Abby’s 2017 Year in Review
A lot has happened this year! While there’s been uncertainty in the world, I wanted to take the time to pause and celebrate at the new year. After starting these review posts last year, I’m looking back on 2017 and reflecting on where I’ve come.
Investing in Open Leaders
In 2017 I was able to focus on scaling Mozilla’s Open Leadership Training. It’s been incredibly rewarding to continue working towards culture change through 1:1 mentorship on open practices.
I ran 2 online rounds and 2 in-person rounds of Mozilla Open Leaders in 2017, trained 124 community members and 72 new mentors (up from 46 community members and 11 mentors in 2016). You can read about the online graduating classes from round 3 and round 4. I’d like to see this continue to grow with a focus on regional cohorts in 2018.
If you’re building in the open there’s a ton of opportunities to join and mentor in future rounds. Keep an eye out on our website and twitter.
Open Leadership 101
Earlier in the year, I worked with a great team to produce Open Leadership 101, a free, hour-long online course on “working open”. As part of the course, we created several videos explaining concepts around working open, including this video where I talk about participation basics on open projects:
To see the rest of the training, you can enrol in Open Leadership 101 for free.
My Own Leadership Journey
To boost my own leadership skills, I spent three weeks in 2017 going through the Rockwood Leadership Institute’s Art of Leadership and subsequent trainings. I was privileged to have been sent to this training along with a group of Mozilla employees. This experience was incredibly useful as I trained the next generation of open leaders.
Speaking & Teaching
I spoke at 21 conferences, lectures or meetups in 2017. I attended 7 more as a participant. I continued to speak on all things “open” with a few new topics including ethics in code and movement building.
- HelloCon, talk, Toronto
- Media Tactics for Development Advocacy, guest lecture, University of Toronto
- P2C Weekly Meeting, talk, University of Toronto
- Open Data Day NYC, workshop, New York City
- Working Open Workshop, talk & organizer, Montreal
- Community Leadership Summit, keynote, Austin
- Mini-Working Open Workshop, talk & organizer, Austin
- FITC, talk, Toronto
- PyLadies, talk, Toronto
- Open Source Initiative’s Open Source for Science + Innovation, talk, Boston
- Digital Science’s Making Open Science Work For You, panelist, Toronto
- Mozilla’s All Hands, talk, San Francisco
- Working Open Workshop, talk, MIT Media Lab
- Open Source Students Weekend, talk, St Louis
- Ladies Learning Code Teen Club, panelist, Toronto
- Mozilla’s Fellows Onboarding, workshop, Toronto
- Binder Workshop, talk & organizer, UC Davis
- Mozilla Festival, talk, London
- Open Science Day, panel, Institut Pasteur Paris
- Working Open Workshop, talk, Paris
- Open Leadership Camp, talk, MIT Media Lab
As a participant, I attended: OpenCon Toronto, Mozilla Participation Design Sprint, Creative Commons Summit, Rockwood Art of Leadership, Mozilla’s Global Sprint, Mozilla’s All Hands in Austin.
Writing
I wrote 86 blog posts this year including 67 interviews I conducted with open source project leads on the Mozilla Open Leaders blog (up from 13 blog posts last year. That’s >6x more posts!).
My favourite (& most personal) post is My Grandmother, My Work, and My Open Science Story.
Open Source
All the mentorship, blog posts and trainings in 2017 have taken a toll on the amount of code I wrote. With even less time to dive into prototyping, I made 373 contributions in GitHub in 2017 (down from 721 contributions in 2016).
One notable reason for the decline in commits was my move to Google Slides for presentations to facilitate collaboration (not everyone likes to edit html slides!).
I continue to maintain several open source projects:
- Editor, Journal of Open Source Software
- Maintainer, PaperBadger
- Maintainer, Open Leadership Training Series
- Maintainer, Databases and SQL, Software Carpentry
In 2018, I’d like to carve out more time to write code and experiment and stop the downward trend in my commit logs.
Media
I was thrilled to be featured in the first edition of the Mozillian (in print!).
Life
I celebrated my second wedding anniversary with this guy. We attended 1 wedding, no funerals and went on several epic vacations (🌴✈️🎡) . In our local community, we continue to serve as coaches for the Bay street small groups with Grace Toronto. According to my TripIt data, I travelled 85,585 km to 23 cities in 4 countries in 2017.
(The top left image is a video of me doing a double-toe loop at the Harbourfront rink)
Looking to 2018
Be Purposeful
At the beginning of 2017, I had a chance to reflect on what drives and motivates me in my work during Rockwood’s Art of Leadership. That’s when I realized I want to make openness the norm in innovation. In 2018, I’ll continue to do work that’s driven by this purpose.
Be Forkable
While I’ve seen a great amount of my work scale this past year, I neglected the documentation and automation work that would make it really forkable. With 83 trained mentors, any of them should be able to fork the program and run their own cohort of open leaders.
I love writing these posts for the chance to look back and collect moments from the past year. Reflecting on 2017 has given me a lot of be thankful for. Again, I could not have accomplished this with the open source community, a great team at Mozilla and my family cheering me on.
As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@abbycabs). Happy new year 🌟
