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Design, Verifying Information and Curating Media

May 22, 2010

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via uxmag.com

In this article for UX Magazine I review my work in the curation and distillation of real-time news using natural language processing algorithms, distributed reputation and media curation. The result is an open source platform that I hope will be used for more than just brand monitoring, but to actually save lives by surfacing actionable information for emergency response organizations.

Read the full article at UX Magazine:

Information wants to flow and it wants to flow freely and torrentially. Twitter, SMS, email, and RSS offer unprecedented access to information. With all these channels of communication comes a deluge of overwhelming retweets, cross-chatter, spam, and inaccuracies. How do you distinguish signal from noise without getting overwhelmed? Can we somewhat automate the process of filtering content into more manageable portions without sacrificing accuracy and relevance?

These are the exact questions I attempted to answer during the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. As the Director and System Architect of SwiftRiver at Ushahidi, we're working on an open-source software platform that helps journalists and emergency response organizations sift through real-time information quickly, without sacrificing accuracy. These earthquakes, however unfortunate, offered extreme use-cases for testing ideas internally, as small nonprofits and organizations as large as the U.S. State Department were relying on us for verified information.

The approach SwiftRiver takes is to combine crowdsourced interaction with algorithms that weight, parse, and sort incoming content. But before we get to that, let's explore how real-time content is currently delivered and consumed.

Find out more about SwiftRiver at http://swift.ushahidi.com and about my other work at http://appfricalabs.com

Filed under  //   Design   Haiti   media   news   nlp   real-time   trust   web  
Posted by Jon Gosier 

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Fellow Rose Shuman in the NewYorkTimes

September 28, 2009

Rosh Shuman, one of TED's newest fellows was profiled in the NYT this morning:

The caller was frustrated. A new pest was eating away at his just-planted coffee crop, and he wanted to know what to do. Tyssa Muhima jotted down notes as the caller spoke, and promised to call back in 10 minutes with an answer.

Each day, Ms. Muhima and two other young women at this small call center on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital city answer about 40 such calls. They are operators for Question Box, a free, nonprofit telephone hot line that is meant to get information to people in remote areas who lack access to computers.

The premise behind Question Box is that many barriers keep most of the developing world from taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge available through Web search engines, said Rose Shuman, the service’s creator. That could be a drag on economic development.

“So I was thinking, why not bring the information to them in a way that’s most convenient and useful to them?” said Ms. Shuman, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif.

Read the full article here....

Filed under  //   Fellows   mag   new york   news   poor   question   rural   times  
Posted by Jon Gosier 

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A Post-TED Update

August 19, 2009

It's been a month since TED and my participation at TEDGlobal 2009 as one of the fellows and speakers.  Needless to say it was an incredible experience. However, I'm sure a lot of people want to know if or how the TED Fellows program has given my work 'the little push' that it needed.  (Or the big push, as it were.)

Well, I have to say from the moment I was selected I could feel the momentum behind my work gaining but the actual conference was a major boost.  Here's what I've been up to since TED Global:

- My panel proposal for SXSW has been selected! The panels are "World Wide UI: Rise of the Data Alchemist" and "What the World Wants to Know".  To get selected, people have to vote on them so Vote! Vote! Vote!

- Status.ug, the first startup Appfrica has funded, is finally incorporated and ready to launch. Three months ago Status.ug (the brainchild of 19-year old Ugandan student Felix Kitaka) received some seed capital from our partner Chembe Ventures and a $100,000 valuation.  Since then I've been mentoring him, and hopefully prepping him to take his idea from lines of code to an innovative Ugandan startup.

- We've been working with UNICEF's branch in Uganda.  They've been incredibly supportive and are very much interested in building capacity here by contracting work from local developers.  This creates jobs and allows for the transfer of knowledge needed to increase local participation.  We're happy to be included as one of the local teams supporting their various projects.

- New Scientist, The Gaurdian, and Forbes all profiled my work with QuestionBox.org and WorldWantsToKnow.com.  Most recently NextBillion interviewed me.

- My staff of entrepreneurs got a lot of attention as well, with Google profiling some of their work here.


- A phone call with Fellow Meklit Hadero resulted in an awesome podcast that I posted at my blog Appfrica.net.  I was happy to help promote her work and I look forward to contacting some of the other Fellows to do the same.

- Fellow Candy Chang has been working with QuestionBox to improve some of our product designs, a great example Fellow-on-Fellow action and the TED community supporting each other.

- There was also a great deal of discussion that began at the conference with a number of organizations that wanted to get involved.  I can't name any names yet but I am looking forward to seeing where it all goes.

- I'm helping to organize a TEDxKampala which UNICEF has already agreed to support and facilitate

Hopefully things are going well for everyone else, looking forward to checking in again next month with more!

Filed under  //   Fellows   TED Fellows   collaboration   news   unicef   update  
Posted by Jon Gosier 

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People Want to Know

July 23, 2009

One of the the things the TED Fellows program is great at is that it allows us to be in the same place as people who have the will and interest to support our projects.  After my talk a few days ago at TEDGlobal, I was approached by someone from the Garudian.co.uk who wrote this article...

One of the features of TEDGlobal was two sessions called TED University where attendees could give short presentations on ideas or projects they were working on. The Grameen Foundation recently contacted African designer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jon Gosier of Appfrica.org because they wanted to know: What do people in Africa want to know?

They knew if they opened up a hotline and offered to answer anyone's question about what they wanted to know that they would quickly be overwhelmed. Working with 'community knowledge workers' who were usually retirees looking for a way to give back to their community, people in a village in Uganda could ask these workers questions. The workers then would relay those questions back to operators using an offline internet application to find the answer in real-time.

Passionate about data visualisations, Gosier also wanted to release the information in a way that easily showed where the questions were coming from and also the range of the topics. You can see the questions that are being asked in real time at the site, World Wants to Know. While the West and Gosier enjoys social networking tools like Facebook and many choices in terms of real-time communications, he was interested to offer something from "such a rural part of the world".

Filed under  //   Africa   TED Fellows   gaurdian   google   news   press   search   support   uganda  
Posted by Jon Gosier 

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