In 2010 the Ushahidi community managed to shift the way information flows in this world, just a little bit, and these repercussions will be felt for a long time to come. This year has been an exciting year for the Ushahidi organization, with major upgrades in the platform(s), greater visibility globally and amazing deployments around the world.
One of the big requests we’ve had from users of Ushahidi products is “What if I don’t know what feeds or sources to follow?” Whether it’s from humanitarian groups or corporates, some organizations have the cold-start problem of not knowing who to to listen regarding specific subjects.
Alongside the next release of the SwiftRiver platform we’re releasing a new application called SwiftMeme, our source discovery and meme tracking application.
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?
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.
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 Conversations
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.
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 organizations.
Director/System Architect Jon Gosier and Lead Developer/Technical Architect Matthew Griffiths, lead the days presentations. Please videos below…
In anticipation of the forthcoming Alpha release of the new Kohana-based Swift River codebase on March 30th, Meedan is sponsoring a hack night and discussion on Friday, April 2, 2010 at 5pm, at the Meedan offices in San Francisco, California.
Proposed goals for the open-invite evening include:
In a past life, before developing software, I was a musician. The two have a lot in common actually: recursive pattern, rhythm, syntax, meter. I suppose most developers don’t think of code this way, but I do. It needs to look as good to humans as it does to machines. When I took over development of Swiftriver and I was looking for a theme to weave through all of our releases, it was natural to default to what I love: music.
If you were there or following South by South West yesterday, you may have heard some chatter on Twitter about the Africa 3.0 talk by Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora. In his panel he used Skype video to chat in real time with software developers and incubators in Cameroon, Kenya and with my staff in Uganda. Two of the developers from Appfrica, Moses Mugisha and Victor Miclovich appeared with me on camera to speak with the crowd. One of them, Victor, quickly discussed his natural language processing project SiLCC.
SwiftMeme early mockup
