By the Virtual Human Rights Lawyer Team
In the months of April and May 2019, PILPG-NL’s Virtual Human Rights Lawyer (VHRL)-development team presented the VHRL at three outreach events, where the team were able to disseminate their activities and receive inputs on how to finetune the project.
In April 2019, some of the VHRL Research Associates and Senior Research Associate, Gabriella Gricius, participated in the Justice Challenge, a competition for social entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to justice problems. The Justice Challenge is a new initiative by the Amsterdam Law Hub, a co-working space for students and staff at the University of Amsterdam. The Justice Challenge incubator consisted of two phases, a startup bootcamp and a pitch competition. At the bootcamp, topics such as lean startups, grant seeking, assumption-testing, validation research, fieldwork, and user interviews were discussed. We would like to thank the organizers of the Justice Challenge, Nathalie Dijkman and Asefeh Zadeh, for their ideas and recommendations.
In May 2019, the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law organized a seminar on the role of law clinics in strategic litigation in the field of migration law. PILPG was invited to give a workshop on its work, in particular the progress of the VHRL project. PILPG- NL Director Dr. Marieke de Hoon and the Research associates Abby Roberts, Cleo Meinicke, and Filipe Costa started the presentation by outlining the overarching goal for the chatbot and explaining our approach towards achieving this goal. They then discussed the process of creating the chatbot, the operational concerns identified during the development phase of the project, and the decision trees that map out the potential user interactions with the chatbot.
Also in May 2019, Dr. de Hoon was invited to speak at the Amsterdam Law Forum Conference: Technology and International Law on the VHRL. At the conference, Dr. de Hoon presented the VHRL, the challenges of the project, and how the team were working to overcome them. With an audience of academics with an interest in law and technology, the team was able to receive relevant feedback.
PILPG-NL extends its gratitude to those who organized the three events for giving the team the platform to share knowledge of the VHRL and to hear feedback on the project.