Obama Foundation Announces Glenn Brown as Chief Digital Officer
May 10, 2017 at 2:22 PM CDT
Chicago – Today, the Obama Foundation announced that Glenn Brown will serve as Chief Digital Officer. As Chief Digital Officer, Glenn will lead the Foundation’s digital engagement efforts, including content strategy and production across the Foundation’s platforms, as well as media and technology partnerships. While the Obama Presidential Center will be based on the South Side of Chicago, it will, via partnerships, programs, and digital initiatives, have projects all over Chicago, the country, and the world.
David Simas, CEO of the Obama Foundation, said, “We are thrilled to have Glenn on our team leading our digital engagement efforts. Glenn has an extensive background developing and executing innovative digital efforts for diverse projects and initiatives. The Obama Foundation – with Glenn’s leadership and expertise – is excited to continue to find new ways to engage people around the world online and inspire them to make change in their own communities.”
“It is an honor to join the Obama Foundation. President Obama has challenged us to develop digital media and tools to help the connect the Foundation’s hub on the South Side of Chicago to people around the world. We look forward to partnering with media makers and technology developers large and small, and everyday citizens from all walks of life, toward this end,” said Glenn Brown, Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation.
Glenn Brown
Glenn Brown is Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation. He began work at the Foundation as a consultant in June 2016 and oversaw the launch of Obama.org in January.
Glenn is a Venture Fellow at Betaworks, a start-up studio and investment firm in New York, and a member of the Board of Directors of The Texas Tribune, a digital-first, non-profit, non-partisan news service in Austin, Texas. In 2016, he was Entrepreneur in Residence at Betaworks.
Glenn worked at Twitter from 2011 – 2015, where he co-founded Twitter Amplify, a premium video program featuring hundreds of partnerships with major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, UEFA, EPL, etc.), broadcasters, and live events around the world.
Before that, Glenn was head of U.S. music partnerships at YouTube, where he negotiated revenue-sharing deals with major and independent record labels and publishers around premium and user-generated video. He also served as in-house product counsel at Google, focusing on copyright, privacy, and content policy issues for YouTube, ContentID, Google Images, and Blogger among other products.
Glenn was the first full-time CEO of Creative Commons from 2002-2005, where he oversaw the launch of the first machine-readable "Some Rights Reserved" copyright licenses worldwide and worked with publishers, creators, and platforms as diverse as MIT, The Public Library of Science (PLoS), Flickr, and WIRED (with whom he curated a remix-friendly album including songs from Gilberto Gil, David Byrne, The Beastie Boys, Spoon, Le Tigre, and other artists). He graduated from the University of Texas and Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society.