Meedan Citizen Editor's toolkit for Arab US journalism

Chris Blow, Meedan's Design Lead has been working for Meedan on a project called Swift. When Ethan Zuckerman says, 'this most certainly is a big deal,' we think our optimism is warranted.

Whether it is cast as an early foray into computational journalism or a tool for taking some of the noise out of the real-time web, we are looking forward to seeing this tool released into the world in the coming weeks.

Chris has put up a short post with slides on this at Meedan's blog.

From that post:

"Swift will give you an aggregator’s “firehose” of any news (say, news about earthquakes in northern Iraq) then asks you to tag all of the people, places and organizations in that data. You will be able to help correct noise on the line, recognize newsworthy people, and identify influential organizations. All of the sources that are parsed by the Swift “human interface” will be tagged minimally with the location of the events that are being described.

With a little bit of effort (curating a few rss feeds and marking up all the content) it becomes possible to put a very bright light on an emerging part of the web. You can, for example, tag violations of electoral code in an election, as we are doing with Vote Report India, which uses Ushahidi and Wordpress as a platform for grassroots reporting in the month-long Indian election.

Swift hopes to advance international journalism by providing a more relvant interface to the realtime web. By focusing on events as they emerge in real time, and then tagging those links with a tag-suggesting backend we think we can make a very useful tool and news discussion forum.

For Meedan, Swift is ultimately a tool for a team of editors who need to produce interesting content for their digital newsroom. Because it is an aggregator, Swift serves naturally as a listening post as well as a tagging workbench. Rope in a few feeds (such as Twitter search results feed for “election” and “Egypt” ) and then let a few of the wonderful Meedan editors tag the links. The result of this distributed effort can be a rich commons of data about elections or any other public interest story. The key to Swift is that it relies on self-interested teams of editors who are entering data in a structured, simplified way. They are able to contribute easily in their pajamas, because they care, and the software is very simple."