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 efficient.  The project to date has progressed well thanks in no small part to the following people: Matthew Griffiths (so important to this project I mentioned him twice), Ahmed Maawy, Charl Van Neikerk, Heather Ford, Vladimir Ermakov, The Ushahidi team, Omidyar Networks, Chris Blow, Ed Bice, Kaushal Jhalla, Neville Newey, Edmar Ferreira, Pete Warden, Patrick Meier, Anahi Ayala, Ethan Zuckerman, the TED staff, Google’s 2010 Summer of Code Participants (Mang-Git, Soe, Nishith Rastogi), the Guardian’s Activate staff, Product(RED) and many others. This project would be nowhere without you all so thanks for making it happen.

For many of us, this project represents a new way of democratizing access to the tools for understanding and vetting information which is needed by Ushahidi, journalists, and many others.

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 Jon Fildes from the BBC who published an interview with myself and Erik Hermsan this morning. The above pic is from a short TED talk I gave on Swift just last week. Those talks are slowly finding their way online, so keep watching TED.com for it’s release.

Read the BBC Profile on SwiftRiver.

For those of you watching attentively, you may have noticed we missed our last release. As we’re getting close to our Beta, we’re focusing less on big public releases and more on the iterative updates that can be found on our Github account.