(Next in a continuing series of posts about core Commoners I’m happy to have worked with. Apologies for the intermittent, serial nature of these entries; it’s taken longer than I thought.)

I’ve known our corporate counsel Diane Cabell for about seven years, since first meeting her back in the early days of the Berkman Center. As far as I can remember, my first conversation with Diane was to ask her what the letters URL stood for. She tried hard to not look too concerned — this was an Internet research center I was volunteering for, after all — then pointed me to a good glossary of terms and loaned me a copy of Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

It was the first of many times at Berkman that Diane took the time to help me out with one thing or another, whether an ignorant technical question or a life lesson. Like a lot of things at Creative Commons, the chance to work with Diane again has felt like a natural and welcome continuation of the good old Berkman days.

A fixture at CC since day one, Diane has ably handled a wide range of crucial behind-the-scenes tasks ranging from the often byzantine government hoops a nonprofit has to jump through, to legal research on trademark, to dotting all i’s and crossing all t’s in all our corporate records, to helping develop the infrastructure for this increasingly international organization — precisely the sort of work, largely invisible from the outside, that keeps CC a steady ship among the exploding number of new projects and developments.

Throughout, and despite working from the East Coast, Diane has been consistent source of optimism and support for the core CC staff. I can think of no one else inside the organization who has so regularly reminded us to step back and appreciate the things we’re doing. So I figure it’s only fair to do the same now for her: thanks for everything, Diane.