Heather Ford
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Heather Ford has worked as a researcher, activist, journalist, educator and strategist in the fields of online collaboration, intellectual property reform, information privacy and open source software in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is currently a DPhil student at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University where she is studying how Wikipedia editors write history as it happens in a format that is unprecedented in the history of encyclopedias. Before this, she worked as an ethnographer for Ushahidi, the Kenyan-based non-profit technology company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping where she studied how Wikipedia and Ushahidi communities work together to verify information collected from social media sources. In 2011, she graduated from the UC Berkeley iSchool Master of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) program. She is a former Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board member and the former Executive Director of iCommons – an international organisation started by Creative Commons to connect the open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. She was a co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa and of the South African non-profit, The African Commons Project and worked as an activist and program manager in Johannesburg and London for the Association for Progressive Communications in the time leading up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At night she dreams about writing books and finding time to draw.
Research interests
online collaboration, Middle East media, conflict in online communities, ethnography, media objectivity and bias, open access, online identity, reputation, privacy, epistemology
Positions held at the OII
- DPhil Student, October 2012 -
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Research
Current projects
April 2011 -
Using Wikipedia to explore the participation gap between those who have their say, and those whose voices are pushed to the side, in representations of the Arab world online.
Wikipedia's Networks and Geographies: Representation and Power in Peer-Produced Content
November 2010 -
This project brings together OII research fellows and doctoral students to shed light on the incorporation of new users and information into the Wikipedia community.
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Publications
Articles
- Ford, H. (2012) Crowd Wisdom. Index on Censorship 41 (4) 33-39.
Chapters
- Ford, H. (2011) The Missing Wikipedians. In Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-78146-13-1.
Conference papers
- Ford, H. and Geiger, S. (2012) Writing up rather than writing down: Becoming Wikipedia literate. Proc. WikiSym '12, 2012.
- Geiger, S. and Ford, H. (2011) Participation in Wikipedia's article deletion processes. Proc. WikiSym '11, 2011.
Presentations
- Ford, H. (2013) Wikipedia, Kenya and Code. Presented at the 'Off the Radar: Stories, Insight, Action!' panel, 2013 Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. January 2013.
- Ford, H. (2012) Managing sources during high volume news events. Presented at the 'Wikipedia in the Twitter Age' panel, Wikimania 2012, Washington DC, July 2012.
- Ford, H. and Geiger, S. (2012) Writing up rather than writing down: Becoming Wikipedia literate. WikiSym, 8th International Symposium on Wikis & Open Collaboration, Linz, Austria, May 2012.
- Ford, H. (2012) Wikipedia Sources: Managing Sources in Rapidly Evolving Global News Articles on the English Wikipedia. Ushahidi Working Paper, 2012.
- Ford, H. (2011) Learning in a WikiWorld: How new media and open collaboration are changing what we know and how we know it. Presented at WikiSym, 7th International Symposium on Wikis & Open Collaboration, Mountain View, California, October 2011.
Reports
- Ford, H. (2009) Open Culture. In Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) 2009.
Theses
- Ford, H. (2011) The Spaces Between: Towards Private Spaces for Peer Learning. Masters Thesis, UC Berkeley School of Information.
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Thesis
Thesis title to be confirmed.
Supervisor
Director of Research and Research Fellow
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Webcasts
Recorded on: 17 January 2013 Duration: 00:08:12
Heather Ford presents at the Microsoft Research 2013 Social Computing Symposium in the panel 'Off the Radar: Stories, Insight, Action!'.
Managing sources during high volume news events
Recorded on: 13 July 2012 Duration: 01:28:26
Heather Ford presents at Wikimania 2012 (Washington, DC) in the panel 'Wikipedia in the Twitter Age' (starts 00:38:00).
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News
Free for all? Lifting the lid on a Wikipedia crisis
17 April 2013 New Scientist
In an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing Wikipedia in expanding participation beyond the English speaking world, Mark Graham’s research on Wikipedia is referenced and DPhil student Heather Ford is quoted.
Blog
February 2013: The Openness Edition
Heather Ford on 3 Mar 2013 13:41PM
First published on ethnographymatters.net. Last month on Ethnography Matters, we started a monthly thematic focus where each of the EM contributing editors would elicit posts about a particular theme. I kicked us off with the theme entitled ‘The [...]
Heather Ford on 1 Nov 2012 10:37AM
It was the end of the final day of our workshop on the outskirts of Cairo and we were all feeling that curious mixture of inspiration, energy and exhaustion that follows those meetings where a world of ideas and people and things are thrown together in a [...]
A new chapter: hFord in oxFord
Heather Ford on 19 Oct 2012 07:37AM
After four months of travel to visit friends in amazing places and visiting some wild places on my own, I have at last settled down in Oxford for my next adventure: three or four years doing my DPhil here at Oxford University. Sometimes I have to pinch [...]
Last updated on: 17 May 2013
