Here at Creative Commons, we know that the stories we tell and the people we engage are deeply connected, together forming the backbone of who we are and what we do. Our community generates our most powerful stories and also amplifies all the work we do, spreading the benefits of open knowledge and better sharing around the world.

To better integrate our community and communications, we are now bringing them together into one common practice. I’m excited to announce that our next move in this direction is to welcome Nate Angell as our new Director of Communications and Community.

Nate joins Creative Commons as a long-time community member, where he has worked to help educators and institutions adopt and adapt open educational resources (OER) and to spread the use of common tools and infrastructure that support open knowledge practices. You may already know Nate for his contribution of the “TV dinner vs smoothie” analogy that tries to help people understand the difference between loose collections and deep remixes of openly-licensed works.

Nate’s long experience cultivating open practices and tools with people working in schools, cultural institutions, libraries and archives, science and research, and journalism will enable him to help us all share the common purpose that unites all our wide-ranging collaborations and creations.

As he’s just getting started, I asked Nate to sum up how he’s feeling about his new role:

“I’m so excited to join Creative Commons and be able to engage full time with this truly global community that I’ve long seen is working to make the world better. When I look at everything happening around the world right now — both the wonderful and the troubling — I know the best thing I can be doing is to help as many people as possible share their creativity and their knowledge. We couldn’t do that without the fundamental infrastructure that Creative Commons provides, and I’ll be doing my best to spread it far and wide.”

Do you have thoughts about communications and community at Creative Commons? Nate wants to hear from you! Reach Nate and the whole Creative Commons team and community by joining our mailing list or Slack, and engaging us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You can also reach Nate directly at nate@creativecommons.org, or as @xolotl on Twitter or Mastodon.