The following post is by Cathy Casserly (CEO) and Joi Ito (Board Chair).

Mike Linksvayer / Joi / CC BY

Many of you know Mike Linksvayer, the first CTO and then Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike started at Creative Commons back in 2003 (almost a decade ago!), and since then has shepherded CC through a period of great expansion, providing leadership and support for efforts across various initiatives and around the world. He has also been a great help to all of us this past year, during the transition from part-time to full-time CEO. We can not begin to name everything that Mike has done, not only for Creative Commons, but for free and open culture generally, so we’ll just name a few, with the caveat that, if ever there was a jack of all trades, he is Mike Linksvayer.

Since 2003, Mike has helped to:

• forward RDFa to a W3C Recommendation,
• migrate Wikipedia to BY-SA,
• build scalable tools and processes to support translation and localization,
• deploy constituent management tools to support fundraising and development,
• provide a great place for technical interns to come and develop their skills,
• improve scalability and responsiveness of the CC website,
• build visionary legal tools that enhance access to and grow our valuable public domain
• test, test and re-test new ideas and experimental projects,
• support the continued development and well-being of staff,
• develop our global network, providing guidance, support and encouragement for our affiliates worldwide,
• bridge communities including F/LOSS and Wikimedia, and
• implement compliant, employee-friendly operations and procedures to scale with staff size and program complexity, and
• bring exaggerated skepticism, rigorous logic and thorough analysis to all of CC’s program activities.

Finally, the board and staff would like to acknowledge that Mike has served as the primary voice of reason and forward thinking that has kept Creative Commons on a track that balances idealism with resource realism. We are grateful for Mike Linksvayer’s exceptional role in building the Creative Commons organization.

His contributions to CC make it all the more difficult to announce Mike’s transition from Vice President to Senior Fellow at Creative Commons. In his new role, he will continue to advise on CC-related research and tech projects, in addition to overarching strategy. We fully expect Mike will continue to bring passion and opinion and reason to all of our work in his new role.

Please join us in thanking Mike for all of his hard work! Mike, we wish you the very best in your future endeavors.