On March 28-29, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and MIT Center for Civic Media hosted a multidisciplinary hackathon to fix the systemic, legal corruption that is weakening public institutions around the world. More than one hundred developers, academics, journalists, designers, and community members gathered at the MIT Media Lab to produce tools to combat problems of institutional corruption across government and law, medicine and public health, academia and nonprofits, and finance and economics. The event was a tremendous success. Working with the Center's Lab Fellows and research and data gathered over the last five years of the Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, ten teams produced tools that will have a real impact in mitigating institutional corruption. The projects were judged by a panel of experts, who awarded first, second, and third place winners.
We will be showcasing these tools on social media over the coming weeks, and the teams will have an opportunity to present their work at our conference Ending Institutional Corruption on May 1-2, 2015. We are very excited about the impact these tools will have, and we hope that you will explore and share them.
Here is an overview of all ten projects, as presented at the hackathon:
First Place: Unearth
Funding and disclosure information for biomedical studies is often buried at the end of medical journal articles. This makes it difficult and unwieldy for healthcare professionals to access this information as they make prescribing decisions. Research has shown that industry-funded studies are often biased in their findings and that knowledge of funding information for these studies has a significant impact on physician prescribing behavior. Unearth is a browser extension (available for free download) that fetches conflict-of-interest and industry funding information (when available) from biomedical journal articles and places it at the top of abstracts within PubMed.
Team Members: Christopher Robertson, Alex Chen, Steven Cooke, Avery Dao, Marco Gentili, Alexandra Horeanopoulos, Alisa Nguyen, Diana Nguyen
Second Place: WeCott
WeCott is a social platform for boycotts that aims to crowdsource ethical consumerism and lower the transaction costs associated with boycotting. Through the WeCott app, people can create boycotts and invite others to participate. The platform also crowdsources information such as boycott proposals, alternative businesses, and the amount of money WeCott members have spent elsewhere over the duration of the boycott.
Team Members: Richard He, Joseph Schiavone, Amy Zhang, Daniel Zhao
Third Place (tie): Open Think Tanks
Thinktankdonors.org is a groundbreaking website that, for the first time, enables the public to search and explore donations from foreign governments and entities, such as state-controlled oil companies, to non-profit think tanks. Situated in the beltway, some think tanks are a key part of coordinated lobbying efforts and often have tremendous impact on public policy outcomes that impact our day-to-day lives. However, as Journalism Fellow Brooke Williams co-reported in the New York Times, "policy makers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in funding the research." Thinktankdonors.org enables lawmakers, journalists, and others to see these financial connections and find out about potential conflicts of interest, even on the fly, using their mobile devices during congressional hearings, press conferences, or other events. The website and its mobile version are searchable by country and/or think tank. They also include the first-ever searchable repository of Truth in Testimony disclosures since the House passed a rule--proposed in response to the Times article--requiring those who testify before Congress to disclose certain foreign government funding. Notably, the website provides the infrastructure for releasing the next several rounds of Williams' think tanks donor data showing contributions from corporations, foundations, and others.
Team Members: Brooke Williams, Yanzhou Chen, John Muldoon, Shawn Musgrave, Soraya Okuda, Demetri Sampas, Joe Uchill
Third Place (tie): CampaignCon
CampaignCon focuses on how campaign contributions change over time, in both the long-term and near-term. Former Lab Fellow Paul Jorgensen's research shows that, in some cases, the FEC has deleted millions of dollars of campaign contributions from its records. Tracking revisions to FEC records is crucial to maintaining the integrity of our data on campaign finance. To help solve this problem, CampaignCon has built a pipeline that pulls the latest FEC records on individual campaign contributions, compares those records to previous versions, highlights the differences, and archives the source FEC files. This tool will help users identify instances in which revisions occur, and how these changes may impact campaigns. The team is also developing concepts for visualizing long-term changes in campaign finance. View a visualization of relevant 2014 funders and recipients here.
Team Members: Paul Jorgensen, James D'Angelo, Max Dunitz, Perihan Ersoy, Al Johri, Nathan Maddix, Dhrumil Mehta, Ari Roshko, Bruce Skarin
BillFinity
BillFinity is a tool to help hold representatives accountable to their constituents. A number of influences, including campaign donations, lobbying, and other private interests, can sway a legislator from representing the true will of the people, but even the most well-intentioned representatives lack a clear, comprehensive way of determining where their constituency's values lie. BillFinity fosters citizen participation by allowing constituents to: 1) view legislation that matters to them, and 2) compare their ideological viewpoints on social and fiscal axes with those of their representatives. Representatives will have a better understanding of their constituency, and voters will have a better metric for understanding whether their representatives are representing them.
Team Members: Leo Blondel, Tim Booher, Dylan Cooper, Mark Coyne, Kris Gosselin, Don Kahn, Zahra Khan, Betty Lo, Lia Mastronardi, Nick Mastronardi, Juan Mena, Kyle Rivers, Adam Rosszay
LIBOR Alt Repair
There is ample evidence that bankers often collude to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). Because banks are not required to make their transaction prices public, the interbank offered rate is calculated by asking banks to report the rate at which they would borrow; this produces a system that is easily gamed. LIBOR Alt Repair is an alternative benchmark interest rate based on the closest available public data that is of comparable term and risk category. On this website, the public would be able to view the benchmark interest rate for the current day.
Team Members: Katherine Silz Carson, James Butler, Naushard Cader, Quan Do, Mike Dombroski, Attila Ferruchi, John Heyer
MuniMining
MuniMining is a means to free data locked in PDF files so that it can be easily downloaded for analysis and comparison. The tool was built in response to a need to compile and analyze data on Community Development Authorities, but it has applicability for a whole range of bond issues on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board website. Using this tool, scholars and community members will be able to better uncover information on municipal bonds and shine a light on the financial products created and sold by Wall Street.
Team Members: Mary Bathory Vidaver, Jeff Keeling, J. Adrian Zimmer, Shane Runquist
OpenPharma
Lab Fellow Jennifer Miller has created an index that ranks the twenty largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as all new medicines and vaccines, on critical ethics, public health, and human rights issues. The first pilot of this index, which ranks companies and medicines on their transparency in disclosing clinical trial information, is complete. OpenPharma is a system designed to automate the data collection for the index, allowing this important work to be done in a time-efficient manner. The team is now moving forward to think about how to visualize the ranking results.
Team Members: Jennifer Miller, Sandesh Iyer, David Mascarenas, Sisi Ni, Rhonda Phillips, Arjun Ramaswamy
ProfessorCert
ProfessorCert is a website based on the Academic Independence Project at the Edmond J. Safra Research Lab. The project grants certification licenses to academics whose work is free from industry bias. Via this tool, academics have two certification options: a personalized log-in gained through the creation of a profile and an in-depth disclosure non-bias survey, or a more general one obtained by answering highly generalized questions. Upon completing this, academics receive an embed link with a certificate from the Academic Independence Project. This certificate can be integrated into research profiles, personal profiles, and academic websites.
Team Members: Szelena Gray, Sujay Tyle, Nikin Tharan
Schoolhouse Ethics
Annual ethics training for congressional staff has been in place for eight years. The training is currently provided on a proprietary web conferencing platform with no options for discussion or feedback. The question of this project is both painfully simple and complex: How can we improve the U.S. House of Representatives annual ethics training for congressional staff? Schoolhouse Ethics piloted an alternative to the current proprietary method. The solution is to use OpenEDx, an open source massive open online course (MOOC), that could reduce costs, provide more interactivity, allow for feedback, enable robust analytics, and promote discussion.
Team Members: Robert Lucas, Marcelo DeCastro, Carl Spagnoli
Congratulations to all ten teams!