Global Weapons Tracking

Ormerod, Julia; Bubencik, Emily; Westreich, Maxwell A.; Llewellyn, Evan M.

Student Work

Global Weapons Tracking

Public

Arms control, tracking, and verification is one of the most pressing and complex issues of our time. In 2018 over 77,320 people died in armed conflicts (Amnesty, 2019). One promising area of innovation in arms control is the use of technology to aid in the sharing of open-source information between organizations who work in this field and connecting a wider audience of concerned citizens. Acknowledging and addressing this opportunity, our sponsors, experts from Oxfam and SOAS University of London, invited us to work on a project to create an online platform that would help gather, connect, and present information on arms control and tracking. Our project is directly connected to the SCRAP initiative, a decades-long initiative that seeks to integrate weapons disarmament, and non-proliferation practices developed in the last decades. For our project, we created a website that acts as a data portal to various open-source arms control organizations. This project aims to address the lack of communication within the arms control community, and we believe that this is an important step towards coordinating efforts and sharing information across stakeholders. Our website should in theory allow for much easier access to the wide range of organizations within arms control, providing much-needed unity between both citizens and organizations. From discussions with our sponsors, their main goal for this project is to integrate a variety of applications into the website. Towards this end, our project serves as a springboard for future groups to have a baseline to work off.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

Subject

Publisher