Ryan Merkley

Notable work and positions

NPR - Chief Operating Officer
Wikimedia Foundation - former Chief of Staff to the Executive Director
Creative Commons - former Chief Executive Officer
Mozilla - former Chief Operating Officer

Biography

Ryan Merkley is Chief Operating Officer of NPR. A Canadian executive based in Toronto, he has spent more than a decade as a C-suite leader in technology and knowledge nonprofits, including as Chief of Staff to the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, five years as CEO of Creative Commons, and Chief Operating Officer of the Mozilla Foundation. Before moving into the nonprofit technology sector, he served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics and as a senior advisor to Toronto Mayor David Miller, where he led the city's Open Data initiative. At Creative Commons, Merkley led a new organizational strategy and secured a $10 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and in 2017 he helped announce a partnership among Creative Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art that released 375,000 museum images into the public domain. He most recently served as CEO of Conscience, a biotech nonprofit, and is founding chair of the Flickr Foundation.