Movement Building: The Next Step
In 2019, I was able to focus on Mozilla’s movement-building work for a healthy internet and test out ways to grow. After years of scaling Mozilla Open Leaders, which offers mentorship and training for leaders in the internet health movement, we launched Open Leaders X (OLˣ) to help others do the same.
OLˣ was designed to raise up multiple community-run Open Leaders programs with diverse audiences to serve as entry-points to the internet health movement.
MozFest: 10 new programs launched
At the 10th anniversary of MozFest, the OLˣ cohort launched 10 new, community-run Open Leaders programs across the open ecosystem including open art, open hardware and open source. You can watch the launch party here.
Fork Open Leaders
We’re seeing more and more people adopting this mentorship model outside of OLˣ. Julia Lowndes launched Openscapes, championing open practices in environmental science. Many others are adapting the Open Leaders model for their own communities. If you’re interested in adapting this work, please reach out!
Media
On the Sustain Our Software podcast, I had a great chat with Eric Berry and Richard Littauer on open leadership. (download MP3)
The Penticton Western News wrote about my keynote at FutureBiz Penticton.
I was interviewed by Tidelift for the curriculum they’re producing to encourage open source participation among the Girls Who Code students.
Speaking & Teaching
I gave 2 keynotes, 6 talks and facilitated 2 workshops in 2019. I attended 5 more workshops, conferences or retreats as a participant. I continued to speak on open source & open leadership and movement building, diving deeper into trustworthy AI.
- Internet Privacy: The 10-Year Challenge. Scientista Symposium, talk, Boston (slides)
- Open Leaders 7, facilitator, Online
- A Primer on AI & ML. MozRetreat, talk, Barcelona
- Mozilla Foundation All Hands, emcee, Toronto
- Learning from Other Movements. Mozilla Foundation All Hands, facilitator, Toronto
- Biased by Default: Exploring Discrimination in ML & AI. SciPy, diversity luncheon & talk, Austin (slides)
- Work Open Lead Open (#WOLO) for Sustainability. SciPy, talk, Austin (slides, recording)
- Open by Design. Comcast Open Source Day, talk, Philadelphia (slides)
- Open Leaders X, facilitator, Online
- Movement Building for Internet Health. MozFest House, facilitator, London
- Open Leaders X Launch Party. Mozilla Festival, emcee, London
- Open by Design: Learning to Lead Openly. SeaGL, keynote, Seattle (slides, recording)
- A Healthy Internet & Open Source: Combatting issues in online life. FutureBiz Penticton, keynote, Penticton (slides)
- As a participant, I attended: Workshop on software metrics, credit and citation (Santa Barbara), Workshop on Software Incubators (College Park), Mozilla Foundation strategy retreat (New York City), Collision Conference (Toronto).
Writing (Words & Code)
I wrote 17 blog posts in 2019, including 4 interviews with the new cohort organizers from Open Leaders X on the Mozilla Foundation Blog. Some of my favourites include these two posts exploring openness and movement building:
I co-authored a paper “Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained” that was published in Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) in Jan 2019. http://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2018.2883051
On the code front, 2019 started off promising with a text generation / neural network prototype. However, when the experiment ended, OLˣ and MozFest took up most of my attention.
I also served on the program committee for OSS 2019: Open Source Systems 15th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference.
In 2019, I’ll be working closely with the people building trustworthy AI. I’ll be writing more on the connections between open source and trustworthy AI. I also hope to have more opportunities to collaborate and dive into code.
Life
Jordan and I celebrated four years of marriage, renovated and moved into our first house and attended 4 weddings. We also said goodbye to Jordan’s grandfather in the final moments of 2019. In our local community, we continue to serve with Grace Toronto. According to my TripIt data, I traveled 93,960 km to 25 cities in 8 countries in 2019.
Looking to 2020
I’m excited to narrow my focus around trustworthy AI this year as we continue to fuel the internet health movement. I’ll be writing and speaking more on this topic while collaborating with others doing this work in our movement. If you’re in this space and interested in collaborating, please reach out!
As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@abbycabs) or by email (abby [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org). Happy new year 🌟
