The Good Explorers fighting modern slavery — Hack’n’Lead hackathon 2019
Photo by Ms.Sue Huan on Unsplash
There are no words to describe my excitement days and weeks before the start of the Hack’n’Lead hackathon, and the same feeling is not leaving me even a few days after the intense weekend of coding and working in an amazingly open and friendly atmosphere.
I met my friends and acquaintances from the Women++, other female colleagues I’ve known through preparatory workshops and elsewhere. Last but not least, I met my team live for the first time. We did match and talk about some basic ideas a few days before thanks to provided Slack channels but seeing and already hugging each other was something different.
We’ve been working on the Thomson Reuters challenge “Combating Modern Slavery in the Supply Chains through Technology” mostly cause the high importance of fighting modern slavery is what we could definitely connect to.
Here you can read more about all the challenges.
Our team consisted of 3 data scientists ( Tilia, Jasmin, Chinya), 1 full stack developer ( Neha) and 1 project and product lead (myself).
Chinya, Tilia, Jasmin, Neha and Maja
Our overall goal was to
Create MVP that would be the very simple and small but innovative solution and eventually scale it later.
Vision / value proposition
It’s all about making better decisions in life.
Imagine you want to know more about the products you’re using or planning to buy, by having more transparency on product manufacture.
What if the information you got would make you more aware and informed about modern slavery?
You could find out what products are built based on the best standards and what ones you should avoid or even fight for better conditions for those involved.
How we worked
At the beginning of the first day, we’ve had a high-level time plan with 3 main tasks to achieve until the end of the day, including who is doing what.
1. Retrieve the data through different data sources / API’s provided, mainly howgood.com -> FoodData Central USA, list of goods and the global slavery index
2. Develop sentiments over time (anomaly detection, labeled clusters … on child labor, forced labor, prevention efforts) longer than the last year
3. Implement the simple and intuitive website where the user can first search for a product and then based on the results scroll in the countries map to further explore and learn about the results.
In the second phase (once when we have time to sit together again, after this hackathon) we would like to build in more user interaction so that users can enter their suggestions on missing products, countries and brands. That’s how we’d like to make users feel more valuable and satisfied.
How we proceeded
- After defining our vision, the product’s scope and the steps described
- We have made different iterations and synced team approx. every 2nd hour and re-scoped different tasks when needed.
- The most important thing was to know-how is doing what.
- My role was to make sure the work is well split and clear, that no one is stressing out (even if I was as well towards the end of the second day, just before the pitch), to remind about all different small “things” (like don’t forget git push :) ), etc. I was also responsible for checking if the pitch would fit into 30 sec and create most of the slides.
Technologies used
- MongoDB
- Python (libraries: pandas, numpy, sklearn, matplotlib, plotly, flask, pymongo, BeautifulSoup)
- d3.js (visualisations)
- Java, Spring framework
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Presentation
In our pitch, we’ve explained our vision, approach, business model and plans for the future.
All of us loved the challenge and enjoyed working together.
Our MVP website
Lessons learned
Start creating the slides and screenshots as soon as possible, already at the beginning of the 2nd day.
The presentation style really matters. Practice practice practice.
Try to spend not too much time on data scraping and analysis. Specifically, try to have more or less the same amount of resources for different tasks, not only for the data part.
