Heather Ford

Infobox_Person
name = Heather Ford


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caption = Ford at the iCommons meeting in Dubrovnik 2007
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Heather Ford is a South African who has worked in the fields of Internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is the Executive Director of iCommons, a UK private charitable corporation. Incubated by Creative Commons, iCommons is an organisation with a vision to develop a united global commons front by collaborating with open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

Ford graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and has a certificate in Telecommunications Policy, Law and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre. After working in the United Kingdom for GreenNet and Privacy International, she went on to Stanford University in 2003 where she worked as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program.

Volunteering for Creative Commons while she was at Stanford, she decided to go back to South Africa at the end of her studies to start Creative Commons South Africa and a programme entitled "Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons" at the Wits University Link Centre. During 2006 Heather co-founded The African Commons Project, a South African non profit organisation dedicated to nurturing the commons in Africa.

Ford serves on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

External links

* iCommons [http://www.icommons.org/static/about/people/#ford "People"]
* [http://hblog.org/ Heather Ford's Blog]
* [http://www.researchictafrica.net/images/upload/004-21-SAJIC01.pdf "Africa and the Digital Information Commons: An Overview"] , with Chris Armstrong
* [http://www.commons-sense.org/ Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons]
* [http://rdvp.org/become/ Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship]
* [http://za.creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons South Africa]
* [http://link.wits.ac.za/ University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre]
* [http://video.ideasagency.jp/20071106/9/ Heather Ford's Interview Video]