United Nations Treaties 101

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  United Nations Treaties 101

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  How can you raise awarness on international issues?

Inspiration

Kleng got inspired from his work on OECD surveys and the urge to make them accessible and understandable.

What it does

It helps:

• find a treaty covering a threat to the environment or a violation against living beings
• understand a treaty originally written by lawyers for lawyers.
• build a data bank of use cases, monitoring tools & solutions

How we built it

• we crawled the official site gathering the UN treaties: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ParticipationStatus.aspx?clang=_en
• we parsed the data, cleaned it (a bit) and made it available as a REST API for anyone to make easy for anyone to use (https://github.com/DataForGood-Norway/un_treaties)
• we start building cases.

With one monitoring tool using satellite data, we will build a tool watching fires from space for specific sensitive areas on the planet:

• protecting the environment by automatically detecting wild fires early on (cases in Sweden and Norway).
• protecting populations' health by tracking illegal & toxic garbage fires (cases in Mumbai and Lebanon)
• detecting villages being attacked with houses being burned

Challenges we ran into

• Missing team members with skills in infographics to convey the meaning of a treaty or the status of countries/treaties
• A coming challenge might come from the amount of computer resources required to track parts of the planet with images from Sentinel 2.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are on our way to make international law more understanable, and through that promoting our international rights and duties :P

What we learned

• To use satellite data from Sentinel 2.
• Components to build cool infographics soon

What's next for United Nations Treaties 101

Check it on GitHub! https://github.com/DataForGood-Norway/un_treaties

Built With

• elastic-search
• infographics
• python-backend
• python-rest-api
• satellite-data
• scripts-automating-tracking-treaty-violations