My latest CJR column: the Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information
… The challenge is to find a way to quickly and accurately sort and evaluate a mass of incoming reports according to your preferences. This is a core element of distributed verification, which I called “the best way to engineer trust in today’s information environment” in a previous column about WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan documents.
This is where SwiftRiver comes in. I got in touch with Jon Gosier, a co-founder of SwiftRiver and the CEO of African software consultancy Appfrica, to talk about the project.
“The big motivation behind SwiftRiver, to be quite frank, was to solve two problems Ushahidi was having,” he told me by e-mail. “One, how to verify crowd sourced information, and two, how to filter realtime streams of data when it became overwhelming, without sacrificing the integrity of the stream. In other words, how can you speed up the process of vetting information from Twitter, RSS feeds, SMS and email.”
via The Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information : CJR. I've been delinquent in posting links to my CJR columns. But the most recent ones are listed in the sidebar to the right.
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