Crowdsourced newsgathering has become a real alternative to traditional reporting, especially where the press ‘dare not go’ because of political correctness or expediency, and in crises that develop so quickly that it becomes difficult to follow the stream of data about rapidly unfolding events.
The Mumbai attacks were one such rapidly evolving crisis and it became clear at that time that with a huge stream of bits of data from news reports, twitter, blogs, photo streams, video and email communication, it becomes hard to distinguish the signal from the noise.
A post on the Ushahidi blog Crisis Info: Crowdsourcing the Filter analyzes this situation and reports about a tool that is being developed to overcome the difficulties.
The Ushahidi community – Ushahidi means “testimony” in Suahili – works on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. Two of its members are driving the development of a filter to overcome the problem of having too much news all at one time to be able to make sense of it. Their project called “Swift River” is designed to add a layer of evaluation to the newsgathering that is going on full steam through distributed media.
Swift River is “Crowdsourcing the Filter”.
The tool has been prototyped and tried out during the US inauguration. For more detail on the idea and a screenshot of how it looks for now, check out the post on the Ushahidi blog.