[2] She was Head Girl at Carter High School in Pietermaritzburg and won awards for debating, drama, music and academics.

[citation needed] In 1996, Ford went to Rhodes University to study a four-year Bachelor of Journalism degree majoring in communication design.

In 2003, she received a scholarship from Benetech to attend Stanford University as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Program.

After iCommons, in 2009 Ford founded the GeekRetreat, an event aiming to bring together technologists from around South Africa to discuss improving the local Internet.

[2] Ford was previously a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation[8] and earned a master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.