@hfordsa

I am 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. Today I work as an Associate Professor at the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) where I am 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, I now focus on implications for the increasing deployment of algorithms and automation to organise and construct knowledge about events, people, places and things around the world. I am 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 have 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.

My 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. I have published in a variety of channels including Big Data and Society, New Media and Society, the International Journal of Communications, Social Studies of Science and a number of Advanced Computer Machinery (ACM) journals. I am a founder editor of ethnographymatters.net and review articles for a number of journals and conferences in the fields of science and technology studies, media and communication.

I completed my DPhil (PhD) at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University under the supervision of Professors Mark Graham and Eric Meyer and my Masters in Information Management and Systems (MIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley iSchool. Before my PhD I worked for a number of non-profit technology organisations including the Association for Progressive Communications, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iCommons, Privacy International and Ushahidi as an activist, ethnographer and director. I am on the board of the Copyright Evidence Wiki and have been on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and the board of iCommons where I worked towards the goal of fairer intellectual property provisions for the Internet, particularly in developing countries. I facilitated a number of open technology events including Africa Source (Uganda) and FOSS Road (Tajikistan) (by Tacticaltech), and the GeekRetreat (in South Africa).