1. CROWD SOURCING 102
Real-Time Data Mining and Curation with SwiftRiver
Personal Democracy Forum 2011
jg@swiftly.org
@jongos @swiftriver
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
2. About Ushahidi Notable Uses The Challenge
Ushahidi is a free, open-source Ushahidi has been deployed in As the amounts of data
platform used for crowdsourcing major global crisis scenarios, aggregated by Ushahidi users
and visualizing data geospatially. allowing organizations to draw grows, they face a common
It was born out of the 2008 situational awareness from the problem. How do they effectively
election unrest when founders crowd. To date it’s been manage this realtime data? How
Juliana Rotish, Erik Hersman, Ory downloaded over 15,000 times. can we help them discover
Okolloh and David Kobia wanted credible and actionable info from
to allow Kenyan citizens a way to S o m e o f t h e m o re n o t a b l e the deluge of reports they’ll get
SMS reports of incident to know deployments include recently in from the public? The SwiftRiver
what was occurring around them. Egypt, the Haiti earthquakes, the initiative was created to begin to
This was one of the earliest uses fires in Russia, the Queensland answer some of these questions
of crowdsourcing for crisis floods in Australia. for Ushahidi deployers.
response.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
3. “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
- Clay Shirky
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
4. PLATFORM GOALS
Consider the context, relevance defined by the user
Offer an opt-in global database of trust and authority
Algorithms augment, but not define, human decision making
Work across media channels (Twitter, Email, Feeds, SMS)
Be accessible (offline/online/mobile)
Index massive amounts of the mobile/social web
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
7. STRATEGY
Operate more like a startup than activists
Test humanitarian solutions in a business context
Journalists, Private Sector, NGOs & Government Agencies
Build internal engineering capacity
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8. PROGRESS
7,000+ downloads in 6 months
7,000+ API Users
100,000+ Lines of code
5 APIs and 2 Apps
Data Items Processed - 70,000,000 (liberal extrapolation)
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
