Heather Ford

Heather Ford is a digital ethnographer passionate about how the Internet and digital technologies can be developed to serve principles of global solidarity, knowledge equality and democratic governance. She works as an Associate Professor at the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) where she is Head of Discipline for Digital and Social Media. With a background as an activist for internet rights and free and open source software and content, Heather Ford now focuses on 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 has worked 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.