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 used to filter and make sense of realtime information from SMS, Twitter, Email and the Web.
Where do we add value to news? SwiftRiver is free and open source. This includes apis for natural language processing, location detection, reputation & trust, duplication filtering and influence detection.
We make these tools open for two reasons: Firstly, because in large news rooms, staff want complete control over their platforms and they need to be able to modify and customize workflows as needed. This tends to mean they develop similar tools in-house which is great for organizations with those types of resources, not so great for organizations who can’t. Secondly, our goal is to make these advanced intelligence tools available to journalists in even the most remote, unconnected places.
Who needs our products? The strongest demand for SwiftRiver is actually from journalists who are increasingly overwhelmed by the task of sorting through vast streams of data. We’re actually working with several different groups from around the world who want to use applications like Twitter and Facebook to gather news, who share the problem of identifying the kernels of reliable information amidst a sea of ‘noise’.
Why should you vote for us? SwiftRiver has gone from merely a concept that was laid out two years ago, to a tangible product over the last year on very limited resources.
Although, we’re part of the Ushahidi family (still a small company in it’s own right), we don’t have access to the same financial resources or staff. They all have their hands-full making Ushahidi the great product that it is. Because we’re a small team, we can’t develop things as quickly as we might like. Demand is way out-pacing our ability to deliver and scale.
We’re a very small team: one full-time person people, one part-time developer and we’ve only this month added a third.
Who are you targeting? Swift is for people overwhelmed by data. That’s a very broad problem that essentially effects everyone with a computer and connection to the internet. This makes a singular audience difficult to suss out. I like to say this: We built a platform and we’re using our platform to target different industries, primarily, data journalists.
There are many other uses of the SwiftRiver platform, many that people are discovering without our guidance and hopefully that means what we’re doing is powerful, adaptable, relevant in different scenarios, easy to use and most importantly accesible to all.
Vote or ask questions about SwiftRiver in the Knight News Challenge.
