The Argentum Law team continues to focus efforts on mentoring the next generation of innovative lawyers, with its participation in the Future Lawyers Network which is a collaboration between Bird & Bird, Microsoft Gulf and Middlesex University Dubai to pair experienced legal practitioners with exceptional talent from local law schools.  Below is a submission from one exceptional young law student, Mohammed Asim Shaikh of Middlesex University School of Law.   The aspiring young lawyer-to-be is currently being mentored by one of the Argentum Law partners.  Mohammed and his team came Runners Up in the Smart Contracts Hackathon held by the London Blockchain Foundation in December 2020, featuring at the Global Legal Technology Summit & Expo 2020.  

We are proud of the efforts of Mohammed and below we include a summary of his team’s innovative submission to the judges: a ground-breaking idea to streamline data collection for census purposes to advance the UN Global Compact’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The Mycensus Project Proposal featured at Global Legal Technology Summit & Expo 2020

By Mohammed Asim Shaikh, law student at Middlesex University School of Law

Team Members: Mohammed Asim Shaikh, Karishma Sukhwani, Rithika Raghunatha, Balsm Abuzakuk.

Competition Background

The Smart Contracts Hackathon was held by the London Blockchain Foundation in partnership with Forte Markets in December 2020. It was featured at the Global Legal Technology Summit & Expo 2020. The competition aimed to aid participants with the knowledge of blockchain and smart contracts as well as provide industry support from lawyers and blockchain experts from across the globe. The three-day event was an opportunity for participants to collaborate in teams to conduct market research and develop a prototype under selected United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This competition raised awareness of the various Sustainable Development Goals as well as provided information regarding the potential application of the technologies.

Project Description

Our project, which was awarded the Runners Up position, included developing an application, “Mycensus” to facilitate and transform the traditional method of conducting population census and provide transparency on the use of the collected data by governments.

Once fully developed and implemented, Mycensus can be easily downloaded and accessed on any smartphone, as approximately 3.4 billion people across the globe own and use a smartphone. The end goal of Mycensus is to reach out to each household consisting of at least one smartphone user and thereby seek their consent and details required for population census from citizens. Subsequently, another way of reaching out to people in remote areas would be to set up booths across these areas, making it easily accessible for the people. Therefore, this would eliminate the need to physically reach out to each and every household of the country and requiring them to fill-in their details on a piece of paper. Moreover, the data collected from each booth and smartphone user would be transferred via a system consisting of blockchain and smart contract technology, which will ultimately be stored in a secured governmental database. Mycensus targets all the SDGs as it would aid the governments in policymaking, allowing them to rely on the data collected by Mycensus in quicker time as compared to traditional methods, which take around 5-10 years to complete. As per our estimates, this project may save millions of dollars which can be utilised in fulfilling these SDGs.

The Process

The team’s goal was to target multiple SDGs and propose a singular solution with the application of blockchain and smart contract technology. Our team consisted of law and IT students with distinct interests, which made it challenging to identify a common SDG to tackle. However, we overcame this obstacle and formulated an initiative of digitising the census collecting process using blockchain technology. We started developing the idea on the second day, and our research revealed this idea to be feasible, as the data collected from the population could be utilised in fulfilling various SDGs, including healthcare and infrastructure - the two most important pillars in the times we live in, owing to the pandemic.  The entire idea was developed in a mere 48 hours, which had to be delivered virtually on the third day to an audience and judges, which included legal and IT experts from across the globe. Lastly, after assessing multiple features of our idea and to showcase its accessibility, we aptly named our team “The Sustainable Tribe”.

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