual scholarship attendees from five different organizations to the conference. Hearing their perspectives on Elastic{ON} and learning about the insights they took home when the conference wrapped inspired us to step up our scholarship game, and the Elastic{ON} 2018 Opportunity Grant was born.
Recipients of the Elastic{ON} Opportunity Grant may be eligible to receive a highly discounted ticket to Elastic{ON}, 2–3 complimentary nights at the conference hotel, and a grant to help cover travel costs. If you want to come to Elastic{ON} but need some help to get there, we hope you'll check out the grant page and consider applying. Diversity is one of the core values in our company and in our open source community. We hope this grant will bring voices that otherwise might not have been heard to our conference this year.
To give you an idea of what we hope this grant will do, here are several stories from our Elastic{ON} 2017 scholarship attendees:
Karen, Bek, Jimmy, and Pedro were all pursuing medical research at Mike Cherry's Stanford Lab. With an Elastic{ON} scholarship, all four computer scientists were able to attend Elastic{ON} 2017. They left with a lot of new ideas and strategies for merging the future of their research with the future of the Elastic Stack. As Karen put it, "Getting ideas for communicating the value of time and resource investments we'll want to make for upgrading to 5.x is incredibly valuable."
As a web developer at KQED (the public radio station of Northern California), Cynthia Chen was part of a team using Elasticsearch to improve search on the radio station's archive site. With a scholarship, she and her colleague Marc attended Elastic{ON} 2017, diving deep into all the new Elastic Stack features coming down the pipeline and planning for future projects. "I want to be intellectually stimulated and continually grow throughout my career," she said. Attending Elastic{ON} 2017 was the next step in her team's journey with Elasticsearch.
As the founder of Citizen Audit, Miguel Barbosa runs a website that uses Elasticsearch to power full-text search of nonprofit records (like tax documents) to create detailed reports. A scholarship brought him to Elastic{ON} 2017, where he could take his toughest questions to the Ask Me Anything booth. "I learned more than I ever could have on my own," he said. Talking through the best way to set up his servers, clusters, and overall architecture gave him ideas for dramatically speeding up search functionality on his site.
Anna Wendt from Eastern Michigan University started working with Elasticsearch on a side-project for her internship. Her motivation to attend the conference was to strengthen her technical skills with the Elastic Stack. Read more about her experience in Anna's blog post.
Needa Lin, a Data Engineer for the non-profit organization USRA (Universities Space Research Association), which primarily works with NASA to develop search tools for EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) data for the International Space Station. After Elastic{ON} 2017, Needa mentioned her team was excited to use Kibana to visualize the ISS data for the very first time. Read more about Needa's experience at Elastic{ON}.
If the stories of last year's scholarship recipients inspired you and sparked your interest in Elastic{ON}, we encourage you to apply for an Opportunity Grant by filling out the application. Applicants must be 18 years or older and must belong to a group that is underrepresented in the technology industry. If you're not sure if you qualify, we recommend you apply anyway. Applications must be submitted by December 1, 2017 in order to be considered.
A selection committee will review each application and will inform applicants regarding the status of their application by January 5, 2018. Grants are awarded based on a combination of need and impact. Submitting an application does not guarantee a grant will be awarded.
For more information, please visit this website.