Labdoo


Labdoo.org is a non-profit collaborative social network which brings recycled Laptops loaded with educational applications to schools throughout the world without incurring any economic cost and without generating additional CO2 emissions to the Planet. Through the collaboration of thousands of people around the globe, the Labdoo humanitarian platform has grown to support over 1600 schools in more than 130 countries, deploying more than 280 operational hubs spread over the five continents, benefiting more than 500,000 students from around the globe.

Approach

Labdoo is a non-profit organization implemented as a social network that leverages global collaboration to transport recycled laptops and tablets loaded with educational software to schools around the world.
To achieve this mission, the Labdoo platform allows users to manage four types of resources.

Dootronics

Dootronics are computer devices that satisfy two requirements: they can be used as educational tools at schools and they can be sustainably transported without generating additional CO2 emissions. Examples of dootronics are laptops and tablet computers.

Edoovillages

Edoovillages are schools registered in the Labdoo platform that receive the dootronics.

Hubs

Hubs are locations in the world where people can bring their unused dootronics. Labdoo volunteers in these hubs are responsible for tagging and sanitizing the dootronics, installing the educational software and preparing them for their transport to a destination edoovillage.

Dootrips

Dootrips are trips contributed by travelers and organizations around the world who donate space in their luggage or cargoes to carry the laptops from the hubs to the schools. The dootrip system enables a collaborative global transport to bring the dootronics to the edoovillages without incurring any economic cost and without generating additional CO2 emissions to the Planet.
Users anywhere in the world can contribute to the Labdoo cause in four ways: by donating their unused dootronics, by creating new edoovillages, by volunteering time at a hub to sanitize dootronics or by offering a dootrip to carry a dootronic to an edoovillage. The Labdoo social network allows each of these tasks to be globally managed in a transparent and open manner.

History

As a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, Jordi Ros-Giralt joined the university's Engineer Without Borders chapter in 2004. During that year, Ros-Giralt proposed to his teammates the idea of collecting unused laptops from students at the university with the goal of sanitizing and delivering them to a needy school. Three other students, Christine Lee, Michael Bruce and Charlie Fan, joined Ros-Giralt and together they spent the rest of that academic year collecting unused laptops, cleaning and installing them with educational software. During the Summer of 2005, the four students traveled to the village of Antigua, Guatemala, where they set up a computer lab with 12 laptops at a local school and connected them to the Internet using a 250 kbit/s DSL connection.
After the trip to Guatemala and to achieve a larger and more sustainable positive impact, the limited time resources were dedicated to program an online collaborative tool, enabling anyone to participate in the cause of bringing educational laptops to schools. The result of developing this tool was the non-profit social network Labdoo, which allows users to make contributions of different sizes depending on their available time and resources. This strategy allowed Labdoo to unlock a large pool of small volunteering resources found anywhere in the world, making the project scalable and sustainable. In 2010, Labdoo was registered as a 501 charity organization in California, USA, with a board formed by Jordi Ros-Giralt, Wendy Lu and Calvin Shen. Thanks to its distributed grassroots approach, today Labdoo serves educational laptops to more than 1600 schools located in more than 130 countries.

Zero Funding Organizations

According to its charter, the Labdoo Project runs as a zero funding organization. This concept was introduced in the article "Humanitarian Social Networks and Positive Sum Development" presented at the 2013 International Conference on Sustainable Development Practice, in New York, an event organized in partnership with the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Zero-funding organizations are a special case of nonprofit organizations and the concept of social businesses introduced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus in his book ”Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism". A zero-funding organization is at the same time a non-profit organization and a social business which is self-sustainable without any major source of monetary funding, including philanthropic donations, external investment funding or even internal profits. This type of organizations are considered a special case of a nonprofit organizations because they generate no monetary profits, only social profits. They are also a special case of Yunus' concept of social businesses because, since there is no money involved, its objective can only be social.

Awards and publications