In today's society, it seems as if someone famous is indicted every other day for a crime. Reports of involvement in shady activities seem to pop up for even the most unassuming of men. Take, for instance, the current controversy at MIT over monetary gifts from the late Jeffery Epstein. Although it was originally assumed that only Joi Ito and Seth Lloyd were the only ones involved, a recent investigation proves that our president, Rafael Reif, knew about the gifts, and even signed a letter of appreciation for Epstein. Inexplicably, however, Reif does "not recall it."
After reading Reif's emails about the Epstein situation, and having followed the Kavanaugh and Sessions hearings, we were inspired to create a solution for these unfortunate men. One key bottleneck in their search for justice is that most of the convicted men simply do not recall writing or signing documents that implicate them in high-profile cases. Powerful men need a tool that keeps track of the documents they signed, so they can understand and mitigate their role in future controversies.
This is where our web app, Disaster Relief, comes in. With Disaster Relief, users can easily access previous documents they signed, with Docusign, and search through this database with keywords. For instance, if a known person is trending on Twitter for the wrong reasons, a user can simply search for that person in their document database, and figure out if they ever sent a document that could implicate them. This would have helped Rafael Reif find that he had sent a letter to Epstein before Goodwin Procter, the organization investigating MIT, did.
In addition, users can easily send documents to anyone over email. For instance, if Reif wanted to push blame to a lower level administrator at MIT, he could simply plug in an email address and send a form to be filled. He can also add "view-only" recipients, which could include the entire MIT student population. After all, accountability is vital. For ease, we have created a resignation letter template which can easily be sent or filled in. For Reif, in particular, we have already created a resignation letter that only requires his signature. Lucky for him, we can send that letter by email, and he can sign it confidentially with Docusign!
We use the Docusign Python API in tandem with a Flask server to allow for queries of a user's docusign envelopes through a web interface. The way that the search function works is by using the Docusign API to enumerate all the envelopes in a user's account and all of the documents within the envelope. Then, it parses the documents from PDFs into text and then performs searches on the raw text. Next, it displays any document that matches any of the input keywords. If you click on a tag, it generates a list of keywords to search and returns documents that match any of them.
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