At GitLab, we believe that every student can contribute! The GitLab for Education Program provides the top tiers of GitLab for free to students and faculty at educational institutions around the globe. We are invested in ensuring that students have access to the full functionality of GitLab while in school so they can become future contributors and evangelists of GitLab.
The GitLab for Education Program has exceeded our expectations on its own merit. As of January 2020 we reached over 740 educational institutions worldwide and have 1.4 million users.
The primary mission of the GitLab for Education Program is to facilitate and drive the adoption of GitLab at educational institutions around the globe and build an engaged community of GitLab evangelists and contributors in the next generation of the workforce.
Additionally, the Education Program seeks to evangelize the benefits of an all-remote operating model and GitLab's associated company values to the next generation of the workforce.
The goals in building out the Education Program are:
The vision of the GitLab for Education Program is to enable educational institutions to be successful in teaching, learning, conducting research with GitLab. We seek to build an engaged community of GitLab users around the world who actively contribute to GitLab and each other’s success, and ultimately become evangelists of GitLab in the workplace and beyond.
GitLab for Education Program issues typically exist in the Education Program subgroup of the Community Relations Group but they can also exist in Field Marketing, Corporate Marketing, or other marketing subgroups.
We use the education label to track issues. The Education Program issue board provides an overview of these issues and thier status. Any Epics that we are working on can be found in the Community Relations Group with the tag education.
We use Epic Boards in the Community Relations project to track our Education Program OKRs. All OKR Epics specific the Education Program have the 'education' tag.
This KPI is defined as the total number of educational institutions that are issued an educational license per quarter.
At this time we are not tracking renewals but we are looking at improving data accuracy and will include renewals on a subsequent iteration.
This KPI is defined as the total number of seats issued for all educational licenses per quarter.
In order to qualify for the GitLab for Education Program the following criteria must be met:
Be a qualified educational institution: A qualified educational institution is one that has been accredited by an authorized agency within its applicable local, state, provincial, federal, or national government and has the primary purpose of teaching its enrolled students. Qualified educational institutions can be public or private and must be non-profit/non-commercial.
Meet the use case requirements: The GitLab educational license can be used solely for the purposes of instructional use or non-commercial academic research. Instructional use includes activities related to learning, training, research and development. Non-commercial academic research includes not-for-profit research projects that are not intended to nor produce results, works, services, or data for commercial use by anyone to generate revenue. The GitLab educational license cannot be used for commercial, professional, or any other for-profit purposes.
Be a full-time faculty or staff member at the qualified educational institution: We can only issue licenses to full-time faculty or staff who are directly employed full-time at the educational institution. Students who may also be employed in a staff role cannot apply.
Please note that the decision to issue a GitLab education license is always at the discretion of GitLab. If you have questions on the application and decision making process, please reach out to education@gitlab.com.
Examples of educational institutions that qualify:
Examples of entities that do not qualify:
Examples of acceptable use cases:
Examples of non-acceptable use cases:
At this time, GitLab does not issue licenses directly to students as part of the GitLab for Education Program. Students are welcome to encourage thier educational institution to apply to the program directly. Students can access a free subscription for GitLab.com or a free download of our core self-managed offering. Students can also apply for a 30-day trial if they would like to try out some more advanced features.
At this time, GitLab does not have a formal not-for-profit program. The primary reason is that the volume of applications to our current free programs takes up all of our bandwidth! We do generally see the value in non-profits and we hope to create some sort of a non-profit offering in the future.
Any inbound request for a discounted or free license by a not-for-profit organization is handled on a case-by-case basis by the DRI (the appropriate sales team member for the geographic region of the non-profit and their manager). We cannot guarantee that non-profit requests will be granted as the decision is at the discretion of the DRI. Discounted or free licenses for non-profits are only issued in very rare cases. Because GitLab does not currently have a license and end-user license agreement (EULA) specifically for non-profits, we are not able to issue a license without additional support from our legal team in order to modify our existing EULA and license granting process.
We are always looking for ways to better support our participants' use of GitLab for teaching, learning, and research. Please reach out to us at education@GitLab.com with any ideas.
The Student Spotlight Program provides an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to feature their work on GitLab! The aim of the program is two-fold. First, we hope to inspire other to join the program by showcasing some of the exciting work our members are doing. Secondly, we want to connect and build relationships with institutions already using GitLab for teaching and learning.
Students, faculty, or staff can apply to be highlighted in the Students Spotlights Program by filling out the application form. Our team will review the applications and selected projects will be featured via a video-recorded interview with the students and profressors invovled. Interviews and project links will be featured on the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel and the GitLab for Education main webpage.
We often receive questions about how to best manage your licenses. Here are a few tips:
All applications to our Education Program and renewal requests for education licenses are routed through our application workflow by the Community Advocates.
The Education Program generates standard metrics for our KPIs and for general monitoring purposes. These metrics are reported in the Community Relations Group Conversation as well as for quarterly tracking.
The steps below will generate the Education Program metrics:
Run Report to generate the report.Export Details. Choose Unicode (UTF-8) for the Export File Encoding and .csv for the Export File Format. Then click Export and save the file../edoss.rb -i <exported_file>.csv -o <output_file>.csvchmod 755 edoss.rb
yaml and json formats.