SwiftRiver Hackathon Recap

On April 2, Meedan sponsored an alpha hack night (a Mission*Social with Inveneo) to work on the new Swift River alpha from Ushahidi. Participants gathered at the Meedan offices in San Francisco as well as virtually via our public skype chat. Here's some photos from the event! And a recap from event organizer Chris Blow:

We had a great time with a bunch of newcomers (I think we had 10 people total, with a two or three more remotely via skype). We didn't exactly build any fancy new features -- this was more of an introductory session. Perhaps the next sessions will be more of a sprint toward specific features. We also might do a session that is more oriented toward taking more formal usability feedback. Please chime in if you have ideas for the next session, probably in May. But we did get a bunch of newbie kinks worked out -- we got Swift installed on 8 computers! To those who got pizza: we expect at least a dozen code patches in return, payable via github :) The discussion was very high energy, with lots of really valuable input: One of the big takeaways was Ping's suggestion that we us PubSubHubBub. Does the core developer team have any plans for experimenting with it? I can't remember ever talking about it but it seems like a natural fit. Does anyone on the list have experience with it? http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ Also, from a usability perspective, there were a lot of questions about the veracity scoring mechanics -- people expressed that it was hard to tell how the scores were applied (eg, to a specific source or a specific tweet) and a little mysterious how the scores were created. When you move the slider it could be confusing if you did not know that the slider worked as a filter -- sometimes you would get no results unexpectedly. But this kind of usability bug is totally to be expected from an alpha release and I am sure we will work them out as we do more deployments. For more specific bugs we, just dropped items into Github issue tracker: http://github.com/ushahidi/Swiftriver/issues Some of these were probably already known to the devs, but it was still good to get the bug reporting cycle going with our new testers. Overall the best part was to have the new codebase -- huge thanks to the Ushahidi Swift team for getting something out for us to work with!