Swiftly.org

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.

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, SwiftRiver) and Brian Herbert (Lead Software Developer, Ushahidi) have spent the past week with the Guardian staff as part of their Guardian Activate program.

What is Guardian Activate? A Guardian platform aimed at world-changers who have proven that through the use of technology and the Internet, we can make the world a better place. Past speakers at Guardian Activate Summit have included Katrin Verclas (Mobile Active), Rose Shuman (QuestionBox.org), Eric Schmidt (Google) and Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices).

Our own discussions with the Guardian staff spanned a number of topics:

• Lessons learned from Guardian’s uses and modifications of Ushahidi
• The role open source software like Ushahidi plays in investigative journalism
• Data Visualizing and Informatic Cartography (mapping)
• Exploring the SwiftRiver platform and products
• Ideas for new open source products for newsrooms and journalists

We also had a great tour of the massive four executive floors of the Guardian’s operations in London and the opportunity to sit in on a few non-sensitive meetings and editorial discussions. In the past, Ushahidi has collaborated with newsgroups like Al Jazeera, the Guardian, BBC, Thomson Reuters and others. So it was good to finally have an intense week of discussion with one of the world’s foremost leaders in news, to get some insight as to how our products can be improved to aid the journalistic process.

At the 2010 Guardian Activate Summit our very own Juliana Rotich (Program Director, Ushahidi) gave this talk:

This article also appears on the Ushahidi Blog here.