Heather Ford, Masters student at the iSchool

Heather Ford is a budding anthropologist who studies how online communities get together to learn, play and deliberate. She is currently enrolled as a Masters student at the UC Berkeley iSchool where she is researching the social life of information in schools, educational privacy and Africans’ on Wikipedia. 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 as well as a community-building initiative called the GeekRetreat – bringing together South Africa’s top web entrepreneurs to talk about how to make the local Internet better. On 1 June, she will start working as an ethnographer for Ushahidi and Swifly and continuing her privacy ethnographies. At night she dreams about writing books and finding time to draw.