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Heather Ford

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Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney

Dr Heather Ford is an Associate Professor and Head of Discipline for Digital and Social Media in the School of Communications at the University of Technology Sydney. With a background as an activist for internet rights and free and open source software and content, she now researches the implications for the increasing deployment of algorithms and automation to organise and construct knowledge about events, people, places and things around the world. She is the co-founder of a number of digital activist and community groups including Creative Commons South Africa, ethnographymatters.net, InfoCamp and OxDEG (the Oxford Digital Ethnography Group) and hasworked as a Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University, as a Google Policy Fellow, a Fellow for the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK and a University Academic Fellow in Digital Methods at Leeds University. Her first book: “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age“ follows the ways in which facts about historic events are being constructed on Wikipedia and what that means for how we know and remember

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney
  • 2018–2019
    Senior lecturer, University of New South Wales
  • 2015–2017
    Fellow, University of Leeds
  • 2011–2012
    Ethnographer, Ushahidi
  • 2010–2010
    Policy Fellow, Google / Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • 2006–2008
    Executive Director, iCommons
  • 2003–2004
    Fellow, Reuters/Benetech Digital Vision Fellowship Programme
  • 2002–2003
    Project Manager, Association for Progressive Communications
  • 2000–2002
    Digital Information Manager, Electoral Institute of Southern Africa

Education

  • 2015 
    University of Oxford, DPhil
  • 2011 
    University of California Berkeley, MIMS
  • 2002 
    University of the Witwatersrand, Telecommunications Policy, Regulation and Management Certificate
  • 2000 
    Rhodes University, BJourn