Staff at Australian tech company, Atlassian, are offered 5 days of paid volunteer time to give their skills to the not-for-profit organisation of their choice, as part of the Atlassian Foundation’s ‘Giving Back’ initiative.

Not for profit organisations register projects via the Atlassian portal on Benevity, and then Atlassian staff skills and interests are matched with projects.

In July this year, the Institute was thrilled to hear from Atlassian staff member Sam Leatherdale, who was interested in gifting his full-stack software engineering skills to the development our Low Carbon Living calculator.

Over 5 days in August, Sam worked closely with Dr John McKibbin, the founder of the Ecologic app that powers our calculator, on several exciting new features that will help the Low Carbon Living program.

These new developments included:
- a new interface for partner professionals and suppliers to create a team account
- a new interface for suppliers to create product / service offers
- a new interface for partners to review and approve product / service offers

Dr John McKibbin was delighted by the opportunity to work with a skilled Atlassian developer on ideas that had been in the wish-list pipeline for some time.

”Thanks to Sam for the intensive 5 days he spent working on this for us. These new features will help us scale the program and work better with partners, which we see as essential to the continued success of the program.”

Sam Leatherdale was also happy with his project of choice, saying:
”I had a very positive experience during this volunteering! Working on the calculator was definitely the right fit for me, it’s a really cool product being built with the latest technologies, and it turned out to be tech that I was very familiar with, so I was able to get to work with only a little induction.”

The Institute wholeheartedly thanks Sam and Atlassian for the generous gift of time and valuable skills. We hope to be able to work with Sam and Atlassian again in the future.

LEARN MORE

The Low Carbon Living calculator is freely available to households to use to calculate their carbon footprint, and take action to reduce both costs and emissions related to their use of energy, water, transport and waste.

Businesses are encouraged to join the Low Carbon Living program and integrate use of the business version of the calculator to help reduce costs and carbon emissions related to their use of energy, waste, water and transport.