Abby’s 2018 Year in Review

Abigail Cabunoc Mayes
5 min readJan 8, 2019

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2018 was a year of growth and change. Before launching into the business of the new year, I wanted to take a moment to continue this tradition to pause and be thankful for 2018 and look forward to what 2019 might be.

Jordan wanted to make me a heading image. Remixed Faces of Open Source Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Faces of Open Source / Peter Adams. I’m sorry, Peter.

Interviews & Photos

Some of my favourite moments in 2018 were the opportunities I had to chat about my work and share my passion for open source, open leadership and open science.

I spoke with TechRepublic on “Why open source isn’t just about code”. Read the full transcript on TechRepublic.

I was honoured to be photographed by Peter Adams for his project, Faces of Open Source. Faces of Open Source is an ongoing photographic documentation of the people behind the development and advancement of the open source revolution that has transformed the technology industry.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Faces of Open Source / Peter Adams

On the Changelog podcast, I had a fun convo with Adam and Jerod at OSCON on open science and open leadership (I join at 43:13). You can read the full transcript here.

I was interviewed by Digital Trends along with my colleague Sam on Mozilla’s Global Sprint and Internet Health Report. The Internet is sick. Here’s how Mozilla is making it healthy again.

Open Leaders

Not updated to include Round 6

I ran 2 online rounds of Mozilla Open Leaders in 2018, trained 208 community members and 126 mentors (up from 124 community members and 72 mentors in 2017). You can read about the graduating classes from round 5 and round 6.

The Open Leadership Zone at MozFest 2018. Photo CC-BY-NC 2.0 Connor Ballard-Pateman / @PinotConoir

Speaking & Teaching

I spoke at 13 conferences, meetings or workshops in 2018 (down from 28 in 2017). I continued to speak on all things “open” diving deeper into open leadership.

Unconferencing at SustainOSS. Photo CC BY-SA 4.0 @photobenphoto

Open Source

I made 248 contributions in GitHub in 2018 (down from 373 in 2017 and 721 in 2016). One big reason for the drop in my code has been the additional support from the Mozilla Foundation’s digital team to the open leadership work.

My GitHub (@acabunoc) contributions in 2018

I’ve moved to the role of Editor Emeritus, Journal of Open Source Software, but I continue to maintain several open source projects:

I know I said this in 2018, but in 2019, I’d like to re-discover the joy of building prototypes & diving into code (I mean it this time!).

Writing

I co-authored a paper “Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained” that was accepted by Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) to appear in 2019, preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08473

The JOSS Editorial Board published “Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): design and first-year review” PeerJ Computer Science 4:e147 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.147. This was one of the top 5 most viewed articles of 2018 in its subject area.

I also wrote 28 blog posts this year including 17 interviews I conducted with open leaders on the Mozilla Read Write Participate. This is down from the 67 interviews I conducted in 2017 since we were able to decentralize our interviewing model and bring on more interviewers in true open-source fashion.

Life

Jordan and I celebrated three years of marriage, bought our first house and attended 3 weddings. We also said goodbye to Lolo, my great-uncle who hosted my family when we immigrated to Canada. In our local community, we continue to serve as coaches for several small groups with Grace Toronto. According to my TripIt data, I travelled 71,014 km to 26 cities in 10 countries in 2018.

#2018bestnine Instagram photos by @abbycabs

Looking to 2019

Uncovering Roots

We bought a house in the East end of Toronto in the final days of 2018. Ready to set roots in a city we love, the beginning of 2019 has been full of contractors, paint chips and the joys (& surprises) of home-ownership!

I’d also like to get back to my roots — I fell in love with the open source movement by writing code. I want to find ways to write more code in 2019.

Uncovering Leaders

In 2019, I’ll be exploring more ways to grow and train leaders in the open internet movement.

2019 has started at such a fast pace that I had a hard time forcing myself to sit down and write this. But I’m so glad I took the time to look back and reflect. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities and connections that happened in 2018. Huge thanks for the support from talented teammates, supportive family & friends, and the vibrant open source community.

As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@abbycabs). Happy new year 🌟

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Abigail Cabunoc Mayes

open source, mentorship & prototyping, now @github . ❤ open science. founder:@MozOpenLeaders . alum:@mozilla @OICRGenomics @wormbase @uwaterloo 📸@facesopen