Heather Ford

Heather Ford is a South African researcher, blogger, journalist, social entrepreneur and open source activist who has worked in the field of Internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is the founder of Creative Commons South Africa.

Early life and education Ford was born in Pietermaritzburg in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. She attended Carter High School in Pietermaritzburg.

In 1996, Ford went to Rhodes University to study a four-year Bachelor of Journalism degree majoring in communication design. and performed in numerous plays and dance dramas. She co-wrote and starred in the National Arts Festival Fringe Festival play: 'Sincerely, Colour' in 1997 and was considering a career as a dance choreographer before she decided to find work in the media sector.

Career After working as Digital Information Manager for Johannesburg-based non-profit, the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa from 2000 to 2002, she went to the United Kingdom to work with the Association for Progressive Communications, She said in 2010 that Creative Commons and Wikipedia are not inclusive enough for the developing world. and earned a master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. She has blogged at Thoughtleader and Global Voices, and has been a guest on Reuben Goldberg's 'The Internet Economy'. In 2011, IT News Africa named Ford one of Africa's 10 most influential women in science and tech.

Ford worked as a digital ethnographer at Ushahidi until October 2012 when she began studying for her DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. She gained her PhD from Oxford with her thesis Fact factories: Wikipedia and the power to represent. Since then, she has worked with the Wikimedia Foundation, investigating questions such as the nature of power within Wikipedia. She was a fellow in digital methods at the University of Leeds and is currently at the University of Technology Sydney as an Associate Professor in the School of Communications, the Coordinator of the UTS Data and AI Ethics Cluster, Affiliate of the UTS Data Science Institute, and Associate of the UTS Centre for Media Transition. She spent ten years studying the editing of the Wikipedia article 2011 Egyptian revolution, releasing the book Writing the Revolution in 2022.

Boards The African Commons Project Board: 2006–present The Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board: 2007–2009 iCommons Board: 2005–2006

Honors and awards 2009 – UC Berkeley School of Information Fellowship 2009 – Book of South African Women - An annual register of South Africa's top women in business, technology 2004 – Stanford BASES social entrepreneurship award for Bookbox, a web-based jukebox of digital books in languages from around the world 2003 – Reuters Digital Vision Program Scholarship awarded by Benetech 2003 – British Chevening Scholarship awarded by the British government 2000 – Rhodes University Academic Colours and Distinction

Publications 2009: Open culture in Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) 2009 2013: Getting to the source. Where does Wikipedia get its information from? Coauthored with Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, and Nathaniel Miller, Presented at WikiSym 2013 2022: 2023: