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.