Vera Franz

Vera Franz oversees the Digital Civil Liberties and Intellectual Property Reform portfolios at the Open Society Information Program. She has been deeply involved in the launch and development of the global access to knowledge (A2K) movement and the successful campaign for the WIPO Copyright Treaty for Visually Impaired. She is also working to strengthen civil society advocating for the protection of human rights in the online environment, and is currently co-leading an OSF working group on big data and open society. She is member of the advisory board of Ariadne, the European network of funders for human rights and social change. Before joining the Open Society Foundations, Franz was affiliated with the Austrian Techno-Z Research and Development Institute, researching information market developments for the European Commission. She has lived in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, running internet projects for local non-governmental organizations. Franz has studied in Canada, Italy, Austria, and the UK and holds an M.Sc. in media and communications from the London School of Economics and an M.Phil. in political science from Salzburg University.

Twitter: @vfranz73