Swift is a Free and Open Source toolset for crowdsourced situational awareness. The first use of Swift is as a complement to Ushahidi to monitor the Indian 2009 Elections, which you can see at Vote Report India.

Swift builds on Twitter Vote Report, a platform for crowd-sourced election monitoring.  Twitter Vote Report made it possible for US voters to report voting irregularities in real-time using a standard set of tags for monitoring wait time at polling places.

Swift hopes to expand this approach into a general purpose toolkit for crowdsouring the semantic structuring of data so that it can be reused in other applications and visualizations. The developers of Swift are particularly interested in crisis reporting (Ushahidi) and international media criticism (Meedan), but by providing a general purpose crowdsourcing tool we hope to create a tool reusable in many contexts.

Swift engages self-interested teams of “citizen editors” who curate publicly available information about a crisis or any event or region as it happens.

The goal of Swift is to provide an API (for programmers) and data set (for researchers) about an arbitrary set of RSS feeds. Swift is a database and a user interface; we are currently focusing on utilizing the open source freebase.com repository as a central store of our curated data.

Homepage: http://swiftapp.org

Development Wiki: http://inaug09dev.pbwiki.com/
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/inaug09dev?lnk=gcimh

This application hosts a set of mechanisms desgined to pull polling place reports in from multiple sources, including:

Twitter
  Polls http://twittervision.com/inaugreport.json for latest #inaug09 Tweets

SMS
  Accepts input from Mozes for SMS messages that contain:
    #dctrip, #inaug09, #dctrip09, #inaug

YouTube
  Polls YouTube API for relevant keywords and grabs links to videos
  
Flickr
  Polls Flickr API and grabs links to videos

Telephone
  Accepts phone calls into an Asterisk system
  See adhearsion/components/vote_report/lib/votereport.rb
    
iPhone
  Accepts audio, photo, and text reports from the Inauguration Report dedicated iPhone application

Android
  Accepts reports from the Inauguration Report dedicated Android application

Email
  Email text, photos, or audio to "report@inaugurationreport.com"


--
INSTALL

Required gems: fastthread json GeoRuby haml calais libxml-ruby curb

You will need to add GitHub as a gem sources for will_paginate:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ gem install mislav-will_paginate

For daemons:

$ gem install daemons

--
LICENSE
Made available under the MIT License.

Copyright 2008-2009 by the following authors and contributors, based on the VoteReport '08 app:

David Troy, dave@roundhousetech.com
Andrew Turner, andrew@highearthorbit.com
Billy Gray
Cory Forsyth
John Trupiano
Bryan Liles
Brendan O'Connor
Deanna Zandt
Nat Freitas
Chris Strom
Tony Herrera