Hi, hallo, hola, مرحبا!
I’m Michelle. I work for Mozilla as a global event strategist, aiming to grow communities around open web projects through live events. We host small meet-ups, to larger design jams and hackathons, to an annual festival.
For several years I was the International Project Manager at Creative Commons, coordinating over seventy countries (jurisdictions) worldwide to localize Creative Commons tools and to promote legal sharing and Free Culture.
I organized the Free Culture Research Conference, an event dedicated to exploring the commons and hybrid economies, and co-chaired Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival on Learning, Freedom, and the Web, bringing together disruptive technologists and educators to forge the future of education. I’m a trustee of the Awesome Foundation Berlin, a lightweight association to fund small projects. As a believer in making and doing things, I also helped “chaordinate” the DMY Maker Lab and other DIY projects in Berlin and around the world.
I hold a B.A. in Critical Social Thought and German Studies from Mount Holyoke College, where I completed an honors thesis on authorship, originality, and American copyright law. I’ve also studied at the University of Leipzig and grew up in Heidelberg, Germany.
Contact
Publications
Presentations on SlideShare.
An Open Web. Commissioned by transmediale. Berlin: 2011. Contributors: Adam Hyde, Alejandra Perez, Bassel Safadi, Christopher Adams, Mick Fuzz, Jon Phillips, and Michelle Thorne. (Editable version) / Creative Commons Attribution Unported License Version 3.0.
Thorne, Michelle and Cobcroft, Rachel. “Capturing the Commons: (Ways Forward for) The CC Case Studies Initiative”. Free Culture Research Workshop, Harvard Law School, 23 October, 2009. (PDF) / Creative Commons Attribution Unported License Version 3.0.
“Strengthen the Commons – Now!”. Manifesto from the Interdisciplinary Political Salons of the Heinrich Böll Foundation‘s Time for Commons. Berlin: 2008-2009. Translation: Michelle Thorne, Silke Helfrich, David Bollier. (PDF) / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Germany License Version 3.0.
Thorne, Michelle. Copywritings: Technology, Authorship, and Originality in American Copyright Law. Honors B.A. thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2007. (PDF) / Creative Commons Attribution Unported License Version 3.0.
Thorne, Michelle. Copywritings: A Eulogy for Authorship. Mount Holyoke College Senior Symposium 2007, South Hadley: Mount Holyoke College. April 2007. (PDF) / Creative Commons Attribution Unported License Version 3.0.
Apologies
If you were expecting to find the homepage of my Googlegänger, the more infamous Michelle Thorne, you’d be mistaken here. Alas, I am not a woman of her…um, ahem…caliber. But I am trying to beat her Google rankings.
