John Weitzmann / DTKindler / CC BY

Gwen Franck / Gwen Franck / All Rights Reserved

I am very happy to introduce our two new European Regional Coordinators – John Weitzmann and Gwen Franck.

Creative Commons has volunteer teams in over 70 countries, including 35 in Europe, all of whom work to support and promote the adoption of CC in their local jurisdictions and advise CC’s work globally. The role of the Regional Coordinators is to support and foster these communities in their regions. We’ve had a Regional Coordinator in Europe for a few years, but this will be the first time we have two for the region, significantly increasing their capacity.

John is not new to the CC community, and in fact has been a leader in Europe for many years as the Legal Lead of CC Germany. Based in Berlin, he is also a Partner of iRights.Law, an IP and media law firm, and is a well known writer and speaker on open issues as part of iRights.Lab.

Gwen is newer to Creative Commons, but is still known to our community through her work with the OpenAIRE project, providing access to research across Europe. She has also worked on Open Access Belgium and TEDxGhent. Her background is in community management, international relations and research.

Jonas Oberg / Mathias Klang / CC BY ND

With this announcement, I also bid a sad farewell to Jonas Oberg, who has been our European Regional Coordinator for almost two years now. Jonas has done a great job of supporting our European community, organizing multiple regional meetings, working with individual teams and taking a lead in everything from grant applications to collaborative activities. We are extremely grateful for Jonas’ time with us, and very glad that he will continue to be part of our broader community in his new Shuttleworth Fellowship looking at automated attribution for open objects.

Join me in farewelling Jonas, and welcoming John and Gwen to their new roles.