Michelle Thorne

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,-

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.

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.