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Ryan Merkley

Ryan is currently the Chief of Staff at Wikimedia Foundation. He was CEO at Creative Commons from 2014 to 2019. He helped define a new strategy and to establish long-term sustainability for CC resulting in a vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude.

Prior to joining CC, Ryan was Chief Operating Officer of Mozilla, 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. Ryan is an experienced campaigner and advocate for social causes, and has advised political campaigns on the local and national levels. Ryan is an avid cyclist and an amateur barista. He lives in Toronto with his daughter and his wife Kelsey.

Posts by Ryan Merkley

New CC T-Shirt! (Inspired by a Letter from a 5th Grader)

by Ryan Merkley Open Culture

Creative Commons gets letters and phone calls and emails from all around the world. People write to share their work, call to get advice on how to use the licenses, and email to complain and to say thank you. Recently, we got a series of hand-written letters from a number of students in a US-based…

Moving on from Creative Commons

by Ryan Merkley About CC

I have some bittersweet professional news to share. I will be stepping down from my position at Creative Commons and joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Chief of Staff. Leading Creative Commons has been the most challenging and rewarding role of my career. It has been a privilege to do this work, and together we’ve had…

Looking forward and back: Five years at Creative Commons

by Ryan Merkley About CC

This month, I’ll mark five years as CEO at Creative Commons. That makes me the longest-serving CEO in the organization’s history, and it’s also the longest I’ve served with the same job title. Every day I get to work with some of the brightest, most dedicated staff and community members in the open movement. Anniversaries…

Use and Fair Use: Statement on shared images in facial recognition AI

by Ryan Merkley Licenses & Tools

Yesterday, NBC News published a story about IBM’s work on improving diversity in facial recognition technology and the dataset that they gathered to further this work.

Big Flickr Announcement: All CC-licensed images will be protected

by Ryan Merkley About CC

I’m happy to share Flickr’s announcement today that all CC-licensed and public domain images on the platform will be protected and exempted from upload limits.