Wanted: Ways to battle corruption
For the past few years, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has been wrestling with the knotty problem of institutional corruption, the diversion of an institution’s mission in response to legal but undue influences from outside, which often results in a loss of trust among the institution’s constituency. Now the center is seeking a practical way of monitoring institutional corruption, generating ideas from the Harvard community and the public through a contest launched this week with $8,000 in prize money. The Systems to Monitor Institutional Corruption challenge, being conducted with InnoCentive, a company that specializes in arranging such contests, seeks new ideas on how to use the abundant data available from the Internet, government records, watchdog groups, and other sources to highlight and discourage such corruption. Center Director Lawrence Lessig said the contest idea is something of an experiment, and he wasn’t sure what would result from it. “Optimistically, we’ll get fresh thinking...