[1] Previous to NPR he was Chief of Staff to the office of the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation,[2] and before that, the CEO of the American non-profit organization Creative Commons.

[8] Merkley was born in Cambridge, Ontario, and studied at the University of Waterloo from 1998 to 2001, and employed at Engineers Without Borders Canada as the Chief Communications Officer.

During his tenure at Mozilla, he contributed to the development of products in support of the open web including Lightbeam, Webmaker, and Popcorn.

[15][16] In 2016, he successfully secured a $10 million grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support Creative Commons' new strategy, re-focusing the organisation on encouraging sharing.

As part of the announcement, Creative Commons also released the beta of CC Search which included social features for list sharing and simple attribution.