Photo by Paola Villareal, CC BY

I’m thrilled to announce that Paola Villarreal will be joining the Creative Commons team as Director of Product Engineering. She will lead the development of CC’s tools to create a more vibrant, usable commons, beginning with CC Search.

This is an important hire for Creative Commons, and it was important we find someone with the talent, curiosity, and values needed to lead our technical work in a global movement.

Villarreal is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard University and a former Mozilla Open Web fellow. A self-taught systems programmer and accomplished open advocate, Paola’s research as a Berkman Fellow focuses on the relationship between data and justice, aiming to strengthen access and reduce inequality by developing data tools that inform the work of advocates, activists, community organizers, lawyers, and journalists and their communities. In her 2015-16 Mozilla Open Web Fellowship, she worked at ACLU of Massachusetts on social justice projects that heavily rely on open technology and data.

Villarreal previously worked at Xamarin Inc as a iOS Developer and was the Director of Technologic Innovation at Mexico City’s Innovation Lab (Laboratorio para la Ciudad), where she ran the Code for Mexico City Fellowship and designed and implemented the Data Lab, an Open Data portal with an API. While working as the systems administrator for Mexico’s President’s Office, she was part of the team that first proposed the usage of CC’s licenses as best practice for governmental websites. In addition to her professional work, Paola has been involved with the Creative Commons Mexico Community since 2005 and blogs about her work at Paw.mx.

With over 17 years experience, Villarreal brings a wealth of knowledge to CC as a long-time advocate for public access to information, an open source veteran and community builder, and a talented programmer and data scientist with a history of work for social justice causes ranging from community over-policing to solving local transportation issues. Read a profile of Paola’s work in the Harvard Gazette, and learn more about her work in her presentation on “Public Interest Data Science” at the Harvard Law School.

Paola is originally from Mexico City and is currently based in Boston, MA. She will join us in June, and we want to give her a warm welcome to the CC Community. Welcome, Paola!