Michelle Thorne

Michelle Thorne (born 1985) is an American-born, Berlin, Germany-based internet culture and climate justice activist who is known for leading community initiatives at Mozilla and before then with Creative Commons. Her work focuses on knowledge sharing and on the social and planetary implications of new technologies.

She is the Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the Green Web Foundation an organization focused on climate justice related to the Internet. She served 12 years with the Mozilla Foundation in a number of different roles, including in her final years as Mozilla's Sustainable Internet Lead.

She is the editor of an award-winning online magazine, Branch.

Early life and education

Thorne grew up in Heidelberg, Germany. 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.

Career

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 organized the Drumbeat Festival and the first several editions of the Mozilla Festival, which grew to be the largest annual gathering of the Mozilla community.

She is co-author of the book Understanding the Connected Home: Thoughts on living in tomorrow's connected home in 2016 (2nd edition) and was a co-founder of Mozilla's Open IoT Studio the same year, which later evolved into a PhD program on internet health with the University of Northumbria called OpenDoTT in 2018. At Mozilla, she co-founded the magazine Ding in 2017 with Jon Rogers.

She was a founding member of the Awesome Foundation Berlin, which is no longer active.

In 2020, she founded the online magazine Branch to convene people and ideas on how to make the internet itself more sustainable for the planet. She is also a Senior Program Officer on Mozilla's Fellowships and Awards team.

Honors and awards

2021: Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity for the online magazine Branch