Jennryn Wetzler (CC BY); Sophine Clachar (CC BY-NC-ND); Jay Walsh (CC BY-SA, photo by Lane Hartwell)

I’m excited to announce three new members of the Creative Commons team: Jennryn Wetzler, Assistant Director of Open Education; Sophine Clachar, Data Engineer; and Jay Walsh, Chief of Staff.

Jennryn joins us following her work at the U.S. Department of State, where she piloted open educational resources (OER) use for public diplomacy. There, she helped lead the development and implementation of open policies to ensure publicly funded resources are openly licensed. She also co-developed the Federal Open Licensing Playbook to help government officers understand and properly implement open licensing requirements. Prior to that, Jennryn worked in Thailand and Niger, and learned how essential access to education is for international development. Jennryn has a Masters in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University’s School for International Service. At CC Jennryn will seek new ways to build and support the global open education movement, and will be our lead for the Creative Commons Certificate program. Jennryn lives in Mt Rainier, Maryland. Her work at CC kicks off March 5.

Sophine will be ramping up CC’s ongoing product work to build a more vibrant, usable commons, with a major focus on CC Search. She is a data engineer with over 10 years of experience. Before CC she worked on research projects relating to aviation safety and large-scale and complex aviation data repositories at the University of North Dakota. Sophine was a recipient of the Airport Cooperative Research Program Graduate Research Award which fostered the development of machine learning algorithms that identify anomalies in aircraft data. Sophine holds a PhD in Scientific Computing from the University of North Dakota. She resides in New York City.

Jay previously led communications at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, and recently headed up the global communications team at Riot Games in Los Angeles. His 16 years of communications and strategic planning experience span open source and free culture projects, gaming, public broadcasting, academia and the public sector. At the Wikimedia Foundation Jay spearheaded the organization’s debut efforts to increase global awareness of Wikipedia’s vast community of editors, and made strides in transforming the mainstream conversation about Wikipedia’s reliability and sustainability. As Chief of Staff, Jay will be working across CC’s staff to help focus and accelerate our projects and initiatives, build up our product development strategy and pipeline, and enhance our long term sustainability and operational planning. Jay studied Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. He currently resides in Sonoma County, California.

I am incredibly pleased to welcome these three new staff members to Creative Commons. We are poised for an impactful and exceptional 2018 with our small, global team. Welcome, Jennryn, Sophine, and Jay!

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Expanding and strengthening the Creative Commons global network has been a primary focus of the organization since our most recent Summit in Seoul, South Korea. Most recently, we announced CC’s next global summit, which will take place in Toronto at the end of April, and will bring together hundreds of community members from around the world to work on growing the commons. Leading up to the Summit, the CC community will be drafting its first collaborative global movement strategy. This effort follows an extensive research project aimed at identifying the specific needs of community members. It will mean a big shift in how CC builds, enables, and works as a network and a global movement. And it will require strong leadership and support, which is why I am so pleased to bring on Claudio and Simeon into these new roles.

In Claudio’s position as Director of Ecosystem Strategy, he will focus on supporting the development and implementation of the new global network strategy. He will collaborate with the CC global community to develop plans and recommendations for shifting Creative Commons to a more open, global, and inclusive organization, and a more powerful, impactful movement led by its community. Claudio is based in Chile and speaks Spanish and English. Read Claudio’s full job description

As Network Manager, Simeon will provide daily support to affiliate teams, collect information about their work, make connections and introductions, and manage administrative needs. This is an essential role to facilitate everyday collaboration and connectivity in the network. Simeon is based in Kenya and speaks Swahili and English. Read Simeon’s full job description.

Claudio and Simeon have been part of the CC community for many years and their work has been integral to the growth of our global network. For the Creative Commons movement to continue to grow and to flourish, ongoing and open communication between CC HQ and all the members of our community is a must. I couldn’t be happier to be able to make an investment in leadership that will support this communication and facilitate a new era of global engagement.

Please join me in welcoming Claudio and Simeon. If you have any questions about their work or about how to get involved in CC’s network, please send a message to network@creativecommons.org.

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Kat joins us with an extensive background in the free culture and software communities. She has been a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, where her focus is on legal and community issues, and she was previously a policy analyst at the American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy. Kat has a BA from Stetson University and a JD from George Mason University. In her secret double life, she is a classical musician, performing on bassoon and viola.


Elliot has worked in the non-profit sector for eight years, mostly in the arts and technology. He has a degree in English and theatre from the University of South Dakota and a Master’s in writing from the California College of the Arts. When he’s not thinking about CC’s communications strategy, he’s often thinking about cooking, poetry, or music. He also wrote this recent CC post on how support for Open Access to science research is growing.


Sara also joins us with a background in free culture. From 2008-11, Sara was Head of Partnerships & Foundation Relations for the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously, she worked in development for Cambridge in America; and at several non- and for-profit ventures based in New York City. Sara is on the board of the Global Lives Project. She has a joint Masters in Journalism and French Studies from New York University, and a B.A. in French and English Literature from Georgetown University. Most days, Sara can be found attempting diplomatic negotiation on behalf of open knowledge, crafting with words, or inventing easier ways to do things at the office. Otherwise, she is likely hiking, cooking, reading, or out and about in San Francisco; most always with her dogs.

Please join us in welcoming our new team members. We hope to do great work in furthering openness together.

You can read more about each of them, and the rest of the Creative Commons team, at our staff page.

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Lila will join our San Francisco office from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she practices Internet-related litigation and counseling, with a particular focus on novel copyright and privacy issues. Lila has also worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where she was an Intellectual Property Fellow in 2007. She earned her Juris Doctor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) after graduating from Brown University with a BA in Philosophy.

With the busyness of the holidays ahead, we are delighted to head into the new year with Lila committed to our team.

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