Awesome Python for Social Good

A curated list of examples & ideas of using Python for Social Good.

This list is based on my talk at PyDays Vienna 2018 and extended with new content over time. Contributions of new ideas and technical examples are very welcome. 🙂

Contents

• Environment
• Poverty
• Internet
• Privacy
• Free Press
• Democracy
• Politics
• Volunteering

Environment

• global warming data
  • deleted data – Trump’s administration [deleting public data on climate change from government websites
  • archivers
    • https://envirodatagov.org/
    • http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/2016.html
    • http://www.cdlib.org/
    • http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefuge
    • https://climatemirror.org/
  • Python scraping
    • Requests + BeautifulSoup
    • https://scrapy.org/
    • https://scrapinghub.com/
• the current rate of power consumption for cryptocurrency mining is a bit worrisome
  • more power than Iceland, Denmark…
    • cryptocurrency mining in Iceland is using so much energy the electricity may run out
    • Bitcoin electricity usage
  • ⚡️ Call for action
    • is there a way to make such computation more green?
      • supply-demand balancing
      • negative energy prices
      • helping balance out volatility of wind turbines
    • can a proof of environment friendliness be encoded in the blockchain?

Poverty

• Costa Rican household poverty level prediction using machine learning – part1, part2 & the Kaggle competition

Internet

• recent DDoS attacks – the "Mirai" botnet attack on DynDNS and the Memcached attack on GitHub
• recent vulnerabilities – Heartbleed, Shellshock, Meltdown, Spectre, oh my!
• make sure your servers are secure
  • don’t expose Memcached to the Internet!
  • server – keep your software up to date. Unattended OS upgrades using Ansible
  • PyMetasploit – a Python library for running Metasploit, the tool for pen-testing your sites
  • learn the basics of internet security
    • hashlib – hash passwords with scrypt
    • Let’s encrypt – use HTTPS
    • cryptography.io – don’t roll your own crypto, use existing good implementations
• don’t let your users behave insecurely
  • 86% of passwords are terrible – people use 123456, password, …
  • Pwned Passwords v2 – elegant & safe API check
• maybe help keep an eye on the Internet
  • check those smart toasters exposed to the internet now & then
  • white-hat hackers upgrading routers
  • vigilante malware makes you safer
  • not the hero Gotham deserves…

Privacy

• Snowden – revealed government surveillance programs (June 2013)
• ⚡️ Call for action
  • Signal – great e2e encrypted chat app, open source & needs UX help
  • Mailpile – web-based email client w/ PGP in Python

Free Press

• Fake news
• Attacks on journalists
• ⚡️ Call for action
  • help fact-checking sites
    • https://www.snopes.com/
    • http://www.politifact.com/
    • http://fivethirtyeight.com/
    • start something like this in your own community
  • Be wary of the possibility of tampering with information
  • TensorFlow detect fake news – Jupyter notebooks & datasets on Kaggle
    • Kaggle fake news competition
    • Kaggle datasets related to "fake news"

Democracy

• Facebook + Cambridge Analytics + trolls + fake news = impact elections
• voting machines in Germany hacked (7.9.2017.) – by white hat hackers this time
• Cyber attack Estonia – outright "cyber warfare"
• ⚡️ Call for action
  • help find software vulnerabilities
  • identify trolls / bots on social networks
    • TensorFlow
    • https://www.kaggle.com/vikasg/russian-troll-tweets

Politics

• Analyse the data
  • open data
  • scrape it!
• Code for America / Europe / …
  • civic hacktivism
  • help your village/town/country make a better service for something
• help politicians you support
• subvert politicians you don’t 👹
  • Trump2Cash – a stock trading bot powered by Trump tweets
  • Trump2Cash blog post

Volunteering

• helping the economically disadvantaged
• helping the misrepresented
• other forms of helping your community
• ⚡️ Call for action
  • both local & remote
    • http://www.refugeescode.at/
    • https://www.freecodecamp.org/nonprofits/
  • help teach others
    • Python is the No. 1 language in education

License

To the extent possible under law, Dražen Lučanin has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.