About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization at the center of a high-profile, international movement to promote sharing of creativity and knowledge. Our goal is to help realize the full potential of the Internet—universal access to research and education, full participation in culture—to drive a new era of development growth, and productivity. CC provides the well-known suite of licenses that have become the global standard used by leading companies, institutions and individuals across culture, education, government, science, and more to promote digital collaboration and innovation. CC licenses are everywhere—1.1 billion CC licenses in use across 9 million websites—making it easy for anyone to use and re-use content. For example, CC licenses help the world gain access to NASA’s most iconic images from space, help educators create curriculum that will bring down the cost of college for everyone, and allow scientists to freely share their work with medical professionals around the world as they did when they identified the strain of Ebola in West Africa. CC also works with foundations and governments to ensure that when they fund new content, like research and educational materials, those materials are made available for us to freely use, share, and improve.
Jane Park
Jane Park is Director of Platforms and Partnerships, and leads CC’s work with platforms to create a more vibrant and useable commons. She has eight years of organizational experience in open education, communications, fundraising, and community building. As a founding volunteer of the Peer 2 Peer University, she has designed and taught a variety of online courses from creative writing to Creative Commons for educators. She has a BA in Philosophy and minor in creative writing from the University of California at Berkeley.
Diane Peters
Diane Peters is General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for CC, where she directs the organization’s legal strategy, affairs and projects, and oversees CC’s legal staff. She coordinates legal programs and activities that harness CC’s diverse and complex international network of affiliate institutions. She also leads development of CC’s licenses and legal tools, including the CC0 public domain dedication (2009), the Public Domain Mark (2010), Version 3.0 ports and, most recently, Version 4.0 of the CC license suite (2013). Diane is a founding director 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 was legal counsel to Mozilla. In 2014, the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award for public policy. She is based in Portland, Oregon.
Ryan Merkley
Ryan Merkley is Chief Executive Officer of Creative Commons. He joined the organization to focus on defining a new strategy and to establish long-term sustainability for CC. Today, Creative Commons is implementing its renewed strategy to build a vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. Since 2014, CC nearly tripled the number of individual donors, and the commons grew to over 1.1 billion licensed works. Prior to joining CC, Ryan was Chief Operating Officer of Mozilla, makers of the world’s most recognizable open-source software project and internet browser, Firefox. Ryan previously worked as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project. Ryan is an experienced campaigner and advocate for social causes, and has advised political campaigns on the local and national levels.
Johnathan Nightingale
Johnathan Nightingale is the Chief Product Officer at Hubba, and was formerly the head of Firefox for Mozilla. He was among the first to graduate from the University of Toronto’s Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence program in 2001. In his role at Mozilla he was responsible for the engineering, product management, marketing, and design of the Firefox web browser on desktop and mobile platforms; a suite of products developed by a global community, used by over 400 million people worldwide, and localized into more than 80 languages. He has been an invited expert to the UK’s House of Lords on issues of surveillance and tracking, sat for 3 years on the W3C’s usable security working group, and has spoken often at industry conferences on issues of technology and security. He is an avid photographer, a Wikipedian, author of the ubiquitous Linux command line tool, “beep”, and a proud parent in a house full of Minecraft.
