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Ryan Merkley

Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at NPR, leading its work on strategy, technology, AI, product, and network growth. He is the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation. He was previously the CEO of Conscience, an emerging biotech non-profit, using AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He was also a Fellow with the Aspen Institute, working on topics like AI, open source and intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity.

Merkley spent over a decade as a c-suite executive in technology non-profits, including Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he helped grow and strengthen its global network; five years as CEO at Creative Commons, focused on products, education, and sustainability; and Chief Operating Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at Mozilla, helping to establish new strategy and build collaborative teams. He served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project.

Posts by Ryan Merkley

A long-awaited new look for our website

About CC

One of the projects I knew I wanted to take on when I joined Creative Commons as CEO was a major website redesign. The CC site has always been a valuable source of information about our mission, our community, and the legal tools we offer. While there’s a lot of new things happening at CC,…

Why we’re fighting to protect noncommercial uses

Licenses & Tools

You may have seen our recent blog post explaining Creative Commons’ involvement in a court case between Great Minds, a publisher of educational materials, and FedEx Office, the retail chain that provides on-demand copying and printing services. To recap, Great Minds created educational materials under a U.S. federal government grant that required them to be…

New Job Opportunities at Creative Commons

About CC

I’m very excited to share three new job postings with Creative Commons today, supporting three essential areas of our work: technology, communications, and fundraising. It’s a very exciting time for CC: we have new revenues, a new strategy, and a growing Commons and an energetic movement around the world. There is new energy, a great…