July 2011
0 posts
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Moving on from SwiftRiver and Ushahidi →
gosdot:
Directing the SwiftRiver Initiative to where it is today has been fantastic. The project has matured a lot, in no small part to the volunteer developers and thinkers who contributed over the past two years. My focus with Swift from the beginning was to construct a platform that attempts to…
June 2011
8 posts
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Some Reflections on Sweeper from N.E.A.T. Nigeria
In April we were contacted by a group out of Georgia Tech, M.I.T. and student on the ground in Nigeria about the, then, upcoming elections. This group of individuals, together working as N.E.A.T. (the Nigerian Election Aggregation Team) wanted to run a campaign that mashed up data from several different Ushahidi deployments, Twitter and other sources, displaying them in their own Ushahidi...
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Knight News Challenge Grant!
It’s truly an honor to accept a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for the SwiftRiver project! It’s the culmination of a long journey that began in 2008 but evolved in 2010 when I joined the project as (product designer) and later Matthew Griffiths (lead developer).
Swift is an open-source initiative who’s goal is to make the process of vetting information more...
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Open Source Bookmark Curation
With the latest release of Sweeper, you can roll your own bookmarking service. This is really powerful when you start activating plugins like our auto-tagger SiLCC or our our Push plugins which can output all of your bookmarked content as a feed that can be consumed by other applications.
We call this little plugin Quiver. It’s where you manually collect and store information using...
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Algorithms Augmenting Human Decisions
Here’s an update about the SwiftRiver platform from PDF11 which I had the pleasure of speaking at yesterday. My slides are below and here you can find video of my presentation.
Crowdsourcing 102: Mining Real-Time Data
The summation of the talk is that the Swift project has been assigned a very complex and incredibly difficult task: to verify and contextualize data from the mobile and...
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Building a people's newswire with Newsti.ps
[Guest blog post by Jenka Soderberg, a 2011 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and Evening News Director at KBOO Community Radio in Portland, Oregon. She can be reached at jenka [at] stanford [dot] edu]. This is a cross-post from the Ushahidi blog.
When I first started working on www.Indymedia.org in 2000, I was really excited about the platform it provided: a way for people who witnessed...
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WatchVideo of my presentation earlier today at Personal Democracy Forum
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Members Only
May 2011
3 posts
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Introducing Push Plugins
Anyone pulling from the nightly repo may have noticed a cool new feature for the Swift Core that Ahmed wrote last month, our Push Plugin architecture. This, as well as a number of other features will be released with the next release of Sweeper and the Swift PHP Core.
How Push Plugins Work
Push Plugins allow SwiftRiver applications to acquire content via push (versus pull) commands. For...
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WatchJon’s talk from TED Global 2010 about the evolution of the SwiftRiver platform and learning from mistakes in crowd-sourcing.
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Resources for Developers
If you’re a developer looking to build on our open-source stack or simply curious about our work, check out the following links. You can follow our core team on twitter @swiftriver and code commits to our project @swiftdev:
Overview of platform - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1geoJCwS6Z3uOX2XqqdbxP4gMqEcN5W7ES6MHSIZhEUE/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIvby-8C
Dataflow in Swift -...
April 2011
2 posts
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Sweeper V0.3.1 Released - Twitter Streaming and...
Download Sweeper V0.3.1 With Support for Twitter Streaming API here
Any of you keen Swiftriver lovers out there will remember the recent launch of our 0.3 version of the Sweeper app. The release went well and we got loads of feedback.
We were able to identify a couple of bugs in the release that were causing headaches for you guys and girls out there trying to set Sweeper up. So we fixed them...
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The Sweeper User Guide
Sweeper has been around for just over a year now and although the code is still changing quite rapidly. However, the core platform is now stable enough that we’re releasing this User’s Guide. It’s certainly long overdue. Sweeper is the a free and opensource multimedia curation platform that we’ve been developing over the past few months. It’s a quick and easy way to...
March 2011
5 posts
6 tags
Subjectivity, Veracity and Truth
SwiftRiver is constructed from the viewpoint that there are no absolute truths and that what is considered to be factual by most is still highly subjective or biased depending upon context.
Thus, we build tools which allow users to curate their own depiction of a perspective. In the same way that there are more than one newspaper, more than one political party in most countries, more than one...
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Translating Realtime Social Media
One of the problems a lot of crowdsourcing projects have is that they end up pulling in massive amounts of data from the web, Twitter and other channels from around the world. This means content arrives in many different languages, often languages that the deployer doesn’t speak.
Currently in Sweeper and soon in Ushahidi, users can translate real-time content from one language into...
Integrating with Swiftriver – Using systems we...
Just the other day I was asked a couple of questions about integrating Swiftriver with data sources and third-party systems that the Swiftriver team haven’t thought of.
I though the answers may be helpful to others who are thinking of doing the same thing or just want to get a bit more insight into this side of the platform:
Question 1:
Can Swiftriver be extended to manage streams of discreet...
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Positions Open at Swiftly.org
Ushahidi is currently seeking to hire individuals in the following full-time and contract positions: Sr. Web Application Developer, Online Ethnographer/Behaviorist, Computational Linguistics Expert. As these positions are filled this post will be updated to reflect what’s still available.
Contact: Jon Gosier, Director of SwiftRiver at jg[at]swiftly.org
Sr. Web Application Developer...
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Sweeper v0.3.0 Released
Download Sweeper V0.3 Now - Click Here!
Hi all you Swiftriver and Sweeper followers out there.
The Swiftriver team is over the moon to announce the launch of our latest version of the Sweeper app.
Those of you who have been following our progress will know that this release comes hot off the heels of the V0.2 that we pushed to you all a couple of months ago.
As always, the Swiftriver guys and...
January 2011
6 posts
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Developing Plugins for SwiftRiver Applications
Ahmed Maawy, the newest hire to the SwiftRiver project, recently compiled this great ‘how-to’ guide on writing plugins for SwiftRiver applications like Sweeper and SwiftMeme. These plugins can mostly be found at http://plugins.swiftly.org while the wishlist for things we’d like to see built can be found here.
For a great example of how Swift plugins work, check out the Ushahidi...
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U St. Brainstorming Session
Patrick Meier and some friends and users of Swift stopped by Affinity Labs in Washington a few days ago with some great suggestions and feature requests for the next release of our Sweeper application. Our work was largely centric around rethinking user interaction options. It was an exciting day and we’re really looking forward to incorporating these suggestions in our next release.
...
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SwiftRiver Dataflow Infographic
I’m often asked about the architecture of the SwiftRiver platform. There’s been so much written about, talked about and presented to date that I thought I’d take a different approach. So rather than bore you with another long blog post, I thought I’d share some visuals that explain the system.
PDF | Video | High-Res Image
If the images above are too small, try...
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GeoDict Joins the SwiftRiver Initiative!
SwiftRiver is an opensource project with the overarching goal to help people make sense of data on their terms. We do this by adding all types of elusive context to content: tags, predictions for accuracy, indicators of influence and location etc.
Location is incredibly important to us because one of our many objectives is to help users verify data and location often serves as a clue about...
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Localizing News
The following post was written by a volunteer developer, Vladimir G. Ermakov a Master’s student at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Over the past few months he took on an ambitious project: to contribute code that would allow us to parse news articles and attempt to auto-detect the primary location that is the subject of any given text.
Localizing News by Vladimir Ermakov
...
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Sweeper v0.2.0 Released
It’s been a while since our last major release of product, this is partly because we’ve been working on big projects like the Queensland Floods and our project with Product (RED), and partly because of the holiday break. However we’re back with a ton of goodies for Sweeper users in 2011.
We’re happy to release the newest build of SwiftRiver:Sweeper today. Here’s...
December 2010
6 posts
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WP-Veracity v1.5 Released
WP-Veracity is a plugin we built for Wordpress bloggers. It’s not powered by any of our APIs like our other plugin WP-SiLCC, just something we wanted to see done. Essentially it rates your WordPress posts by applying bayesian algorithms to post popularity and influence, with an adjustment for time so that the titles that rise to the top are always fresh. We designed for blogs and news...
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State of the River 2010
A look back at a year of commits to the SwiftRiver project.
Last December I began working on SwiftRiver for Ushahidi. I wasn’t really until March (after two scrapped codebases) that the project really began to develop. Our goal at the time was to ‘democratize access to the tools needed for making sense of information’. More practically worded, to create an open source...
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SiLCC for Wordpress v1.6
A few months ago we released a few plugins that extend the Swift platform and APIs to Wordpress. One of these plugins was WP-SiLCC, an auto-tagger, that parses text and reapplies those tags to help authors sort content.
The latest build of this plugin is a minor overhaul. First, WP-SiLCC now integrates TagThe.net, a great platform for auto-tagging long-form content. Why? Because SiLCC was...
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Vote in the Knight News Challenge
Every year the Knight Foundation rewards innovation in technology primarily targeting professional and citizen journalists. The rewards are grants that help projects scale and improve their platforms. We just entered and wanted to take some time to explain our vision and what we think makes us a worthy applicant.
What is SwiftRiver’s mission? To democratize access to tools that can be...
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(RED) Uses SwiftRiver for World Aids Day
Wednesday was World AIDS Day, December 1st. In case you missed it, we unveiled a collaboration that had us working with (PRODUCT) RED and number of their partners to launch a campaign that allowed users of social media to participate in a global campaign to ways awareness of that fact that it’s possible that by 2015 child will be born with the AIDS virus.
“With over 1000 children...
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Our Week at the Guardian
This was perhaps one of the busiest weeks in the history of the Guardian newspaper after it was thrown into a tailspin on Monday following some small organization publishing a few secret documents. It was incredibly convenient timing that it coincided with a friendly visit from Ushahidi who had long been scheduled to spend some time with the Guardian staff. Jonathan Gosier (Director of Product,...
October 2010
5 posts
8 tags
Crowdsourcing and Chaos Theory
This is a repost from the Ushahidi Blog. Below you’ll find the basis for my Ignite talk from ICCM10 in Boston originally titled “Veracity Blues: The Trouble with Crowdsourcing”.
Would you trust these guys with your data?
Not based on appearance, but experience or lack thereof. It depends right? You might trust them to lead you to a Heisman Trophy, but you probably...
WatchThis screencast marks the beginning of a series of monthly platform updates you keep users abreast of the changes in our platform, apps, plugins, and features.
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"An Open Source Yahoo Pipes for Anything"
Today SwiftRiver is at the Crowdsourcing Conference in San Francisco where hundreds of businesses and enterprises are in the room to learn about practical applications for crowdsourcing.
After a rough morning of stumbling through my over technical explanation of SwiftRiver - how it manages information across disparate information channels and feeds, how it structures unstructured data and puts...
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Frontline and IMAP Support!
If you’ve got a need for the translation, auto-tagging or prioritization of text messages and email, you can now add this functionality with the click of a button. We’re at the ICCM10 Conference this week at Harvard University in Boston where we’ve announced integration with Frontline SMS and Gmail/IMAP which will both be included in the next release of SwiftRiver 0.6.0...
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plugins.swiftly.org
Two days ago at ICCM2010 plugins.swiftly.org was created to be a repository to find modular extensions for SwiftRiver applications. Here’s a breakdown of what you can find there:
Apps - applications built on the SwiftRiver platform. You can find apps like Sweeper, SwiftMail, and SwiftMeme here.
Parsers - modules that structure unstructured data so that all our Apps can process it....
September 2010
5 posts
6 tags
Watch
CGI2010 “Improving Access to Modern Technology”. Ushahidi Executive Director, Ory Okolloh on panel at CGI alongside Jack Dorsey (CEO, Twitter & Square), John Chambers (CEO, Cisco), Zhengrong Shi (CEO, Suntech), Ratan Tata (CEO, Tata) and journalist Krista Tippet.
It’s a great video to watch if you want a better understanding of why Ushahidi created...
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Better Living Through Crowdsourcing
Christian Kreutz explores the many technologies the the world is using to make sense of real world data in the digital domain. These technologies, apart and collectively, enable computers to more accurately interpret the world as we understand it. In the hopes that they’ll be able to tell us more about our reality than we are able to infer unaided.
Our relationship with these technologies...
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SwiftRiver Web 101 | Sept 23
Are you interested in the SwiftRiver platform? Do you want to get a better understanding of our products or find out how to install them? Well, we’re slowly catching up with demand for documentation, instruction and new features etc. In the meantime, we cordially invite you to sit on your couch, in your jammies, with a big bowl of Lucky Charms and soymilk (that’s what I’ll...
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Summer of Swift: Soe
The Google Summer of Code has ended. This year SwiftRiver was a mentoring organization and we wanted to give our GSoCers some ‘face’ time on the blog by interviewing them. Soe is a developer who worked on our distributed reputation product, River ID.
Interview with Soe Q: What is your educational (or professional) background?
Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering. Starting Master’s in...
August 2010
5 posts
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SwiftRiver Beta Released
SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data. Today we’re happy to announce the relaunch of SwiftRiver at Swiftly.org and to release of our first app built on the SwiftRiver platform, simply called Sweeper App.
SwiftRiver is unique in that there is no singular ‘SwiftRiver’ application. Rather, there are many, that combine...
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Summer of Swift: Nishith Rastogi
The Google Summer of Code is drawing to a close. This year SwiftRiver was a mentoring organization and we wanted to give our GSoCers some ‘face’ time on the blog by interviewing them. Nishith is a developer who worked on our natural language processing api, SiLCC.
Interview with Nishith
Q: What is your educational (or professional) background?
I am currently pursing Msc. (Hons)...
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Summer of Swift: Mang-Git
The Google Summer of Code is drawing to a close. This year SwiftRiver was a mentoring organization and we wanted to give our GSoCers some ‘face’ time on the blog by interviewing them. Mang-Git is a developer who worked on our influence analytic application, Reverberations.
Reverberations is a pretty simple app, it’s a RESTful solution for determining the influence of content...
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On Triage and Verifying Crowdsourced Reports
SwiftRiver is a platform consisting of a number of unique products and technologies. The goal is to aggregate information from multiple media channels (SMS, Twitter, Email, RSS feeds from the web) and to add context: The ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ of that which is being discussed in each message. So, who the message is about, what it’s about, and where the...
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Ten Ways to Use SwiftRiver
On August 30th we’ll release the first public beta of the SwiftRiver platform, an open source toolkit of semantic web technologies. It’s been a busy few months as we’ve been working round the clock to bring you a solid product. One of the questions I’m asked frequently is “What can I use SwiftRiver for?” Here are a few examples: 1. Monitoring Real-Time...
July 2010
2 posts
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SwiftRiver Update
For the past two weeks I’ve been in the UK doing quite a bit of work to answer questions, conduct interviews and even give a few talks about the SwiftRiver platform. I hosted our second SwiftRiver 101 in central London and held private sessions with a number of media groups interested in finding out more about the platform and it’s capabilities. I had the pleasure of speaking with...
June 2010
3 posts
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SwiftRiver 101 Recap
Yesterday we held our very first SwiftRiver 101 which saw an audience of between fifty and sixty people descende upon the iHub to find out the basics of the SwiftRiver platform, as well as technical details like installation, core code and information about Swift APIs and the plugin framework. This included representatives from Google, Datadyne, NDI, Open Street Map and a number of other...
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Latest Getting Started with SwiftRiver Video
Are you using the SwiftRiver alpha release? If so, you may find the latest Getting Started video useful.
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SwiftRiver in Plain English
This week, on Wednesday 16th, we’ll be hosting an in-depth overview of the SwiftRiver software and SwiftRiver Web Services platforms in Nairobi, Kenya. You can register to attend that event (or the live stream) here. Myself, along with Technical Architect and Lead Developer Matthew Griffiths are really looking forward to displaying some of the technical aspects of the work we’ve been...