Board of Directors

Hal Abelson
Hal Abelson is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and a fellow of IEEE. He is winner of several major teaching awards at MIT, as well as the IEEE’s Booth Education Award, cited for his contributions to the teaching of undergraduate computer science.

Abelson has a longstanding interest in using computation as a conceptual framework in teaching. He directed the first implementation of the Logo compater language for the Apple Computer, which made programming for children widely available on personal computers beginning in 1981. Together with Gerald Sussman, Abelson developed MIT’s introductory computer science subject, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a subject organized around the notion that a computer language is primarily a formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology, rather than just a way to get a computer to perform operations. This work, through a popular computer science textbook and video lectures has had a world-wide impact on university computer-science education.

Abelson is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation and Public Knowledge, as well as a a founding director of Creative Commons. At MIT, Abelson is is co-director of MIT’s Council on Educational Technology, which oversees the Institute’s strategic educational technology planning.
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Glenn Otis Brown
Glenn Otis Brown is currently the music business development manager at YouTube. Before that, he worked as a products counsel at Google, where he worked on Google Image Search, Blogger, Google Talk, the Google WiFi initiative, and Google Sitemaps, among many other projects. Glenn was Executive Director of Creative Commons from summer 2002 through spring 2005. In 2003-2004, Glenn was a lecturer at Stanford Law School, where he co-taught a class on copyright licensing with Lawrence Lessig. He clerked for the Honorable Stanley Marcus on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Miami, where he worked on the Wind Done Gone copyright appeal, among other cases. Glenn has also worked stints at The Economist’s Washington D.C. bureau, reporting on general U.S. news during the 2000 elections, and at “Digital Age,” a New York public TV show hosted by Andrew Shapiro, where he was assistant producer for a season. Glenn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A.) and Harvard Law School (JD). Glenn was a member of the Harvard Law Review and worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he organized the first Signal or Noise conference and concert in cooperation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He lives in San Francisco and plays in a band called Magic Me.
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Michael Carroll
Michael W. Carroll is a Visiting Professor of Law at the American University, Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. Starting in September 2009, Professor Carroll will permanently join the American University faculty and be the Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. His teaching and scholarly interests focus on intellectual property and the law of the Internet. Professor Carroll has been a member of the Creative Commons Board since 2001, and he is a member of the subset of Directors who advise Science Commons and ccLearn.

Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Carroll was an attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where his practice focused on intellectual property and Internet-related issues. He also served as a law clerk to Judge Judith W. Rogers of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Joyce Hens Green of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Carroll received his A.B. with general honors from the University of Chicago and his J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Before attending law school, Carroll worked as a journalist, a high school teacher in Zimbabwe, and a program officer for democracy and governance projects in Africa.
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Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is the co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing service developed by Ludicorp in Vancouver and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Flickr ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 integrating features such as social networking, community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the best, or most interesting content. Prior to founding Ludicorp she was Art Director at Salon.com and heavily involved in the development of online community, social software and personal publishing. She joined the board of directors of Creative Commons in August of 2008, and is currently co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Hunch.com.
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Davis Guggenheim
Davis Guggenheim is a director and producer of both documentary and dramatic film and television. In 1999, he undertook an ambitious project documenting the challenging first year of several novice public school teachers. Two films resulted from this intensive immersion in the Los Angeles public school system: The First Year and Teach. Both films sought to address the tremendous need for qualified teachers in California and nationwide and to create awareness of the crisis — as well as to inspire a new generation to become teachers.

Davis was an Executive Producer on Training Day and directed a feature film called Gossip, both for Warner Bros. His television directing credits include recently completed episodes of “The Shield,” “Alias” and “24″ as well as such critically acclaimed programs as “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” and “Party of Five.” He is currently a Producer and Director of the upcoming HBO series “Deadwood.”

Guggenheim’s other documentary films include Norton Simon: A Man and His Art, produced for permanent exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum, and JFK and the Imprisoned Child, produced for permanent exhibition at the John F. Kennedy Library. Guggenheim wrote and edited many films with his father, four-time Academy Award winner Charles Guggenheim. Davis graduated from Brown University in 1986.
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Joi Ito
Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons, and founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002.
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Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School’s Center for Internet and Society. In 2002, he was named one of 50 top innovators by Scientific American. Lessig earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale.
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Laurie Racine
Laurie Racine is co-founder and President of dotSUB, a young technology company that has developed a free, browser based tool for subtitling films from one language into any other language. Racine holds the position of Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center of the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California. She is Chair of the board of Teachers Without Borders and serves on the board of directors of National Video Resources. Until she closed the foundation in January of 2006, Racine served as President of the Center for the Public Domain, a private foundation endowed by the founders of Red Hat, Inc. During her tenure, she co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C. based public interest group that is working to sustain a vibrant information commons. She serves as Chair of the Board. Racine was the first managing director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and then served as President of Doc Arts for six years, the non-profit corporation that produces the festival. Before starting the Center for the Public Domain, Racine was the Director of the Health Sector Management Program at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. She has spent many years as a strategist and consultant for non-profit and for-profit enterprises.
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Eric Saltzman
A 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School, Eric F. Saltzman began his career as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle’s and Boston’s public defender offices. While teaching in Harvard Law School’s Criminal Trial Advocacy program, Saltzman took up filmmaking at MIT’s renowned Film Section and re-created trials as teaching tools. Moving from re-creation to verite, Saltzman introduced cameras into actual courtrooms with The Shooting of Big Man: Anatomy of a Criminal Case (a two hour special on ABC News in 1979, now available for Creative Commons license here). For CBS News, he produced and directed Miami: The Trial That Sparked the Riots, an investigation of a police homicide, its cover-up, and the ultimate trial of the police officers. These and other films have won Emmy and ABA Silver Gavel awards, among others. In the mid-1980s, Saltzman moved into the film business and began acquiring and licensing libraries of classic motion picture and television rights for emerging media such as cable, microwave and satellite transmission. In 2000-2002, Saltzman was executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a member of the bars of Washington State and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on the boards of not-for-profits in the area of race and poverty and the extension of Internet services to the human rights and legal services sectors. He lives with his wife and two boys in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Formerly the Executive Director of Creative Commons and a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Van Houweling graduated in June 1998 from Harvard Law School, where she was Articles Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Following graduation, Ms. Van Houweling was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and one of the first staff members at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She then served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court.
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Jimmy Wales
The co-founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation which operates Wikipedia and several other wiki projects. Wales is also founder of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. (legally unrelated to Wikimedia).
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Esther Wojcicki
Esther Wojcicki has been teaching Journalism and English at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, California for the past 25 years, where she has been the driving force behind the development of its award-winning journalism program. It is now the largest high school journalism program in the U.S involving 400 students. All the publications can be found at http://voice.paly.net which is the school publication website. In the spring of 2008, she was recognized for inspiration and excellence in scholastic journalism advising by the National Scholastic Press Association. She has won multiple awards throughout the years. A couple of others included the 1990 Northern California Journalism teacher of the year in 1990 and California State Teacher Credentialing Commission Teacher of the Year in 2002. In 2009, she was awarded the Gold Key Award by Columbia University Scholastic Press for outstanding contributions to student journalism. She served on the University of California Office of the President Curriculum Committee where she helped revise the beginning and advanced journalism curriculum for the state of California. In 2005–6 she worked as the Google educational consultant and helped design the Google Teacher Outreach program, which includes the website www.google.com/educators and the Google Teacher Academy. She holds a B.A. degree from UC Berkeley in English and Political Science, a general secondary teaching credential from UC Berkeley, a graduate degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, an advanced degree in French and French History from the Sorbonne, Paris, a Secondary School Administrative Credential from San Jose State University, and a M.A. in Educational Technology from San Jose State University. She has also worked as a professional journalist for multiple publications and now blogs regularly for HuffingtonPost and HotChalk.
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Audit Committee

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Formerly the Executive Director of Creative Commons and a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Van Houweling graduated in June 1998 from Harvard Law School, where she was Articles Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Following graduation, Ms. Van Houweling was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and one of the first staff members at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She then served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court.
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Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School’s Center for Internet and Society. In 2002, he was named one of 50 top innovators by Scientific American. Lessig earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale.
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Technical Advisory Board

Ben Adida
Ben Adida is Research Faculty at the Harvard Medical School and a Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society. Ben studies cryptography applied to public policy problems, in particular in the fields of medical informatics, web security, voting, and rights/policy expression with the Semantic Web. Ben began building web applications in 1995, co-founded two open-source web technology startups, and is an experienced free software developer and community lead. Ben was Creative Commons’s first CTO and is currently the Creative Commons representative to the World-Wide Web Consortium, where he chairs the task force on RDFa. Ben received his PhD, Masters, and Bachelors in Computer Science from MIT.

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Barbara Fox
Barbara Fox is a Senior Software Architect, Cryptography and Digital Rights Management for Microsoft Corporation. She is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She serves on the National Academies of Science Committee on “Authentication Technologies and Their Implications for Privacy,” the Technical Advisory Board of “The Creative Commons,” and the Board of Directors of the International Financial Cryptography Association. Ms. Fox joined Microsoft in 1993 as Director of Advanced Product Development and led the company’s electronic commerce technology development group. She has co-authored Internet standards in the areas of Public Key Infrastructure and XML security. Her research at Harvard focuses on digital copyright law, public policy, and privacy.

Immediately prior to Microsoft, Ms. Fox was President of SystemSoft America, a Macintosh software development company in Palo Alto, California, and in addition she was a consultant to Visa International. Between 1981 and 1984, she was Engineering Development Manager for AppleTalk at Apple Computer.
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Don McGovern
Don McGovern is a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to joining the Berkman Center, Don was the World Wide R&D Manager for Hewlett-Packard Operations (HPO). In this capacity he was responsible for managing the five software engineering laboratories of HPO. McGovern has been a board director of X/Open Company Limited, the Open Software Foundation (OSF), and the X Consortium. He is currently on the board development committee at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA, and is a head coach for the Beacon Hill community girl’s softball league. Don is married, has three children, and resides in Boston, MA.
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Eric Miller
Eric Miller is the Activity Lead for the W3C World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Initiative. Before joining the W3C, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and the co-founder and Associate Director of the The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. Eric holds a Research Scientist appointment at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science.
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