Board of Directors
Board of Directors
Hal Abelson
Started: December 2001
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 computer 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.
Paul Brest, Chair
Started: December 2012
Paul Brest is emeritus professor and former dean of Stanford Law School, having recently returned from a twelve-year stint as President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Together with Professor Deborah Hensler, he is developing the law and public policy laboratory at the Law School, and he is a faculty co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Paul received an A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1962 and an LL.B from Harvard Law School in 1965. He served as law clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich and Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan, and practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Mississippi, doing civil rights litigation.
In 1969, he joined the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he was the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law. His research and teaching focused on constitutional law, including articles on constitutional interpretation, race discrimination, and affirmative action. From 1987 to 1999, he served as the dean of Stanford Law School where he spearheaded the expansion of the School’s curriculum in business, environmental law, high technology, and negotiation, and led a $115 million capital campaign.
Paul is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (Bloomberg Press, 2008); Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Processes of Constitutional Decision Making: Cases And Materials (Aspen Publishers, 2006).
Glenn Otis Brown
Started: May 2009
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.
Diane Cabell, Corporate SecretaryStarted: 2001
Diane Cabell, Corporate Secretary for Creative Commons, was the founder of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society where she also served as Assistant Director. Her legal practice focuses on web-based nonprofit start-ups and she also serves as a domain name dispute panelist for the World Intellectual Property Organization. Based in Portsmouth, NH, Diane is currently serving as acting director of iCommons Ltd, a UK charity founded by CC in 2005.
Michael Carroll
Started: December 2001
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.
Catherine Casserly
Started: February 2010
Catherine M. Casserly is CEO of Creative Commons. Cathy’s career is dedicated to openness, and particularly to leveraging possibilities at the boundaries of formal and informal learning to equalize educational opportunity. She has been a long-time advocate of open educational resources (OER). As the Director of the OER Initiative at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation she managed investments totaling more than $100 million to harness the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge sharing worldwide.
At the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Cathy spearheaded work in the areas of transparency and technology as a Senior Partner and the Vice President of Innovation and Open Networks. With the extended Carnegie team she launched a continuous performance improvement system to create alternative mathematics pathways for community college students.
Cathy has been instrumental in supporting many young organizations and currently sits on the Startl board, the Peer-2-Peer University board and serves on the advisory committee for MIT OpenCourseWare and the University of the People. She earned her Ph.D. in the economics of education from Stanford University and a B.A. in mathematics from Boston College.
Caterina Fake
Started: August 2008
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.
Brian Fitzgerald
Started: September 2011
Brian Fitzgerald is Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He holds postgraduate qualifications in law from Oxford University and Harvard University and is acknowledged as a leading scholar in the areas of Intellectual Property and Internet Law. From 1998-2002 he was Head of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia and from January 2002 to January 2007 was appointed as Head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane, Australia. Brian is currently a specialist Research Professor at QUT and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
Since 2004, Brian has been Project Lead of Creative Commons Australia. His work on applying CC licenses to government information and on Open Access to Knowledge is internationally recognized. His research team is made up of scholars from all over the world, particularly from developing and emerging economies. Brian has a strong commitment to the creative and technology communities and in 2010 established a legal clinic that provides free legal advice for local artists and start-ups that cannot afford to pay for legal services.
Davis Guggenheim
Started: June 2003
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.
Joi Ito
Started: June 2003
Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is a Board member of Creative Commons, on the Board of the MacArthur Foundation, on the Board of Trustees of The Knight Foundation, and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation and WITNESS. He is a member of the IT Strategic Headquarters of the Japanese Cabinet. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter, Path, Pinwheel and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor and a Divers Alert Network (DAN) Instructor Trainer.
Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan and by Foreign Poicy Magazine as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world’s leading advocates of Internet freedom.
Lawrence Lessig
Started: December 2001
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.
Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
Laurie Racine
Started: March 2006
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.
Eric Saltzman
Started: December 2001
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.
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Started: July 2002
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.
Annette ThomasStarted: April 2010
Annette Thomas is CEO of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, a company operating in over 70 countries, with interests in scientific, educational and consumer fiction and non- fiction publishing, spanning the range from traditional textbooks and journals to new media tools and services.
Annette joined Macmillan in 1993 as the cell biology editor for Nature magazine. She held a number of editorial and publishing roles within Nature Publishing Group (NPG), including Publisher of the ground-breaking Nature Reviews series, before being appointed Managing Director in October 2000. During the seven years of her leadership, NPG established itself as a major scholarly publisher, extending the reach and influence of the Nature brand in science and medicine and developing an enviable reputation for innovation, particularly in the digital space. In 2007, Annette was awarded the Kim Scott Walwyn prize, set up in 2004 to celebrate outstanding achievements by women in publishing. She was appointed CEO of Macmillan in October 2007. Annette is a member of the Board of Directors of the Verlagsgruppe von Holtzbrinck (Macmillan’s parent company) and a Governor of the Stephen Perse Foundation (Perse School for Girls), Cambridge, UK.
Annette received a B.S. in Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences from Harvard University and a Ph. D. in Cell Biology from Yale University.
Jimmy Wales
Started: March 2006
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).
Esther Wojcicki, Vice Chair
Started: June 2008
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.