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Welcome to the BankTrack wiki!
A large number of banks continue to fund fossil fuel and deforestation projects, causing a great deal of destruction and pushing us further into climate chaos.
BankTrack is an international tracking and campaigning organisation targeting private sector commercial banks (‘banks') and the activities they finance. BankTrack supports civil society organisations (CSO) with their research and reports. They are an integral part of the global community of CSOs focused on the financial sector as a whole (multilateral and national development banks, export credit agencies, private and institutional investors et cetera).
BankTrack’s mission is to stop banks from financing harmful business activities; to promote a banking sector that respects human rights and contributes to just societies and a healthy planet; and to support fellow civil society organisations in their engagement with banks.
BankTrack keeps a database of about 190 banks, listing, among other things, their basic information, policies, and dodgy deals. These bank profiles are currently updated manually. BankTrack is looking to automate this process in order to receive updates on banks’ (corporate social responsibility) policies as soon as they are updated by the bank or as new policies are published.
The goal of this project is to build a web scraper that scours the websites of banks, updating a database whenever a bank has updated their policies. The project will first focus on the 60 ‘worst’ banks (as listed in the 2021 Banking On Climate Chaos Report), and if feasible be extended to all banks in BankTrack’s database.
Automating the process of updating policies would be of great help to BankTrack. In addition to manual labour, it sometimes takes days or even weeks for BankTrack to realize when a bank’s policy has changed. This means a loss of time that might have been crucial to prepare a response and act swiftly.
Create a script that crawls the websites of (initially 60) banks for their corporate social responsibility policies.
BankTrack will provide guidance on how they manually look for these policies, and your goal is to automate the steps they usually take.
We will store the metadata and policies of banks in a database, which needs to be developed, and compare them against any updates when the crawler searches the bank's website again. If there is a difference, the interface to the database (e.g., a Google sheet) should mark this. BankTrack can then manually check any differences for relevancy.
The main drawing board for scoping tickets to work on is on this Miro board. The invite for this board is in slack.
We'll be tracking tickets in Github projects