doteveryone

We’re delighted to announce that we’re through to the final of the Legal Access Challenge!

The Challenge, run by Nesta Challenges in partnership with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, calls on tech start-ups, law firms, alternative legal providers, advice organisations and charities to come up with innovative solutions to help individuals and SMEs to better understand and resolve their legal problems. 

We’re looking forward to joining a community of brilliant finalists who share our passion for responsible technology and justice. And we’re just as excited by the prospect of addressing the challenges we’ve uncovered through our Yes to Redress! and Engaging the Public with Responsible Technology programmes with real-world solutions.  

This work has shown people are being left behind by the pace of regulatory and technological change online, and are struggling to understand their digital rights. Even those with the digital understanding and social capital to keep up with this flux have to navigate complex and onerous complaints systems to hold online services to account when things go wrong. 

Introducing MyDigitalRights

That’s why we’re developing MyDigitalRights, a free and independent one-stop shop for people to exercise their digital rights and access systems of redress when online services fail to respect them. 

The premise is intentionally simple – users answer eight accessible questions to help them articulate an issue they’ve had when using an online service, from a dodgy online shopping experience to  seeing illegal content on their social media feed. MyDigitalRights then directs them to accessible information on their rights, and where possible, triage them to support from ombudsman, regulators, legal support and digital advocates who can help them to resolve their problem. 

What comes next? 

Over the next six months, we’ll be bringing our vision for MyDigitalRights to life. We’ll first explore how people currently understand and articulate their digital rights, then distil these insights into eight simple questions for users to answer when their rights have been breached and they’re seeking redress. 

By the end of this period we’ll have a functioning prototype that gives a flavour of how MyDigitalRights can be used to help people defend their rights online in the real world. If we’re announced as a Legal Access Challenge winner in April 2020, we’ll be supported to further develop and commercialise our prototype to bring it to new audiences.  And of course we’ll be making sure we share our findings and challenges we uncover every step of the way. 

If you’d like to get involved or find out more we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at [email protected]