Skip to content

Explaining Swift River


An Introduction to Swift River from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Swift River was given a lot of thought by Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla before the Ushahidi meetings in March 2009. This video is a short version of what was recorded, giving an idea of what was being discussed.

What is Swift?

It’s an initiative that seeks to do two very important things, both of which are crucial for not just Ushahidi, but for many emergency response activities in the future. First, it gathers as many possible streams of data about a particular crisis event as possible. Second, using a two-part filter, that stream of data is filtered through both machine based algorithms and humans to better understand the veracity and level of importance of any piece of information.

You can read about the human interaction part of it here, where I talk about crowdsourcing the filter.

Posted in News, Strategy, Ushahidi, Video. Tagged with , , , , , , , .

By Erik Hersman
9 April 2009

13 comments

13 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Meryn Stol said
    on 9 April 2009

    Chris Blow on 4:35: “We can do it because we care. The 15 people in this room care.” :)

  2. Eddy Lambert said
    on 12 December 2009

    How are things coming along with this guys. Fascinated to know where you’re at.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Developing Swift River to Validate Crowdsourcing « iRevolution linked to this post on 10 April 2009

    [...] 10, 2009 · No Comments Swift River is an Ushahidi initiative to crowdsource the process of data validation. We’re developing a Swift [...]

  2. Disinformation, trolls, and #pman: more serious than Skittles (DRAFT) « Liminal states linked to this post on 13 April 2009

    [...] Swift River, a Ushahidi project, is a general crowdsourced filtering mechanism, currently being used for India Vote Report [...]

  3. Skittles and infowar: #pman, disinformation, and trolls - The Seminal :: Independent Media and Politics linked to this post on 15 April 2009

    [...] Swift River, a Ushahidi project, is a general crowdsourced filtering mechanism, currently being used for India Vote Report [...]

  4. Moving Forward with Swift River « iRevolution linked to this post on 6 May 2009

    [...] and Chris Blow gave the first formal presentation of Swift River during our first Ushahidi strategy meeting in Orlando last March where we formally [...]

  5. Thoughts on Implementing Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Blog linked to this post on 8 June 2009

    [...] the Ushahidi technical team has been focused mainly on the release beta version and on building out Swift.   We have also been working closely with a select group of testers to figure out to make [...]

  6. The Next Generation Philanthropy Forum – The Ushahidi Blog linked to this post on 11 November 2009

    [...] in London, where I gave a brief presentation on Ushahidi’s genesis, current activities and future plans. It is very encouraging to meet experts in Social Media, Diplomacy and Technology, who are already [...]

  7. Cairo, Johannesburg, Mumbai – 24 hrs Google Buzz and location-based information pops up everywhere linked to this post on 10 February 2010

    [...] purposes?  To analyze this information can become quite tricky. The Swift River project by the Ushahidi team is doing here some interesting work. Google Buzz has an API (Application Progamming Interface), so I imagine it is possible to analyze [...]

  8. Analysis: Finding space for crowd-sourcing in humanitarian response « Ronaldbera's Blog linked to this post on 10 July 2010

    [...] and mitigate post-election violence in 2008, is trying to address this with a new open source tool, SwiftRiver, which filters large amounts of incoming information to separate the wheat from the chaff using [...]

  9. Analysis: Finding space for crowd-sourcing in humanitarian response - AfricaNewsAnalysis linked to this post on 11 July 2010

    [...] and mitigate post-election violence in 2008, is trying to address this with a new open source tool, SwiftRiver, which filters large amounts of incoming information to separate the wheat from the chaff using [...]

  10. Anonymous linked to this post on 27 December 2010

    [...] [...]

  11. Three Common Misconceptions About Ushahidi | iRevolution linked to this post on 2 March 2012

    [...] the validation of crowdsourced information. This is why Ushahidi is fully committed to developing Swift River. Swift is a free and open source platform that validates crowdsourced information in near [...]

Some HTML is OK

(required)

(required, but never shared)

or, reply to this post via trackback.