SWIFT RIVERPLATFORM OVERVIEW

An Ushahidi Initiative

First response is an oxymoron.

Someone is always there first. Rarely is it ever the press.

HAITI EARTHQUAKE

• 20,000 reports in the first few hours•100,000 reports in the first four days •Averaged of 25,000 per day•Real-time Reports from around the world•Conflicting statements•From Twitter users, text messages, Email,

and Web•Each report verified by humans

What if we listened to the crowd?

What if the crowd was also the filter?

Our problem then becomes who in the crowd do we listen to?

How do we manage it all?

Accuracy = Authority ≠ Popularity

The Swift Equation

SWIFT IS THE FILTER

Text

CITIZEN EDITORS

River ID

SiLCC

SiCDS

SULSa

CORE

PLATFORM GOALS

•Save time when sweeping through large, unstructured datasets.

•Surface signal, suppress noise (irrelevant discussions, inaccuracies, duplicates)

•Identify relevant sources and rate them•Identify and rate authoritative users•Curate discussion and media around any topic

or event•Puts the tools into the user’s hands (think Google

Reader vs. Google News)

WHAT IS SWIFT FOR?

• Improving information findability

• Surfacing content you didn't know you were looking for

• Automatically sorting and structuring unstructured data

• Understanding media from other parts of the world (translation)

• Making urgent data more discoverable

• Leveraging eyewitness accounts

• Using location as context

• Expanding the grassroots reporting network

• Preserving information (archiving)

• Improving data management within Ushahidi

Example Use Cases

• Journalists / Newsrooms (aggregating thousands of feeds)

• Emergency Response Organizations (aggregating reports)

• Election Monitoring (curating trusted sources)

• Research and Information Curation (collecting info from around the web)

• Real-Time News Gathering (filter by conditional rules)

• Online Brand Monitoring (monitoring keywords)

TERMINOLOGY

•Channels - methods of delivery (email, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, RSS/XML etc.)

•Sources - the source producing aggregated content

•Content Items - individual items coming from sources

•Dashboard - the central window for processing the various types of data aggregated by swift

SwiftRiver Web Services

• SiLCC - NLP for SMS and Twitter

• SULSa - Location Services

• SiCDS - Duplication Filtering

• River ID - Distributed Reputation

• Reverberations - Measures influence of online content

ROADMAP• March 31 v0.0.9 Rumba *

• first deployment• proof of concept

• April 30 v0.1.0 Apala *• New Core, API, Plugin Architecture• Set up EC2 environment for hosted services• SMS and Email

• May 31 v.0.2.0 Batuque *• integrate SiLCC, SULSa• modules for Wordpress

• June 30 v0.3.0 Benge • User profiles, SiCDS

• July 30 v0.4.0 Bikutsi• Jquery? Tornado for PHP?• River ID• Reverberations• Drupal

• August 30 v0.5.0 Jazz• Feed Recommendations• MHI

LOOKING AT BATUQUEv.0.2.0

SWIFT RIVERswift.ushahidi.comsws.ushahidi.com

swift.ushahidi.com/docs

An Ushahidi Initiative