Spotlight on asylum claims

This is part of the Women Driven Development hackathon, #TechItForward with Pride.

Proposed by Megan Stodel, this project aims to look at outcomes of asylum claims made the grounds of sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI).

Our first challenge is to collate from the government website the decision documents of SOGI-related cases. Our current approach relies on a web scraper using lots of regular expressions. This involves parsing the contents of decision documents to classify them as successful or unsuccessful (or abandoned/withdrawn, i.e. no decision), and then identifying the subset of those cases that are SOGI-related.

Looking forward, we would like to consider the possibility of a machine learning approach: replacing the regular exprssions with a model trained to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful cases, and identify those that are SOGI related.

Presentation

Link to presentation

Megan has also written a blog post about the project.

Our Team

We are:

Megan Stodel: @MeganStodel
Ben Knight: @benknight135
David Thai: @dafuloth
Rish Kumar: @rishkum

Data

The project focuses on better understanding the outcomes of asylum claims made by people on the grounds of sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI), using two key sources:

Project management

The hackathon was on Friday, 26th July 2019. We continue to work on it.

The Trello board for this project can be accessed here.