Introducing Nathan Yergler

"Connexions has been working with Creative Commons from the time both organizations were just visions in their founder's eye. The open, yet clear licenses that Creative Commons fostered to allow sharing and reuse are key to Connexions' mission to be a global repository of high-quality, reusable and adaptable textbooks and educational resources. Nathan, Creative Commons CTO, is our trusted guide on issues of standards, interoperability, and discoverability."
Katherine Fletcher Technology Director and Project Manager for Connexions

I'm Chief Technology Officer at Creative Commons (CC). My responsibilities include managing the team that builds the technical infrastructure behind Creative Commons legal tools. I'm also responsible for looking at ways Creative Commons technology can be applied, and how our experience and expertise with linked open data can be leveraged. Open educational resources are a core application of Creative Commons licenses, as they depend upon license interoperability to scale.

I initially became involved with Connexions through my work at CC. Connexions is one of the great exemplars of a community built around open licensing and re-use. The Creative Commons Attribution license that Connexions' contributors offer their work under reduces ambiguity and removes a friction point for reuse and redistribution. Connexions' support for remixing and reusing content is one of the best, which makes it an extremely interesting platform to be involved with. And as a long time Zope developer, I was further drawn in by the use of Zope and Plone.

I see the Technology Committee as a resource for Connexions and Rhaptos developers to use to help think about ways the already successful platform can be further scaled and improved. As a member of the committee, I hope I can provide perspectives on how other communities are using CC licenses, and how Rhaptos can continue to be an exemplar for encouraging sharing, remix, and reuse.

I'm excited about working on ways to improve search and discovery for Open Education Resources; Connexions' lenses are a great initial implementation of a curatorial system that I think will be central to this. I'm also interested in enabling the discovery of derivatives and transformations of OER across the web.