Catherine Casserly, CEO
Started: March 2011

Catherine Casserly is CEO of Creative Commons. She is passionate about how openness and global knowledge sharing can promote learning. An early architect of the open educational resources (OER) field, she managed investments totaling more than $100M for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Cathy spearheaded work in the areas of transparency and technology as Vice President of Innovation and Open Networks at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She is a founding board member of the Digital Public Library of America and Peer-2-Peer University. Cathy earned her Ph.D. in the economics of education from Stanford University.

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Before becoming Creative Commons’ Office Manager, Valeria worked for several non-profit organizations, lending her administrative and managerial skills to institutions like Planned Parenthood and MoveOn.org. Prior to making the move to Mountain View, CA, she spent three years teaching English to public school students in Seoul, South Korea. A native of the Sunshine State of Florida, she holds a B.A. in Political Science and Women’s Studies from the University of Florida. Outside of work you’ll find her practicing Bikram yoga, mastering her Scrabble skills, and planning her next trip abroad.

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Heidi Chen, Grants & Projects Manager
Started: March 2011

Heidi currently oversees grants administration for CC projects and programs funded through grants and supports general fundraising and development efforts. Prior to joining Creative Commons as its program manager, Heidi worked in operations and program coordination for nonprofit organizations. In her free time, she likes to plan her next trip, play badminton with friends, and always be learning something new.

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Sara is responsible for generating revenue and aligning CC with a network of partners across sectors, with oversight for CC’s fundraising, communications, and grants management.

Most days, Sara can be found attempting diplomatic negotiation on behalf of open knowledge, crafting with words, or inventing easier ways to do things at the office. Otherwise, she is likely hiking, cooking, reading, or out and about in San Francisco; most always with her dogs.

From 2008-11, Sara was Head of Partnerships & Foundation Relations for the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously, she worked in development for Cambridge In America; and at several non- and for-profit ventures based in New York City. Sara is on the board of the Global Lives Project. She has a joint Masters in Journalism and French Studies from New York University, and a B.A. in French and English Literature from Georgetown University.

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Cable works with the global open education community to leverage open licensing, open educational resources, and open policies to significantly improve access to quality education and research resources so everyone in the world can attain the education they desire. Cable has 15 years of academic technology, online learning, and open education experience in higher education and recently led a project to build and share a general education curriculum under the CC BY license. Cable holds a PhD in educational psychology from Ohio State University and tweets @cgreen.

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Before coming to CC, Jill worked throughout the Bay Area at a variety of companies, nonprofit organizations, and local government agencies. She spent time implementing behavior therapy programs with youth on the Autism Spectrum as well as completing two years in AmeriCorps working on community development projects. Jill received her B.A. in International Studies from U.C. San Diego and her Postgraduate Diploma of Sustainable Development from Macquarie University in Sydney.

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Elliot Harmon manages CC’s various communications and social media channels. He’s worked in the non-profit sector for eight years, mostly in the arts and technology. He has a degree in English and theatre from the University of South Dakota and a Master’s in writing from the California College of the Arts. When he’s not thinking about CC’s communications strategy, he’s often thinking about cooking, poetry, or music.

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Puneet likes to write programs that manipulate, analyze and visualize information from large datasets, but he worries what would happen to those data and results 50 or 100 years from now. He is unable to read the two decades old original digital version of his M.S. thesis even while he can read Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata written a few thousand years ago. This, in part, motivates his passion for permanently free and open access to scientific data.

Puneet’s main focus at Creative Commons is on science data policy. His extra-curricular engagements include developing tools and techniques for management and analysis of earth sciences data at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and research at the National Academies/CODATA on policy issues related to citation and licensing mechanisms for digital scientific information. Any spare cycles are devoted to jazz and beer, preferably concurrently.

Puneet has worked, in order, at a rural development NGO in New Delhi, the World Bank in Washington DC, a for-profit GIS consulting company, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is happy to be back to his NGO roots at CC.

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Billy is an instructional designer and open education advocate, and is currently a project assistant at Creative Commons. He works towards CC’s goals through projects that build Open Educational Resources (OER) on the web. Billy has worked in K-12 and higher education, with nonprofit and commercial groups, and believes that we can build innovation around the commons while providing educational opportunities for all people. He holds a BA in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.Ed in educational technology from the University of Hawaii at M?noa. He surfs, is a motorsports enthusiast, and tweets from @billymeinke.
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Dan Mills leads the creation of software products to further the CC mission.

Dan was Product Manager for Identity at Mozilla, and co-creator of Persona. He also worked to integrate sign-in and payments into the Firefox Marketplace and Firefox OS. Dan served as a spokesperson for Mozilla in many international locations, and led efforts to engage and grow the Mozilla community in various countries.

Prior to product management, Dan was an engineer at Mozilla Labs and the Firefox team, as well as the open source startup Ximian.

Dan grew up in sunny Venezuela. He studied computer science at Duke University, with minors in economics and Italian. He loves XLBs and cooking sous vide.

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Before joining Creative Commons, Meryl spent several years doing communications in the law, academia, media, and international fields. She holds a B.A. in Communication and minors in Music Technology and Urban Studies & Planning from the University of California, San Diego. She loves music and escaping to different locations for travel.

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Jane manages the School of Open, a collaboration with the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). A volunteer community-driven project, the School of Open offers free, online courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond. Participants learn how to use free technology and tools, such as Creative Commons licenses, to achieve their goals. Jane also helps creators, institutions, and companies consider and adopt CC tools, while cultivating stories that exhibit the social and commercial value of CC licenses to different communities. As a founding volunteer of P2PU, she has designed and led two online courses on creative nonfiction writing, a third on Creative Commons for K-12 Educators, and hopes to explore a fourth on Open Governance. She is based in Los Angeles, California.

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Sarah helps to provide legal support to Creative Commons, including assisting in the development of Version 4.0 of the CC license suite. While her primary focus is copyright law, Sarah advises the organization on all facets of CC’s work. Before joining CC, she worked at the Stanford Fair Use Project and as an associate at Fried Frank in New York City. Her interest in copyright began in her former life as a journalist. She has a journalism degree from Northwestern University and a J.D. from University of Michigan Law School.

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As General Counsel for CC, Diane oversees the organization’s legal strategy, affairs and projects. She serves on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center. Prior to joining CC, she served as general counsel for Open Source Development Labs (now, the Linux Foundation), and thereafter was legal counsel to Mozilla. She is experienced at providing strategic advice and leadership on an array of IP issues impacting communities and the technology industry, including open source projects, FOSS licensing, and IP reform efforts and policy. She is based in Portland, Oregon.

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Scott has served as director of finance and operations since August 2013. Prior to joining Creative Commons, he worked for several privately held software companies in the Bay Area, including Aggregate Knowledge, SoftCoin, and DiCarta. Scott has an MS from San Jose State University and an MBA from the University of North Florida. In his spare time, Scott enjoys reading, writing, and engaging in fiery political debates.

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Paul is a senior project manager with Creative Commons. His project management skills were honed at Hughes Aircraft working on large scale, international air traffic control systems. Paul’s core expertise is in adult learning, educational technology, and open education. Prior to joining Creative Commons, Paul led Open Educational Resource (OER) and professional development initiatives across all the colleges and universities in British Columbia Canada. Paul’s firsthand experiences using Creative Commons’ licenses with faculty, institutions, and government inspired him to join Creative Commons. Paul is an avid outdoor and ping pong enthusiast.

* Paul works through 0941176 B.C. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Commons whose sole activity is to provide services to CC. 0941176 B.C. Ltd. is operated separately from our CC Canada affiliate.

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Timothy Vollmer is Public Policy Manager. He coordinates public policy positions in collaboration with CC staff, international affiliate network, and a broad community of copyright experts. Timothy helps educate policymakers at all levels and across various disciplines such as education, data, science, culture, and government about copyright licensing, the public domain, and the adoption of open policies. Prior to CC, Timothy worked on information policy issues for the American Library Association in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Information, and helped establish the Open.Michigan initiative.

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As Counsel at Creative Commons, Kat works on issues surrounding the licenses and other projects affecting the legal and policy interests of the CC community. Kat’s background is in free culture, free software, and free expression, especially where they involve copyright and patent. She is the 2012-13 chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, and a board member since 2006. She was previously a technology policy analyst at the American Library Association. Kat has a BA from Stetson University and a JD from George Mason University. In her secret double life, she is a classical bassoonist and violist.
Photo by Lane Hartwell, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

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Carolina Botero is a Colombian lawyer, researcher, lecturer, writer and consultant on issues related to law and technology, especially regarding access. She has developed a special interest on the challenges that the educational and scientific sector faces regarding copyright issues while working with Karisma Foundation in Bogotá where she leads a working group on law and Internet and serves as Legal Lead for Creative Commons Colombia. She is an active member of the Colombian Free Software community and is member of the Board of Conexions (an open education project of the University of Rice) on behalf of Creative Commons.

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After falling in love with the Arab world and its cultures more than 15 years ago, Donatella has specialized in Arab media issues; she has published several chapters in collective books on Arab TV industries and two monographs on Pan Arab satellite channels. She is a Ph.D. fellow at Copenhagen University (DK) and at the Danish Institute in Damascus (Syria). Her Ph.D. work revolves around the production and distribution of Syrian TV drama.

Donatella is an affiliate at Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She blogs on Arab media at http://mediaoriente.com and tweets avidly on the Arab world, tech and society at @donatelladr.

Donatella speaks Arabic, English, French and her native language, Italian.

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Since 2008, Gwen Franck has been working for Ghent University Library on several projects such as Google Books and Europeana. For Ghent University, she served as project assistant for OpenAIRE, a European funded project supporting the Open Access policies of the European Commission. Within the scope of this project, she co-started Open Access Belgium, aiming to spread the word about Open Access for scientific research in the Belgian research community. Since 2013, she is the regional coordinator for Creative Commons in Europe, and from 2014 on she will also be working as open access coordinator for Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL).

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Alex is an activist for openness and transparency and consumer empowerment. He discovered that Creative Commons responded well to his content aspirations on the belief that while “content is king” really, “context rules” as dictated by the creators and/or if with consumers’ contribution. His job entails strengthening, widening and deepening Creative Commons’ embrace across Africa.

He serves as Africa Representative- ICANN’s Non-Commercial Users Constituency, Council Member – Free and Open Source Foundation for Africa, Chair – Broadcasting Content Advisory Council, CCK (converged state regulator), ED- CODE-IP Trust, Kenyan non-profit catalysing enabling environment for local content development and its intellectual property protection. Consultant on ICT solutions, computer programming and digital content development.

Gakuru enjoys creative company; programmers, movie makers, artistes, artists, poets, bloggers, writers and publishers and others, and frequently contributes on technology to various media outlets. He enjoys reading, listening to music and swimming.

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Jane has previously led Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand where she worked with government officials and schools to encourage open access to publicly funded materials. Her background is classical ballet, publishing, and she has a BA(hons) in literature and film from Victoria University of Wellington. She currently works with the DigitalNZ project at the National Library of New Zealand. Jane grew up in the South Island and loves well designed gardens, strong coffee, and free culture activism.
Photo by Andrew McMillan, licensed CC-BY 2.0

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Soohyun has been with CC Korea since 2008, playing her part as international coordinator and leadership roles in many different volunteer projects. She received a Master’s in translation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and began her career as a full-time translator before she developed interest in CC and free culture movement. Other than translating and CC activities, she loves to read with a strong coffee and to try new things.
Photo by dreamdrawing, licensed CC-BY 2.0

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Claudio Ruiz is director of Derechos Digitales, a Chilean non-profit that works to promote, defend and develop rights and civil liberties in the digital environment. He is the public lead for Creative Commons Chile, coordinating projects related to the local music industry, netlabels and public sector, working closely with the local librarians community. He is experienced at free software licensing, fundamental rights and specially freedom of expression on the digital environment. He has a cat, loves indie rock and single speed bikes.

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Tobias is the legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa and the Principal Investigator for the Open AIR (African Innovation Research & Training) project, which investigates the relationship between IP and Innovation on the African continent. He previously worked as a Senior Manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Technology & Innovation Law Division in Johannesburg and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship Position at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Intellectual Property Law & Policy Research Unit – the hosting institution of Creative Commons South Africa. He studied and practiced law in Germany and San Francisco, U.S.A. Tobias’s Ph.D. dissertation was on copyright-related issues – with a special focus on copyright exceptions and limitations.

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As the Legal Lead for Creative Commons Germany, John joined the CC Community in 2006. He is based in Berlin and specializes in open content law, private order licensing in general and open science, both as a lawyer and as a journalist at the consumer information portal iRights.info. John periodically publishes papers on internet law topics, is a founding member of the Digital Society Association and vice president of the Internet & Society Collaboratory intervention platform. As time allows, John provides expertise to activist groups and initiatives. In the past John has inter alia participated in the Communia Project and served as a sherpa in the German Federal Governments IT Summit process.

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Prior to joining CC, Jessica worked as a copyright specialist and community manager in Australia. There she spent much of her time as the Project Manager of Creative Commons Australia and the Creative Commons Clinic, a research program at the Queensland University of Technology. She has also had stints working as a copyright and broadcasting policy adviser for the Australian government and Australia’s commercial television broadcasters, as well as an academic, lecturer and educator. She has a Master of Laws from the University of Melbourne and both a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts (English Hons) from the Australian National University.
Photo by Joi Ito, licensed CC-BY 2.0

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David is a communications consultant and development writer from Chicago. He is working on funding proposals and how CC shares its story with the world. He worked for nearly a decade as a community organizer and enjoys playing hockey and photographing athletes, dancers and all kinds of skaters.

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Eric works with artists, media companies, technology developers, and cultural institutions on the use of Creative Commons licenses and CC-licensed content. Before joining CC, Eric was an editor for Wired magazine, where he is currently a correspondent, covering the intersection of technology and popular culture. He is on the board of CASH Music and is a musician whose recordings and remixes have been released by a variety of record labels.

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Iris’ work at Creative Commons focuses on foundation grants and legal issues. Before joining Creative Commons, she was a lawyer at the Carnegie Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, a couple of biotech start-ups, Stanford University, and LDF (the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., as it was then). She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, and what she likes doing is reading, cooking, baking, traveling and doting on her grandchildren, although not in that precise order.

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Mike Linksvayer joined Creative Commons as CTO, became Vice President in April 2007, then a part-time Senior Fellow in April 2012. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service. He occasionally writes on his personal blog.

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David Wiley coined the term “open content” and created the first open license for non-software creative works in 1998. Since then, he has been a tireless advocate for “open” and the power of openness to improve the quality and affordability of education. David is currently a Shuttleworth Fellow and was previously a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. He is currently on leave from Brigham Young University and leading Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to supporting and improving the adoption of open educational resources by middle schools, high schools, community and state colleges, and universities.

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