Accountable

Inspiration

In today's age, all of our daily products are made in companies thousands of miles away. Before hyper-globalization, everyone's daily products were made locally and you knew where your things were sourced from. We wanted to bring users an awareness of their purchases and a higher level of connectedness to the places where your things come from.

What it does

The website pulls companies from your purchase history, and places their suppliers on a map of where your objects are sourced from. Wikipedia articles are linked to each location as interesting facts in order to connect the user to the people from where you bought your products.

The website also integrates your personalized values through a fillable form. Any of the companies you spend from are analyzed for values such as labor and workers, environment, animal welfare, local community through reliable public database sources. A summary is then provided on how aligned you are with your values compared to the companies that you purchase from.

How we built it

This project was built with a FastAPI backend and a React frontend.

We used Nessie from Capital One to mock our financial data, which includes customers, merchants, accounts, transactions, and more. Merchant's that have been purchased from are analyzed using Gemini through the Gemini API, which researches relevant ethical information about the company. The findings of this research is validated and weighted on your personal values, which allows our application to tell you if the specified company aligns with your values or not. Public databases such as Department of Labor, OSHA, NRLB, EPA were referenced for their information on specific companies to see if there were any lawsuits or violations. The values are then weighed using Gemini and then compared to your own inputed values.

Company manufacturer data was sourced from ImportYeti API which provides us supplier sources through public freight shipment info. The Company's manufacturer's precise address is then converted into coordinates and plugged into Wikipedia's free Geosearch API, which provides nearby wikipedia articles on any given coordinate.

Challenges we ran into

Managing so many different APIs was diffcult for reasons such as rate limiting and tokens running out. We wanted to find free or reliable APIs that could allow this project to continue to exist past this hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having integrated so many different information sources and real reliable databases into a single page. We feel that were able to concisely display many different information sources all onto one page built for the average consumer.

What we learned

In this project we learned how to design a user interface that utilizes a heavy slow back end but doesn't lag the front end.

What's next for Accountable

We want to truly integrate this banking apps to make the user base not restricted to only Capital One. An importable where you could add your spending history easily could be a potential option.