Labdoo

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.[1][2][3]

As a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, Jordi Ros-Giralt joined the university's Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter in 2004. During that year, Ros-Giralt proposed to his teammates the idea of collecting laptops from students at the university with the goal of delivering them to a needy school. Three other students, Christine Lee, Michael Bruce and Charlie Fan,[5] joined Ros-Giralt and together they spent the rest of that academic year collecting 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.[5]

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.[2] 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 anywhere in the world, making the project scalable and sustainable. In 2010, Labdoo was registered as a 501(c)(3) charity organization in California, USA, with a board formed by Jordi Ros-Giralt, Wendy Lu and Calvin Shen.[6][7] Labdoo helps bring laptops to more than 2000 schools located in more than 135 countries.[4]

According to its charter, the Labdoo Project runs as a zero funding organization.[2] 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,[2] 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".[8]

A zero-funding organization is simultaneously 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 organization is considered a special type of nonprofit organization because they generate no monetary profits, only social profits. They are also a special case of Yunus' concept of social businesses [YUN07].

• In 2017, the Labdoo Project is awarded the Alan Turing Award by the Catalan Association of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Engineers.[9]
• In 2017, Labdoo is one of the 3 nominated projects in the area of sustainable development of the GreenTec Awards in 2017.[10]
• In 2016, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel awarded the Labdoo project for its social commitment.[11][12][13]
• In 2016, Labdoo was one of the 100 winners of the Google Impact Challenge Award in Germany.[14]
• In 2016, Labdoo was one of the 3 nominated projects in the area of recycling and resources of the GreenTec Awards in 2016.[15][16]
• In July 2014, an article about the Labdoo Project was published at the Humanitarian Technology Conference in Boston, United States.[1]
• In September 2013, an article about the Labdoo Project was published at the Earth Institute International Conference on Sustainable Development Practice, in New York.[2]
• In 2012, a chapter of the book for IEEE Service-Learning in the Computer and Information Sciences was dedicated to explain the Labdoo Project.[3]