Michelle Thorne (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 and joined the Mozilla Foundation as Global Event Strategist in 2011. She is a founding member of the Awesome Foundation Berlin.
Mozilla Foundation.
Thorne chaired the 2011 Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web, featuring the launch of the HTML5 media framework Popcorn 1.0 and web literacy initiatives for youth and journalists. She also chaired the 2012 Mozilla Festival in which Popcorn was released out of Beta. Her compensation in 2012 from the Mozilla Foundation was $101451,-
Free culture.
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.
In 2009 Thorne co-authored a research paper 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.
Talks and interviews.
Thorne regularly organizes events and gives talks about the commons, open design, and collaborative consumption.
Her design challenges for sharable objects were cited by Bruce Sterling and she was interviewed in the film "The Future of Art".
Thorne's claim to being the inventor of "nutellachino", a dessert combining Nutella and cappuccino powder, led to her being interviewed by the Berlin-based podcast Küchenradio. Also, Thorne stated to be on a personal quest to beat her Googleganger, the British erotica actress Michelle Thorne, at her search engine rankings.