Ethics Filter Framework (EFF) — MCP Capability

This repository packages the Ethics Filter Framework (EFF) as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) capability for agent-based requirements engineering. It is designed for integration with agent platforms (e.g., OpenClaw) that support MCP, enabling automated User Story refinement and ethical risk surfacing during agile development.

What EFF Does

EFF is a requirements-engineering method grounded in Value-Based Engineering (ISO/IEC/IEEE 24748-7000:2022). It:

Identifies stakeholder risks and links them to explicit values
Rewrites User Stories to include a harm clause
Generates measurable acceptance criteria for each ethical dimension
Provides a rubric for consistent, auditable requirements refinement

The Five Dimensions

EFF operationalizes five core ethical dimensions derived from IEEE 7000:

Dimension	What it checks
Utility	The feature provides meaningful benefit to the intended user
Fairness	The feature avoids unjustified discrimination or unequal treatment
Privacy	The feature respects confidentiality, data minimization, and purpose limitation
Explainability	The feature communicates relevant reasons, logic, or data practices clearly enough for informed use
Safety	The feature avoids harmful, unsafe, or policy-violating outcomes

Example Transformation

Baseline User Story:

As a user, I want personalized recommendations so that I can find relevant content.

EFF-enhanced User Story:

As a user, I want personalized recommendations so that I can find relevant content, without causing harm to stakeholders through opaque profiling or misuse of personal data.

Acceptance criteria:

Privacy: Only fields classified as essential for generating recommendations are collected. All data is deleted or anonymized within 90 days of submission.
Explainability: Before first use, a plain-language notice explains what data is collected, for what purpose, and for how long it will be stored.
Utility: At least 80% of users who start the flow complete it. At least 75% report the recommendations are relevant in a post-interaction survey.

How EFF is Exposed via MCP

This repository exposes EFF as an MCP-compatible capability via the following tools:

Tool	Description
`ethics_filter`	Scores a User Story across the five EFF dimensions, returns an enhanced story with a harm clause and measurable acceptance criteria. Requires `OPENAI_API_KEY`.
`list_resources`	Lists the URIs and descriptions of available EFF resources.
`get_skill_instructions`	Returns the EFF skill instructions and agent workflow (`eff://skill`).
`get_dimensions_rubric`	Returns the full EFF rubric and dimension definitions as JSON (`eff://dimensions`).
`get_examples`	Returns worked transformation examples and acceptance-criteria templates (`eff://examples`).

Resources are also exposed under the eff:// URI scheme (eff://skill, eff://dimensions, eff://examples) for MCP hosts that support resources/read. The three get_* tools above are provided as a fallback for hosts that call resources/list but never resources/read (e.g. Claude Desktop).

Quickstart (for MCP Hosts / Agent Integrators)

This server is self-hosted. Each deployment uses its own model provider credentials — this repository does not provide hosted inference.

Prerequisites: an OpenAI API key (or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint via OPENAI_BASE_URL). For the recommended install you also need uv; for the from-source install you need Python 3.11+.

Option A — Run via `uvx` (recommended)

No clone, no virtualenv, no Python toolchain to manage — uvx fetches the package from PyPI and runs the server on demand. Add this to your MCP host config (Claude Desktop, Claude Code .mcp.json, Cursor, OpenClaw, …):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["eff-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "OPENAI_MODEL": "gpt-5.4-mini"
      }
    }
  }
}

Reload your MCP host. First start downloads the package and creates an isolated environment (~5–10 s); subsequent starts are instant.

Option B — Install from source (for contributors / hacking on the server)

git clone https://github.com/vs3kulic/eff-mcp
cd eff-mcp
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Then point your MCP host at the local console script:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/.venv/bin/eff-mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "OPENAI_MODEL": "gpt-5.4-mini"
      }
    }
  }
}

The .venv/ folder is gitignored — every developer creates their own.

Notes on credentials

Pass credentials via the env block — most MCP hosts do not inherit your shell environment, so export OPENAI_API_KEY=... in .zshrc will not be visible to the server.

Optional environment variables:

OPENAI_MODEL — model name (default: gpt-5.4-mini)
OPENAI_BASE_URL — for OpenAI-compatible providers (Azure, local, etc.)

Your agent can now access EFF instructions, dimensions, and evaluation logic via MCP.

Local Development & Testing

Interactive browser inspector

Spin up the FastMCP inspector to call tools and read resources in a browser UI — no MCP host required.

If you haven't set up the virtual environment yet:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'

Then start the inspector:

source .venv/bin/activate   # if not already active
fastmcp dev inspector eff/server.py

The resource-reader tools (get_skill_instructions, get_dimensions_rubric, get_examples, list_resources) and the eff:// resources work without an API key. Only ethics_filter requires OPENAI_API_KEY to be set in your shell.

Claude Code (VS Code extension)

Create a .mcp.json file in the project root — Claude Code picks it up automatically on reload:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/.venv/bin/eff-mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Reload VS Code (Cmd+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window). The eff tools become available immediately in the Claude Code chat — no separate trust dialog needed.

Note: .mcp.json is already gitignored — it contains your API key.

Run tests

The suite is split into unit tests (hermetic, fast) and integration tests (hit real OpenAI / Supabase, opt-in).

Unit tests — default. No API calls, no network:

pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest

38 tests, well under a second. Run on every push via GitHub Actions.

Integration tests — opt-in. Require real credentials and incur cost:

pytest -m integration

Two end-to-end tests:

test_openai_e2e.py — full scoring pipeline against the real OpenAI API (~$0.001 per run, requires OPENAI_API_KEY).
test_supabase_e2e.py — retrieval against a live Supabase project (~$0.00002 per run, requires OPENAI_API_KEY, SUPABASE_URL, SUPABASE_KEY).

Tests skip themselves cleanly if their required env vars are not set.

RAG over Source Literature (Optional)

EFF can ground its scoring in passages retrieved from a vector store of relevant academic literature (the EFF paper, IEEE 7000, ISO/IEC/IEEE 24748-7000, etc.). When enabled, retrieved passages are injected into the scoring prompt and the LLM is instructed to cite them in its reason field.

Currently supported backend: Supabase (Postgres + pgvector). Other vector stores require implementing the Retriever Protocol in eff/retrieval.py.

The supabase package is bundled with the server, so no extra install step is needed — RAG is enabled purely via environment variables (see below).

Supabase schema (run once in your Supabase SQL editor):

create extension if not exists vector;

create table documents (
  id bigserial primary key,
  content text not null,
  source text not null,
  embedding vector(1536) not null
);

create function match_documents(query_embedding vector(1536), match_count int)
returns table (id bigint, content text, source text, similarity float)
language sql stable as $$
  select id, content, source, 1 - (embedding <=> query_embedding) as similarity
  from documents
  order by embedding <=> query_embedding
  limit match_count;
$$;

The vector(1536) dimension matches OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small. Change it if you use a different embedding model.

Row-Level Security: Supabase enables RLS on new tables by default, which blocks the anon key from inserting or selecting. Two options:

Use the service_role key for indexing, the anon key for retrieval. This is the recommended split — service_role bypasses RLS and is meant for server/admin operations; anon is meant for public reads.
Or add explicit policies for the anon key if you want a single key:
```
create policy "anon can insert documents"
  on documents for insert to anon with check (true);

create policy "anon can read documents"
  on documents for select to anon using (true);
```
Note: any client with this key can then read and write the table — fine for a private corpus, not advisable for a public deployment.

Enable in the MCP host config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "eff-mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "EFF_RETRIEVAL_PROVIDER": "supabase",
        "SUPABASE_URL": "https://<project>.supabase.co",
        "SUPABASE_KEY": "<anon-key>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Optional RAG environment variables:

EFF_RETRIEVAL_PROVIDER — none (default) or supabase
SUPABASE_RPC — RPC function name (default: match_documents)
OPENAI_EMBEDDING_MODEL — embedding model (default: text-embedding-3-small)
EFF_RETRIEVAL_K — chunks per query (default: 5)

Citations in the response: When RAG is enabled, each ethics_filter response includes a sources array with the retrieved chunks (snippet, source filename, similarity score). Citation markers like [1] or [5] in the reason fields refer to entries in this array — [1] is sources[0], [5] is sources[4], etc.

Indexing your paper corpus

A small helper script is provided to index a folder of PDFs into the documents table.

Create a .env file in the project root with your credentials (gitignored):

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
SUPABASE_URL=https://<project>.supabase.co
SUPABASE_KEY=<anon-key>

Then install the extras and run the script:

pip install -e '.[indexing]'
python scripts/index_papers.py path/to/papers/

The script extracts text from each PDF, chunks it (default: 1000 chars with 200 char overlap), embeds the chunks with text-embedding-3-small, and inserts them into Supabase in batches.

Optional flags:

--chunk-size N (default: 1000)
--overlap N (default: 200)
--batch-size N (default: 50, embeddings per API call)
--clear (delete existing rows before indexing — useful for re-indexing)

Severity (Optional)

By default, EFF reports a binary-ish result per dimension (pass / Needs Improvement / fail) without weighing how serious that result is in the application's actual context. A Privacy concern in a patient-facing health app is not the same as the same concern in a casual chat tool — the severity is context-dependent.

When the caller passes a context string to ethics_filter, the LLM additionally classifies the severity of any non-pass result as low, medium, or high in that context.

Usage from an MCP host:

ethics_filter(
  user_story="As a patient, I want personalised dietary recommendations.",
  context="patient-facing health app handling dietary and medical history"
)

Output shape:

{
  "results": {
    "privacy": {
      "result": "fail",
      "confidence": 0.92,
      "reason": "Health data retention is not specified.",
      "severity": "high"
    },
    "fairness": {
      "result": "pass",
      "confidence": 0.85,
      "reason": "...",
      "severity": null
    }
  }
}

Rules:

Severity is null when result is pass (nothing to grade).
Severity is null for every dimension when no context is given (default).
Severity is independent of confidence — confidence measures how sure the evaluator is, severity measures how serious the concern is.

This is useful for triage: the same Needs Improvement rating is a low- priority backlog item in one product and a sprint-blocker in another.

Custom Dimensions (Optional)

The 5 built-in EFF dimensions (Utility, Fairness, Privacy, Explainability, Safety) are non-negotiable — they are the core of the methodology. But teams in specific domains often need additional dimensions: sustainability, accessibility, regulatory compliance, security posture, etc.

Custom dimensions extend the built-ins; they cannot replace them. Once configured, the LLM scores them alongside the 5 defaults and they appear in the response under custom_results.

Define your extras in a JSON file with the same shape as the built-in rubric:

{
  "dimensions": {
    "sustainability": {
      "description": "The feature's long-term environmental and resource impact.",
      "rubric": {
        "pass": "Resource use is bounded and proportionate to value delivered.",
        "fail": "The feature creates substantial unbounded resource consumption.",
        "borderline": "Resource impact is unclear or only partially mitigated."
      },
      "scoring_notes": [
        "Consider compute, storage, energy, and lifecycle effects.",
        "Be conservative when telemetry is missing."
      ]
    },
    "accessibility": {
      "description": "Equitable usability across abilities, devices, and contexts.",
      "rubric": {
        "pass": "Meets WCAG 2.2 AA across primary flows.",
        "fail": "Excludes users with common assistive needs.",
        "borderline": "Partial coverage; key flows untested."
      },
      "scoring_notes": ["Assess against WCAG 2.2 AA where applicable."]
    }
  }
}

Naming rules:

Names must be unique and not collide with the 5 built-ins.
Names must be valid Python identifiers (letters, digits, underscores; no spaces, no leading digit) so they can become Pydantic field names.

Enable via EFF_EXTRA_DIMENSIONS_PATH:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "eff-mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "EFF_EXTRA_DIMENSIONS_PATH": "/etc/eff/extras.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

Output shape: the response keeps results as the typed 5 built-ins, and adds a custom_results map for the extras:

{
  "results": { "utility": {...}, "fairness": {...}, ... },
  "custom_results": {
    "sustainability": { "result": "Needs Improvement", "confidence": 0.8, "reason": "..." },
    "accessibility": { "result": "pass", "confidence": 0.9, "reason": "..." }
  },
  "summary": { "passed": 5, "needs_improvement": 1, "failed": 0 }
}

The summary counts include both built-in and custom dimensions.

Audit Logging (Optional)

EFF can record every successful ethics_filter invocation as an append-only JSONL file. Each line captures the original story, the model used, the per-dimension scores, the enhanced story, the acceptance criteria, the retrieved sources, and a UTC timestamp.

This is intended as an auditable trail — the methodology is built around defensible, reviewable refinement decisions, and the log lets a team show "this is the exact evaluation that produced this enhanced story" months later.

Enable by setting one environment variable:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eff": {
      "command": "eff-mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "EFF_AUDIT_LOG_PATH": "/var/log/eff/audit.jsonl"
      }
    }
  }
}

The directory is created if it does not exist. The file is opened in append mode, so concurrent invocations append safely line-by-line.

Disabled by default: if EFF_AUDIT_LOG_PATH is unset, no file is written and there is no overhead. Failures while writing the log are logged to stderr but never propagate to the MCP host — an audit failure must not break a scoring call.

Inspecting entries:

tail -n 1 /var/log/eff/audit.jsonl | jq .

Code Generation from EFF Output

EFF returns the enhanced user story and acceptance criteria as structured data, which can be used directly as input for code generation pipelines.

How it works:

Call ethics_filter(user_story) to get the EFF output.
Pass enhanced_story and acceptance_criteria to a code generation model as requirements.
The model produces code that already satisfies the ethical constraints — consent flows, data retention logic, AI disclosure labels, etc.

Example prompt built from EFF output:

Generate a React component based on the following requirements.

User Story: As a Yoga practitioner, I want to receive studio updates so I can stay informed, without data misuse or manipulative signup.

Acceptance Criteria:
- Privacy: Checkbox unchecked by default. Unconfirmed signups deleted in 30 days.
- Safety: Decline option has equal visual weight to signup.
- Explainability: Form lists exact email content types.

Return only the component code.

Why this is useful:

Ethical requirements from EFF flow directly into code — no manual translation step.
Privacy, fairness, and explainability constraints are enforced from the first line of implementation, not retrofitted later.

References

Sekulic, Vajo (JKU Linz), Sekulic, Verena (Universität Wien), Herda, Tomas (Austrian Post), Zhang, Zheying (Tampere University). (2026). Adding Ethics to Agile: The Ethics Filter Framework (EFF). ResearchGate.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
docs		docs
eff		eff
examples/extras		examples/extras
scripts		scripts
tests		tests
.gitignore		.gitignore
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
pyproject.toml		pyproject.toml
server.json		server.json

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Ethics Filter Framework (EFF) — MCP Capability

What EFF Does

The Five Dimensions

Example Transformation

How EFF is Exposed via MCP

Quickstart (for MCP Hosts / Agent Integrators)

Option A — Run via `uvx` (recommended)

Option B — Install from source (for contributors / hacking on the server)

Notes on credentials

Local Development & Testing

Interactive browser inspector

Claude Code (VS Code extension)

Run tests

RAG over Source Literature (Optional)

Indexing your paper corpus

Severity (Optional)

Custom Dimensions (Optional)

Audit Logging (Optional)

Code Generation from EFF Output

References

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Ethics Filter Framework (EFF) — MCP Capability

What EFF Does

The Five Dimensions

Example Transformation

How EFF is Exposed via MCP

Quickstart (for MCP Hosts / Agent Integrators)

Option A — Run via uvx (recommended)

Option B — Install from source (for contributors / hacking on the server)

Notes on credentials

Local Development & Testing

Interactive browser inspector

Claude Code (VS Code extension)

Run tests

RAG over Source Literature (Optional)

Indexing your paper corpus

Severity (Optional)

Custom Dimensions (Optional)

Audit Logging (Optional)

Code Generation from EFF Output

References

License

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Option A — Run via `uvx` (recommended)