10. Social Injustice Index
GitHub: Frontend | Backend
Status: Post-capstone
Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now that may only mitigate a portion of the problem instead of using a strategic long-term approach that would take longer and endure the test of time. Larger corporations accumulate technical debt in various ways. Over time, tech debt becomes known through fail points in the system: latency goes up, reliability goes down, or changes and deployments take longer to complete. Companies must address tech debt with a focused group of people to resolve latency. This typically works well, but as time passes, the same issue can surface again.
With social injustice, we see the same pattern. In the case of latency, a mature organization will put measurement and attribution in place to ensure that any skew in latency is quickly discovered and resolved. With social injustice, the solution is more abstract and less concrete. One goal would be to develop and maintain a social injustice index based on data surrounding social issues by leveraging current events from multiple media outlets, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with Google Trends. This would allow for some measurement to be performed at the state and national level so that trends and magnitudes across localities could be examined objectively through a data driven lens.
Update: May 2022
We have been working with students as part of ASU's Senior Capstone program over the last two semesters to prototype what a solution might look like.
The team has written the following open-source code:
They have also prepared this short demo video as part of their capstone showcase: