#WLS2019 has been an incredible journey from start to finish, with 30+ cities across 20+ countries participating in the Aug 1st Summit.Purpose of Summit: global collaboration and insights gathering around legal frameworks dealing with emerging technologies.

Outcome: our team is working along side hosting organizations and partners to develop a global publication detailing the work of each city’s hosts. It will include summaries of insights for those jurisdictions, as well perspectives from local leaders.

What Happened After the Summit!? 

This Summit lead to the Sept 6-8th Development Sprint that had several cities continuing the impact of the Aug 1st Summit.

Purpose of the Development Sprint: to build an environment in which technologists can work along side legal and governance professionals in actually building those legal insights into their technologies.

Outcome: action oriented collaboration between technologists and legal/governance professionals. Several organizations participated that weekend across several cities, improving their technologies.

So, What’s this Global Impact Award About? 

This award was created to acknowledge the work of the organizations that participated in the September Development Sprint. The organization that was selected emulated the core mandate of the World Legal Summit (WLS): progressing the global and legal sustainability of emerging technologies. They also are an organization geared toward making impact in a problem area that is global reaching and of great social concern.

The chosen organization is the International Bar Organization (IBO) for their work on the ValiData solution.

About ValiData: This project is about making ‘the Invisibles’ visible, through the creation of legal digital identities for stateless refugees utilizing blockchain technology and a self sovereign identity system.  According to data collected by The UN Refugee Agency, there are approximately ten million “stateless”, people without personal identification, who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. This is ten million refugees around the world who could benefit from the Invisible project  and gain access to basic services, education and employment. 

Many thanks to all!

We would like to thank the hosts that made the development sprint possible, the participants, and the panel that reviewed the organizations and their projects that made it through to the global rounds.

Review Panel

Javier de Cendra: Dean of IE Law School, and member of the international advisory board of several universities, research centres and think tanks.

Isis Bous:  Managing Director of the LexMundi Pro Bono Foundation, and a barred and practicing attorney in the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland, and founder of LawRex.com.

Carlos Chalico:  Cyber security and Privacy at EY, teaches at the University of Toronto, is a member of the advisory board of IAPP, and has assisted organizations across America, Europe and Asia.

We would also like to thank our partners for their support through out the development sprint and final events. With special shout out to Tim Souza, our incredible virtual rep (for tours and inquiries contact: timothysouza@gmail.com):