Slavery Included

Raise consumer awareness and pressure companies towards transparent, slave-free supply chains.

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Inspiration

Forced labour is an unfortunate reality and by volume, the largest manifestation of modern slavery. This nebulous problem persists for a great number of reasons: consumers and industry profit from exploitative labor, consumers are unaware of the human rights violations occurring at various links in the supply chain of our everyday goods, and corporations seek to distance themselves from the practices of their lower tier supply chain entities.

The lack of transparency from companies whose supply chains might not be entirely slavery-free made us realize that we needed an effective way to call out and push companies to investigate and declare their chain of supply, as well as inform the consumer of the ethical decisions involved in buying such goods.

SlaveryIncluded is a modest to force companies to be transparent as possible in their supply chain by raising consumer awareness around the specific actions that they have or have not taken to minimize their slavery footprint.

What it does

For a select list of sellers, we developed Chrome Extension, SlaveryIncluded, that informs buyers on Amazon about the practices of the product manufacturer. The Chrome Extension purports an estimated additional price which directs consumers to https://www.slaveryincluded.org/ (built by us!). The website details the supply chain practices of product manufacturer including information on the steps they have or have not taken to minimize the number of forced the laborers they complicity exploit.

Consumers get access to recently published new articles that may relate to the labour practices of the company along with a "sentiment score" that might inform the consumer on how ethical the company is. They can then choose to tweet at the company/corporation and demand fairer practices or laud their ethical practices!

How we built it

The Website was built using Flask, java, html, css and Gunicorn and the maps were built using d3.js The Chrome Extension was built using Javascript. A postgreSQL database provides a number of tables to populate individual company pages with their relevant details. IBM Watson Discovery News was used to query news articles from the last two months using their Watson-developer-cloud Python API. The chrome extension can request the website to select and convey the information on the seller related to the product on Amazon.com.

Challenges we ran into

We had no idea how little data there would be about human trafficking. We had hoped to estimate the cost of offsetting forced labor in a single industry; that was a great deal of hubris! However, this prompted our effort to compel businesses to investigate and publish the incredibly complex details inherent to a many-tiered supply chain. We are new to web development. At every corner, we were exposed to the ins and outs of linking a live web server to an accessible Chrome Extension.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The live web server with a queryable table database was an amazing feat! Publishing the chrome extension to the web store made us feel like real developers.

What we learned

A whole lot of web development and the basic elements undergirding the internet. #Watson was fun to play with and immensely useful!

What's next for Slavery Included

We've made our system scaleable: as the postgreSQL databases can be updated with new seller information; the chrome extension calls the website to determine if there is any knowledge on the seller. We look forward to aggregating a great deal of information to deploy on the web for consumers!

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