Orbana - Data-driven Social Justice

INSPIRATION & ORIGINS

Orbana is a platform to visualize, analyze, and respond to human trafficking. With gigabytes of illegal advertisements throughout the internet, our idea was to parse this data and display it visually, making it available to NGOs, and running statistics in order to make subtle links apparent.

Why Orbana? It's not just a hipster, trendy name, but a reference to our core mission: to combat the social issues of human sex trafficking. According to Roman mythology, Orbona was the goddess of children, and had a soft spot for the orphans. She regularly granted children to parents who had lost their own children. Just as Orbona was patron of children, we want to use our big data, analysis, and processes to end human trafficking.

KEY FEATURES:

Responsive visualizations in context to other socioeconomic factors
Trove of data updated daily so algorithms can provide accurate feedback
Direct lines of communication to NGOs for 24/7 assistance or tips.

Our primary strength is displaying complicated, convoluted data sets in understandable visualizations. Second, we update our entire database of statistics daily, and re-analyze every corner of the Earth in order to detect suspicious and dangerous patterns. We have automated systems to alert local authorities, community members, and NGO's when certain danger levels are breached. Our twitter also sends out notifications at specific NGOs and locales when our algorithms detect suspicious patterns. Third, up to 4 million men, women, and children are deceived, recruited, and shipped into slavery and abuse each year. We can't stop them on your own, so we're establishing direct lines to major partners against human trafficking so you can join us with confidence.

HURDLES & COMEBACKS

The APIs we used to scrape and gather data had daily limits which slowed our progress. Nonetheless, we've collected over 7,000 sets of data from all around the world to fuel our custom algorithms and notifications.