Global Impact Award
The InternetBar.Org, an organization with which I have been associated for many years, has just been named the winner of the World Legal Summit Global Impact Award. In the words of the WLS:
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.
Again, in WLS’s words the award was given to our project, 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 Invisibles project and gain access to basic services, education and employment.
We at IBO began working on the Invisibles project almost three years ago, first with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, then in other places around the world. Currently Scott Cooper and I are presenting a world-wide standards proposal to the International Standards Organization that could lead to recreation of lost identities for millions of displaced persons.