Biography | Ryan Merkley — The Castro Street Floor Creative Commons Occupied When It Named Him CEO

People treat a Creative Commons chief executive as a lawyer in a licence debate.

The board that hired Ryan Merkley picked a campaigner who had run city communications and a Mozilla operating budget.

On 14 May 2014 the board announced the appointment from a Mountain View dateline.

He was to start on 1 June 2014, based in Toronto, splitting time with the Bay Area.

The office CC still listed was 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, a few blocks north of the Mozilla canopy he was leaving.

The organization had moved into that downtown Mountain View floor on 1 April 2011.

Four months after Merkley started, on 3 October 2014, he wrote that CC was closing the office and going fully virtual.

The pin is the last physical headquarters the licences occupied when he took the job, not a building a visitor can tour as a CC museum.

He stayed five years, the longest CEO tenure CC had recorded when he left.

In January 2016 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation approved an unrestricted multi-year grant of 10 million dollars for the strategy he had just published.

CC's own later biographies say individual donors nearly tripled in his term and that the commons grew past 1.1 billion licensed works.

On 13 August 2019 he announced he would step down and join the Wikimedia Foundation as chief of staff.

The portraits attached here were made by Rannie Turingan on 9 May 2014, five days before the press release, and released as CC0.

They are the images the organization used to introduce him.

444 Castro is a Class A office tower in Old Mountain View.

Nothing on the sidewalk now says Creative Commons.

The decision that matters happened on this floor in the early summer of 2014, when a Canadian civic staffer became steward of the licences that already sat under Wikipedia, Flickr, and a growing share of the open web.

Photos: Rannie Turingan, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (9 May 2014), taken days before the appointment announcement.