Ryan Merkley (businessman)

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Ryan Merkley
TerBurgDSCF0820 (34367491515).jpg
Born
Cambridge, Canada
Education University of Waterloo (BA)
Merkley introducing himself
Recorded August 2019.

Ryan Merkley is a Canadian businessman, and the COO of NPR. [1] Previous to NPR he was Chief of Staff to the office of the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, [2] and before that, the CEO of the American non-profit organization Creative Commons. [3] [4] He is an advocate for open licenses, net neutrality and open data initiatives in the public sector. Merkley is the Chair of the Open Worm Foundation board of directors [5] and was trustee at the Quetico Foundation. [6] He writes and speaks on issues such as the sharing economy, academic publishing and legal infrastructure for sharing content. [7]

Contents

In 2016, he was listed in the Globe and Mail's "Sixteen Torontonians to Watch in 2016". [8]

Biography

Merkley was born in Cambridge, Ontario, and studied at the University of Waterloo from 1998 to 2001, and employed at Engineers Without Borders Canada as the Chief Communications Officer. He worked for the City of Toronto government and the City of Vancouver government in roles such as Director of Communications and Senior Advisor to the Office of the Mayor, leading the open government data initiative of Toronto mayor David Miller. In 2010, he moved to the Mozilla Foundation to take the role of Director of Programs and Strategy. During his tenure at Mozilla, he contributed to the development of products in support of the open web including Lightbeam, Webmaker, and Popcorn. [9] [10]

Creative Commons

Merkley was recruited as CEO for Creative Commons in 2014, [11] after the position was vacated by Catherine Casserly in 2013. His focus included work on new, long-term strategy and sustainability of the Creative Commons mission and operations. [12] [13] [14] His 2016 op-ed in Wired criticising the academic publishing industry was referenced by then-Vice President of the United States Joe Biden in his speech to the American Association for Cancer Research, calling for more open research. [15] [16] In 2016, he successfully secured a $10 million grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support Creative Commons' new strategy, re-focusing the organisation on encouraging sharing. [17] [18] [19]

On February 7, 2017, Merkley announced a partnership between Creative Commons, [20] Wikimedia Foundation [21] and The Metropolitan Museum of Art where the museum released 375,000 images under a public domain dedication Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0. As part of the announcement, Creative Commons also released the beta of CC Search which included social features for list sharing and simple attribution. [22] In early 2021, the search engine was renamed to Openverse and joined the WordPress project. [23]

Related Research Articles

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Copyright license for free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates critical infrastructure, and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights. It owns two taxable subsidiaries: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and MZLA Technologies Corporation, which employs developers to work on the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and coordinate its releases. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, United States.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation awards grants to a variety of liberal and progressive causes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joi Ito</span> Japanese-American entrepreneur

Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brendan Eich</span> American computer scientist and technology executive

Brendan Eich is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitchell Baker</span> Chairwoman and CEO

Winifred Mitchell Baker is the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. She left the CEO role in February 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Hurd</span> American businessman (1957–2019)

Mark Vincent Hurd was an American technology executive who served as CEO and as a member of the board of directors of Oracle Corporation. He had previously served as chairman, chief executive officer, and president of Hewlett-Packard, before his forced resignation in 2010. He was also on the board of directors of Globality and was a member of the Technology CEO Council and board of directors of News Corporation until 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla Corporation</span> American software company

The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tristan Nitot</span> French founder of Mozilla Europe

Tristan Nitot is the founder and former president of Mozilla Europe.

Connexions, later known as OpenStax CNX was a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform was provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection was available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and was available for download in various digital formats.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England and Wales as a private company limited by guarantee. Between May 2016 and May 2019 the organisation was named Open Knowledge International, but decided in May 2019 to return to Open Knowledge Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelle Thorne (Creative Commons)</span>

Michelle Thorne is an American-born, Berlin, Germany-based internet culture and climate justice activist who is known for leading community initiatives at Mozilla and before then with Creative Commons. Her work focusses on knowledge sharing and on the social and planetary implications of new technologies.

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Bassel Khartabil, also known as Bassel Safadi, was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015. Human rights organizations claim that he was detained for his activities in support of freedom of expression, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered his detention to have been arbitrary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Surman</span> Canadian internet activist

Mark Surman is a Canadian open internet activist and the president and executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. He is a leading advocate for trustworthy AI, digital privacy, and the open internet. Before joining the Mozilla Foundation, Mark spent more than 15 years leading organizations and projects promoting the use of the internet and open source for social empowerment in many countries around the world.

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The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, Massachusetts. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.

Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.

Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.

References

  1. ↑ "NPR CEO Katherine Maher names Ryan Merkley Chief Operating Officer". npr.org. 13 February 2025.
  2. ↑ "Wikimedia Foundation welcomes Ryan Merkley as Chief of Staff to the office of the Executive Director". Wikimedia Foundation. 13 August 2019. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
  3. ↑ Van Houweling, Molly (13 August 2019). "Leadership Transitions at Creative Commons". Creative Commons. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
  4. ↑ Merkley, Ryan (13 August 2019). "Moving on from Creative Commons". Creative Commons. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
  5. ↑ "People". openworm.org.
  6. ↑ "Our Trustees".
  7. ↑ Merkley, Ryan (19 September 2015). "In a true sharing economy, the reward is gratitude". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  8. ↑ Andrew-Gee, Eric; Bozikovic, Alex; Moore, Oliver; Nuttall-Smith, Chris; O'Kane, Josh; Ross, Selena; Wheeler, Brad (31 December 2015). "Sixteen Torontonians to watch in 2016". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  9. ↑ "Ryan Merkley's Profile". LinkedIn. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  10. ↑ "TED Talk: Ryan Merkley demos Popcorn". The Mozilla Blog. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  11. ↑ Gannes, Liz. "Creative Commons Picks Former Mozilla COO Ryan Merkley as CEO". Recode.net. Vox Media. Retrieved 27 September 2016.
  12. ↑ "MLTalks Series: Diane Peters, Jane Park, Ryan Merkley and Johnathan Nightingale in conversation with Joi Ito". MIT Media Lab. Retrieved 19 September 2016.
  13. ↑ "Welcoming Creative Commons' new CEO, Ryan Merkley". Creative Commons. 14 May 2014. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  14. ↑ Harmon, Elliot (25 September 2013). "Catherine Casserly to step down as Creative Commons CEO". Creative Commons. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  15. ↑ Merkley, Ryan. "You Pay to Read Research You Fund. That's Ludicrous". Wired. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  16. ↑ "VP Joe Biden asks about CC's Ryan Merkley's op-ed in Wired". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  17. ↑ "Creative Commons' Radical Plan to Bring Joy to the Commons". Shareable.net. 23 March 2016. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  18. ↑ "Creative Commons awarded $10M grant from Hewlett Foundation to support renewed strategy". Creative Commons. 19 January 2016.
  19. ↑ "The Hewlett and Gates Foundations Award $9 Million to Pratham". Hewlett Foundation. Archived from the original on 18 September 2016. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  20. ↑ "The Met Makes 375,000 Public Domain Images Available". Fortune. Retrieved 2017-02-11.
  21. ↑ "The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes 375,000 images of public domain art freely available under Creative Commons Zero – Wikimedia Blog". 7 February 2017. Retrieved 2017-02-11.
  22. ↑ Perez, Sarah (7 February 2017). "Creative Commons unveils a new photo search engine with filters, lists & social sharing". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-02-11.
  23. ↑ Stihler, Catherine (2021-05-03). "CC Search to Join WordPress". Creative Commons. Retrieved 2024-03-21.
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