| Michelle Thorne | |
|---|---|
Michelle Thorne 2007, by Joi Ito |
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| Born | January 15, 1985 USA |
| Residence | Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | Mount Holyoke College University of Leipzig |
| Occupation | Mozilla Foundation |
| Known for | Creative Commons |
Michelle Thorne (born January 15, 1985) is an American-born, Berlin, Germany-based Creative Commons activist. She holds a BA summa cum laude in Critical Social Thought and German Studies from Mount Holyoke College, USA, where she wrote an honors thesis on authorship, originality, and American copyright law. Thorne grew up in Heidelberg, Germany. She worked as the international project manager for Creative Commons from 2007 to 2011[1] and joined the Mozilla Foundation as Global Event Strategist in 2011.[2] She is a founding member of the Awesome Foundation Berlin.[3]
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Thorne chaired the 2011 Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web, featuring the launch of the HTML5 media framework Popcorn 1.0[4] and web literacy initiatives for youth and journalists.[5]
Thorne contributed as a core writer of An Open Web, a book about the opportunities and challenge of the web, written in five days by six writers during a book sprint in Berlin in 2011, facilitated by FLOSS Manuals.[6]
In 2009 Thorne co-authored a research paper[7] in which the authors analyze show cases and identify key challenges to the Creative Commons Case Studies Project. This paper was published at the Free Culture Research Workshop held at Harvard Law School October 23, 2009. Thorne co-organized the following year's Free Culture Research Conference in Berlin.[8]
Thorne regularly organizes events and gives talks about the commons, open design, and collaborative consumption.[9][10]
Her design challenges for sharable objects were cited by Bruce Sterling[11] and she was interviewed in the film The Future of Art.[12]
Thorne's claim[13] to being the inventor of nutellachino,[14] a dessert combining Nutella and cappuccino powder, led to her being interviewed by the Berlin-based podcast Küchenradio.[15] Also, Thorne stated[16] to be on a personal quest to beat her Googleganger, a British erotica actress of the same name, at her search engine rankings.