On September, 27 2015, Tarik Nesh-Nash will represent GovRight at the inaugural Solutions Summit being held at the United Nations in New York City. Tarik will be presenting GovRight’s innovative Legislation Lab, a cloud-based platform allowing citizens to participate in the legislative process. It is an honor for Tarik and GovRight to be chosen as one of the final 14 participants from over 800 submissions worldwide. Attendees will include technologists, scientists and engineers from many disciplines.

The Solutions Summit is being held to promote and encourage exceptional innovators who are developing solutions that address one or more of the U.N.’s initiative known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This new 15-year initiative is being launched the same weekend. The SDGs, or Global Goals, are a set of 17 objectives for global dignity, prosperity, partnership, and justice for all people and the planet.

The Legislation Lab addresses Goal #16 of the SDGs. This goal calls for all counties to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”

Through its online crowdsourcing platform the Legislation Lab enables citizens to read, vote and comment on every article of a draft law. Citizens’ opinions are published in real time as data visualizations. In the long term, this is part of a strategy to make the law field a commodity that is accessible to every citizen in the world.

The Legislation Lab is unique in that it can replace current systems whereby citizen participation in legislative processes are limited and difficult to easily access. Typically, current systems work either through offline consultations (conferences, town hall meetings, face-to-face) or online custom platforms (too narrow, expansive or generic and often not legislation focused) making participation burdensome. The real-time analysis and feedback is also a distinctive component of Legislation Lab.

Legislation Lab aims to bring the public closer to the legislative field by making the experience easy, fun and understandable. The Beta version of the Legislation Lab was launched in March of this year. It can already be seen in action in New York City as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.

I am both honored and excited to take part in this global gathering of  policymakers, investors, visionaries as well as leaders from philanthropy and the civil society.

Tarik Nesh-Nash

GovRight is evolving to meet the larger demand for meaningful participation in the legislative process. Feel free to visit GovRight or contact Tarik at tarik@govright.org