Hacking iCorruption, one line of code at a time
A hack to fix the systemic, legal corruption that is weakening our public institutions around the world. Organized by the Harvard Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the MIT Center for Civic Media
Live blogging the event: Matt Carroll, Ying Quan Tan and Ali Horeanopoulos
A hackathon against institutional corruption was held March 27–29, 2015 at the MIT Media Center. It was sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.
The live blog
And the winners are…
6:20 pm, Sunday, March 29:
The first place winner was UnEarth, which helps surface funding information for biomedical studies through a browser extension. (March 30: UnEarth was just written up in an article for the Boston Business Journal.)
The second place winner was WeCott, which aims to create a social platform for boycotts.
And two projects tied for third place: Open Think Tanks and CampaignCon. Campaign Con looked at how campaign donations changed over time. Open Think Tanks “enables the public to search and explore donations from foreign governments and state-controlled entities to nonprofit think tanks.”
A tremendous round of applause for all the teams and all the hard work they did. It was a great set of projects.
And a round of applause for the team: Danny Miller, Stephanie Dant, Heidi Carrell, Katy Evans Pritchard, Brooke Williams, and Ying Quan Tan. (Team, am I missing anyone?)
2:55 pm, Sunday, March 29: And as the minutes ticked away, people worked hard to finish.
12:10 pm, Sunday, March 29: With less than 3 hours to go before projects have to be uploaded, teams are hard at work.
11:25 am, Sunday, March 29: So many ideas, so many different ways of thinking them through. Here’s two classic ways, and one not-so-obvious — a whiteboard, post-its, and an arm. (That’s Ying’s arm, btw.)
8:50 am, Sunday, March 29: Great progress by the end of the day on anti-corruption hacks. Here are the team names, project names, and brief descriptions. These will be updated during the day here.
Government & Law
Team: Glass Dashboard
Project Description: Representatives cannot represent their constituents without collecting constituent input. We must get citizens to participate in their political process, and to get them to do that we need to produce engaging metrics for them — such as identify their political ideology, their district ideology, how their representative’s voting behavior aligns with their district.
Team Members: Nick Mastronardi, Tim Booher, Don Kahn, Mark Coyne, Lia Mastronardi, Dylan Cooper, Kyle Rivers, Adam Rosszay, Leo Blondel, Juan Mena, Betty, Kriz, Ari
Team: CampaignCon
Project Description: Our focus in on how campaign contributions change over time. We are looking at both long-term and near term changes. In particular we are building a pipeline for pulling down the latest FEC records on individual contributions, comparing the records to previous versions, highlighting the differences, and archiving the source FEC files. As Paul Jorgensen found, tracking revisions to records is crucial to maintaining the integrity of the data since in some cases the FEC has deleted millions of dollars worth of contributions. CampaignCon will help users to identify instances where revisions occur and how they impact campaigns. The team is also developing concepts for visualizing long-term changes in campaign finance.
Team Members: Nathan Maddix, Dhrumal Mehra, Bruce Skarin, Max Dunitz, Perihan Ersoy, James D’Angelo
Safra Fellow: Paul Jorgensen
Team:
How can we improve House annual ethics training of congressional staff? The team is looking at alternative to the current proprietary method. The new system would have a number of advantages: It would be open source, reducing cost; provide a more interactive experience; have better analytics; and would be designed to promote dialogue and discussion, unlike the current system.
Team Members:
Safra Fellow: Robert Lucas
Finance & Economics
Team: WeCott
Project Description: Creating a social platform for boycotts to lower the associated transaction costs. People can submit boycotts and invite people to participate. Additionally, the platform furthers the social aspect by crowdsourcing information such as boycott proposals and potential alternatives.
Team Members: Amy Zhang, Daniel Zhao, Joseph Schiavone, Richard He
Team: MuniMining
Project Description: The team is developing a means to free data locked in pdf files so that it can be easily downloaded into an Excel file for analysis and comparison. The proposed mechanism has the potention not only to enable expanded data consideration of Community Development Authorities, the original research subject, but a whole range of bond issues on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board website. Such analysis can better educate citizens, local government officials, and buyers of municipal bonds and shine a brighter light on the financial products created and sold by Wall Street.
Team Members: Jeff Keeling, J. Adrian Zimmer, Shane Runquist, and Mary Bathory Vidaver
Team: LIBOR Alt REPAIR
Project Description: Studies have shown that bankers often collude together to manipulate the the London Interbank Offered Rate(Libor). Since banks are not required to make their transaction prices public, the interbank offered rate is calculated by simply asking banks the rate they would borrow at — a system that is easily gamed. Our project goal is to develop a benchmark interest rate based on the closest available public data — bond transaction data. This will be a website where the public can view the benchmark interest rate for the current day.
Team Members: Katherine Sliz Carson, Naushard Cader, James Butler, Quan Do, Mike Dombroski, Attal, John,
Medicine & Public Health
Team: Unearth
Funding information for biomedical studies are often buried at the end of the article, and health care professionals are often unaware of this. Studies have shown that funded studies often are biased in their findings. This group makes a browser extension that will show funding information on PubMed studies up-front, when a someone is viewing an article.
Team Members: Alexandra Horeanopoulos, Alisa Nguyen, Avery Dao, Alex Chen, Diana Nguyen, Marco Gentili, Steven Cooke
Safra Fellow: Christopher Robertson
Team: OpenPharma
Project Description: An index was created by Jennifer Miller that ranks the 20 largest pharma and biotech companies, as well all new medicines and vaccines, on critical ethics, public health, and human rights issues. The first pilot is complete. It ranks companies and medicines on their transparency in disclosing clinical trial information. Gathering the data for the pilot index was very time consuming, so the hackers are helping automate the process. To this end, they created a software to automate the most time consuming, important and tedious part of the ranking. So far it is looking good! We are also begining to think about how to visualize the rankings results.
Team Members:
Safra Fellow: Jennifer Miller
Nonprofits & Academia
Team: Open Think Tanks
Project Description: We have created a groundbreaking website and app that enables the public — -for the first time ever — to search and explore donations from foreign governments and state-controlled entities to nonprofit think tanks. Often based in the beltway, think tanks are a key part of coordinated lobbying efforts and often have a tremendous impact on the pubic policy outcomes that impact our day to day lives. The website we’ve created is responsive, enabling lawmakers, journalists and others to use their mobile devices to quickly find out about conflicts of interest while they’re at congressional hearings, press conferences and events, among other scenarios. We’re working toward ensuring the website, www.thinktankdonors.org, also will include a repository of Truth in Testimony disclosures since Jan. 1, 2015, when the House passed a rule requiring those who testify before Congress to disclose whether or not they or the institution they represent have received money from foreign governments. The web app will enable users to search by country and/or think tank in order answer a conflict-of-interest question on the spot. It will also enable users to explore the data, sorting by amount or any other field. Lastly, this web app is scalable, as it will provide the infrastructure for releasing the next several rounds of think tank donor data.
Team members: John Muldoon, Soraya Okuda, Joe Uchill, Shawn Musgrave, with assistance from Dhrumil Mehta
Safra Fellow: Brooke Williams
Nikin Thare
Category: Nonprofits & Academia
Academic independence is hard to verify, as different schools have different standards for conflict of interest disclosures. The project goal is to provide scholars with a embed link, much like a Creative Common’s seal that can be embedded in a site as a public’s certification of independence.
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4:50 pm, Saturday, March 28: Hacking has continued all afternoon, with many projects starting to take shape. Here’s some pictures of people at work. These photos by Ali Horeanopoulos.
2 pm, Saturday, March 28: Here’s the first update on what teams are working on. It’s an exciting mix of ideas ranging from ways of fixing banks from colluding on fixing bank rates to creating a social platform for submitting boycott petitions; from letting citizens know which bills are most important to them to improving the ethics training in Congress
Of course, the focus of the projects could change at any time. Most teams have settled on an idea, although a few are still seeking the right problem. (The names in bold are those we spoke with from the group.)
Nikin Thare: Academic independence is hard to verify, as different schools have different standards for conflict of interest disclosures. The project goal is to provide scholars with a embed link, much like a Creative Common’s seal that can be embedded in a site as a public’s certification of independence.
Kate Silz Carson: Studies have shown that bankers often collude together to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Since banks are not required to make their transaction prices public, the interbank offered rate is calculated by simply asking banks the rate they would borrow at — a system that is easily gamed. Our project goal is to develop a benchmark interest rate based on the closest available public data — bond transaction data. This will be a website where the public can view the benchmark interest rate for the current day.
Joseph Schiabon: Creating a social platform for boycotts so people can submit boycott petitions and invite people to participate. Also provide mechanisms to help people with the boycott, for example, by suggesting alternatives.
Marco Gentili: Funding information for biomedical studies are often buried at the end of the article, and health care professionals are often unaware of this. Studies have shown that funded studies often are biased in their findings. This group makes a browser extension that will show funding information on Pubmed studies up-front, when a someone is viewing an article.
Brooke Williams: Right now the public cannot search. Scholars help to shape the laws that impact day-to-day lives, and there are conflicts of interest in their relationships to foreign government. Right now, the public cannot easily find out whether a foreign government donates to a think-thank. This project aims to build a web application to enable people to search for such contributions. thinkthankdonors.org
Marcia Hams: They are looking at ways to make the data-rich CMS (the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) more user friendly. The open payments system collects data on all pharma and device payments made to physicians and teaching hospitals. There’s lots of good data, but it’s not user friendly. This is more of a design problem, the gorup said.
Jennifer Miller: The name of the project is OpenPharma. They are creating an index that ranks the 20 largest pharma and biotech companies, as well all new medicines and vaccines, on critical ethics, public health, and human rights issues. The first index ranks companies and medicines on their transparency in disclosing clinical trial info.
Nathan Maddix, Dhrumal Mehra: Still focussing, but a couple of ideas. First is visualizing Congressional campaign contributions by some unknown variable, possibly looking at state-by-state contributions to see if out-of-state money flows into states to manipulate elections. This may be melded into another group’s idea of looking at Senate weekly expense reporting, which is easily manipulated to hide problems.
Nick Mastronardi: This group — which has about 15 members, easily the largest in the hack — is trying to remove a barrier to promote more citizen participation in politics by helping voters find bills that are relevant to them. Ultimately, it would provide a prioritized, relevant list of bills they might care about.
Robert Lucas: How can we improve House annual ethics training of congressional staff? The team is looking at alternative to the current proprietary method. The new system would have a number of advantages: It would be open source, reducing cost; provide a more interatice experience; have better analytics; and would be designed to promote dialogue and discussion, unlike the current system.
A team made up of Matt Boujonnier, Vijay Laxmi, Pierre Charmasson was still working to figure out what project to do. They had narrowed it down to two topics: a browser extension that pulled up the funding behind scientific research articles and a tool for creating greater visibility for foreign donations to US entities. The trio come from two countries, India and France — “two countries with no corruption,” joked one member.
11:45, Saturday, March 28. Pictures of groups hard at work coming up with hacks.
10:55, Saturday, March 28: Fascinating list of datasets to hack with. Maybe it’s a browser plugin that shows who funded an academic paper. Or an alternative to LIBOR, the benchmark used by many banks for setting rates. Or a tool that helps comb through campaign finance records.
8:35 am, Saturday, March 28: 25 minutes before the official launch and people are already here & eager to start. Exciting.
Matt Carroll runs the Future of News Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. His blog is at http://bit.ly/MattWords and he can be followed at @MattatMIT.
