Elastic Announces Recipients of 2018 Elastic Cause Awards

The Elastic Cause Awards are part of Elastic's expanding philanthropic mission, which will continue to grow to further benefit nonprofits using the Elastic Stack. Now in its second year, the Cause Awards included nominations from dozens of organizations working to advance the human condition, improve the environment or help a local, regional or global population in need. Judges included Elastic Founder and CEO Shay Banon, VP of Human Resources Leah Sutton and a panel of Elastic developer, product, and customer experts, who evaluated entries based on their impact, altruism, and reach. Each of the selected project teams received complimentary conference tickets and hotel stay for up to two project members and will be featured in various events at Elastic{ON} 2018.

"When we started Elastic, I knew our software products could be used to help developers solve critical use cases within their organizations, but I never anticipated the impact it would have on solving humanitarian, and environment issues around the globe," said Banon. "I'm inspired by the life-changing initiatives we've learned about through this year's Elastic Cause Awards, and humbled by the small part we play in making it possible."

Dimagi

Dimagi is helping to fight the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic in India—which accounts for 23 percent of TB cases worldwide—with an integrated mobile and web application that helps healthcare workers keep track of TB patients. Built on Dimagi's software platform, CommCare, the app leverages the Elastic Stack to follow beneficiaries from the time of their initial diagnosis and throughout the course of their care, providing actionable data throughout. The app currently aggregates real-time data to track 150,000 patients in select districts.

"Every three minutes in India, two people die of tuberculosis. It's an epidemic needing immediate attention and innovative solutions," said Farid Rener, senior engineer, Dimagi. "We believe that mobile solutions can transform the efficiency, quality and impact of service delivery programs. By combining our mobile data collection platform with the power of the Elastic Stack, we are improving the efficiency that workers can follow-up with patients, and giving government decision makers a more accurate and timely view of the efficacy of current programs."

Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières)

Libraries Without Borders facilitates free, open access to information and education, equipping vulnerable communities around the world with the tools and skills to learn and to thrive. The organization is rolling out digital libraries (KoomBook) as well as portable, "pop up" digital media centers (Ideas Box) that provide educational and cultural resources to communities in need, including refugees and displaced persons in camps around the globe and underserved communities in developed countries. Log analysis and dashboards delivered through the Elastic Stack provide instantaneous insight into digital resource usage and users' browsing habits and interests, enabling the organization to more effectively assess impact and relevance, and improve the user experience.

"The Elastic Stack's capacity to process various raw logs while at the same time generating appealing visuals perfectly matches our needs," said Steven Walliman, Digital Projects Manager, Bibliothèques Sans Frontières. "In providing the IT team with a better view of performance and stability, and librarians with the ability to measure relevance of their choices, the Elastic Stack enhances the impact of our projects. We look forward to deepening the links between our two organizations as we make good on our vision to empower vulnerable populations and transform the lives of millions people around the world."

Refugee Datathon Munich

Amidst a massive wave of support for refugees in Munich, Refugee Datathon Munich was started in autumn 2015 to provide up-to-date and reliable numbers for pro-refugee activists across Europe. The organization's software extracts statistical data on asylum seekers from official websites, then relies on the Elastic Stack to visualize the data before publishing the information. The software helps activists stay on top of current trends in asylum (e.g. approval rates by countries of origin), while serving the general public by disproving erroneous statements and biased reports about refugees.

"When we saw activists struggling with Excel to explain the refugee situation, we realized there was a need to give them more explorative power with more up-to-date data and less work," said Suny Kim, Big Data Scientist, Refugee Datathon Munich. "The Elastic Stack helps us unlock the wealth of data from Eurostat statistics and visualize the information in an interactive way. By applying the techniques and spirit of the open data community to this project, we knew we could come up with a solution that would not only change the lives of asylum seekers we were in direct contact with, but also have an impact a broader humanitarian crisis."

Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children

Co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Every moment counts when it comes to finding and saving more kids.Thorn uses the Elastic Stack throughout its products to streamline features that help law enforcement search through millions of records and quickly find the small pieces of information to identify a child. In 2016 and 2017, Spotlight, which accelerates identification of child victims of sex trafficking, helped identify 5,791 child sex trafficking victims (eight per day.) Thorn's other product, Solis, has been used by law enforcement in 17 countries and has rescued 72 victims of child sexual abuse whose images were being distributed on the dark web.

"It's by partnering with leading technology companies like Elastic that we're able to build cutting-edge tools that find child sexual abuse victims faster, make online environments safer, and deter criminal behavior," said Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn. "Working at the intersection of child sexual abuse and technology, we know technology is powerful, and we choose to use it for good — to successfully fight child sex trafficking and other online trafficking."

Elastic Cause Award finalists include:

• Action Network: helping progressive organizations target advocacy and outreach
• CBC Radio: enabling the discovery of new and emerging music artists in all genres
• Factr: facilitating global problem solving with collaborative intelligence streams
• Mark43: reducing violent crime through better software
• Internet of Things for Disaster Risk Reduction (IoT-DRR): reducing disaster risk through monitoring and analyzing smart rainwater tanks and river water levels
• University of Bristol: facilitating the application of Mendelian randomization
• US NAVY: protecting sailors and soldiers of the US Navy through cybersecurity
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech): monitoring watersheds for environmental and agricultural stakeholders
• weblyzard Technology: creating an environmental web intelligence portal for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to identify opinion leaders and structure the public debate by topic and geographic location
• Zebra Medical Vision: curating clinical and algorithmic datasets

Learn More

• Elastic Cause Awards blog
• Elastic{ON} 2018
• Elastic Cause Awards