When a dootronic is deployed at a school and a mini-mission is accomplished, is the Labdoo effort completed? as you probably guess, the answer is no. Labdoo's goal is to deliver laptops loaded with education to schools but also to ensure that all laptops, once they no longer work, are properly recycled to make a more a sustainable world, and many things can happen between the deployment and recycling time that could still require Labdoo's aid.

One of the big things we try to accomplish after a dootronic is deployed at a school is to ensure that it continues to run as healthy as possible to maximize its lifespan until it is time to recycle it. This effort is made possible thanks to the Labdoo Global Support (LGS) Team, a program run by Labdoo volunteers from around the world who provide online help to students, teachers and staff members of edoovillages in resolving their dootronic (laptops, tablets, ebooks, etc.) related technical questions.

If we were a company selling laptops, the Labdoo Global Support Program would be what people in the business world commonly refer as "After-Sales Support". Labdoo is however not a company, but a humanitarian social project. Not only that, as you know, Labdoo does not accept monetary donations and does not use money to run its logistical system, so we can't rely on the traditional business approach to support laptops deployed in the field. Instead, we apply once again the same strategy we use to solve every challenge we encounter along our way: global collaboration and distributed technology. Labdoo's Global Support Program works by collecting drops of goodwill from everywhere in the planet united to help resolve technical questions that may arise to users located in the most disadvantaged areas of the world. In a nutshell, LGS provides a wall-like interface that allows students, teachers and staff members of the schools that receive laptops to write their technical questions. On that wall, Labdooers distributed across the planet help resolve the posted questions. Since Labdoo has physical presence in the five continents, the end result is a 24/7/365 (all days of the year) interactive online system that provides both technical support to people from the schools while at the same time it helps to continue to grow the global pool of knowledge (knowledgebase).

This wiki describes how the LGS Program works.

What it is:

Labdoo Km0 is a workflow inside the Labdoo platform dedicated to helping those neighboring schools right next to you that are affected by the digital divide.

Why it exists:

Labdoo Km0 is one of the workflows implemented by the Labdoo platform designed to operate locally at a global scale. The objective of this program is to eradicate the digital divide found in our neighbour communities by delivering educational laptops using Labdoo’s circular economy.

The Outcome:

Labdoo Km0 provides a very simple process that anyone can do. In just 4 hours of your time, you can change the life of a child and help significantly reduce the effects of climate change. Every time you recycle a laptop and give it to a needy child, you are:

• Creating an incredible educational opportunity to that child.
• Helping to flatten the climate change curve by reducing 18.59 Kgms of CO2 for each rescued laptop.

How it works:

• Step 1. Collect an unused laptop (estimated time 1 hours). Everyone knows somebody who has an unused laptop, possibly even you have one! Start by collecting the unused laptops from your friends and family and tag it: https://platform.labdoo.org/content/step-1-collecting-unused-laptops

• Step 2. Sanitize the laptop (estimated time: 2 hours). Follow the Labdoo sanitation process to re-install a new operating system into the laptop and then load it with a very powerful educational package that includes the Wikipedia, Khan Academy and between 30GB and 300GB of high-quality educational content: https://platform.labdoo.org/content/step-2-sanitizing-laptop

• Step 3. Deliver the laptop (estimated time: 1 hour). The happiest moment, identify a school or NGO in your local neighbourhood or village/town that needs laptops to fight the digital divide and deliver it: https://platform.labdoo.org/content/step-3-delivering-laptops-project

Enjoy the most unique and amazing human feeling of giving happiness to another human being!

Labdoo for Cities is a program that allows cities from around the world to implement the Labdoo collaborative workflow in a simple and sustainable manner. In a nutshell, Labdoo for cities works as follows:

1. The Town Hall of the village, town or city creates first a Labdoo dropping point. This is a location where citizens can bring their unused but working laptops and tablets. This reception point is in charge of one main task: tagging the received dootronics and storing them in a drawer or some room. This step also leverages the great capabilities that the Town Hall has in reaching out to all of its citizens (via its standard channels such as the city news magazine, or the local radio and TV stations) enabling community awareness to help mobilize computers and new volunteers interested in the cause.
2. One or more sanitation hubs are also created in the city. Our experience says that one very sustainable and educating way to do this step is by implementing the sanitation hubs in the various local schools (high school level). This allows young students to be part of the solution, allowing them to learn the concepts of recycling, sustainable international development, and global collaboration in a very hands on manner. Sanitation hubs can naturally be created in many other places besides schools, including homes, NGOs or local companies.

   In this step 2, volunteers from the sanitizing hubs pick up tagged laptops from the dropping point hubs.

3. Students and/or volunteers from the sanitation hubs clean up the laptops and install the educational software following the general Labdoo workflow.
4. Sanitized laptops are transported to needy schools using sustainable dootrips, as is also done in the general Labdoo workflow.

While the above workflow has been demonstrated to be simple and efficient, cities can develop their own modified workflows based on their capabilities and needs. If you are interested in implementing Labdoo for Cities in your own village, town or city, please reach out to the Labdoo Team at contact@labdoo.org and we will help you get started.

Keep on reading in order to learn the specific (dropping point) hub protocol implemented by the Town Hall.

1. About the Labdoo CSR Package

When it comes to spreading education around the world, we can all be part of the solution, whether its by tagging or cleaning up a laptop, by contributing a trip to bring education to a school, or simply by spreading the word out to mobilize your community. There is a large variety of things (small, medium, or larger tasks) you can do to help out with our global mission.

Among all the people and organizations that are part of the global community, companies play a key role when it comes to helping those that are most in need. This package is specially designed to let companies contribute to the Labdoo cause and at the same time benefit from it as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy.

Two main reasons led us to the creation of the Labdoo CSR package:

• Resources. Companies are incredibly well connected and have access to a very large pool of human and technology resources. It is often the case that a small action carried out by a company can have large effects to those who are most in need.
• Goodwill and reputation. More and more companies are looking for ways to contribute back to the community. We as a people understand that life is not just only about revenue bottom lines, but also about community and helping each other to make the world a better place. Doing good things for the community also helps companies increase their reputation, and provides an example for others to do the same.

These two reasons provide a win-win opportunity addressed by this CSR package. By participating, companies are both doing a great contribution to the community while helping increase their goodwill reputation providing an example for others to follow.

If you are interested in participating in the Labdoo CSR program, please contact us at contact@labdoo.org.

2. How Does it Work

Deep into Labdoo's DNA there is the notion of finding the right task for every person and organization who participates. This is very important for one key reason: long term sustainability. A task should fit your capabilities, not too small, not too large, just the right fit. That's why we designed Project Labdoo.org following a bottom-up approach. What does that mean? in short, it means that you get to decide what action you want to help with. There is a very simple principle behind this approach: you know your capabilities, your preferences, skills and passions better than anyone else, so you and your organization are most appropriate to make this decision.

As a result, the Labdoo CSR package is designed to be simple to understand. The package includes a list of actions you can do to help with the mission of spreading education around the world and you get to choose which ones you want to carry out. Tasks are organized into modules and depending on which module you implement, you get one of the various recognition levels: World Ambassador, World Activist or World Changer.

Our recommendation is also simple: start small, choose a simple initial task, implement it, learn from it, and if you feel you can, grow your level of contribution one step at a time.

3. CSR Modules

Companies can choose to implement one of the following three contribution modules.

3.1. World Ambassador Module. The main objective of this module is to spread the word out that Project Labdoo.org exists and to help mobilize local communities towards the goal of moving laptops and tablets to needy schools. This is for the most part an outreaching/networking package. As a company, you are very well connected to communities such as your own employees or other companies and simply spreading the word can lead to other great contributions. There are several great things you can do to help spread the word out as part of the World Ambassador module. You will be recognized with this contribution level if you do at least one of the following tasks:

1. Let your employees know how they can donate their unused laptops. Using your internal network, you can inform your employees how their unused laptops can potentially change the education path of a child.
2. Let your employees know how they can contribute a dootrip. A dootrip (a Labdoo Trip) is defined as a CO2-neutral trip that someone needs to do (for business, for holidays, etc.) and that is re-purposed to carry a laptop to a destination. Inform your employees about the possibility of contributing a dootrip to bring laptops closer to a needy school.
3. Encourage your employees to create a Labdoo hub. A Labdoo hub is a location where people can bring unused laptops and where volunteers help sanitize and install the education software following the steps in the Labdoo Sanitation Toolkit. Encourage your employees to create a hub on their own to help make the world a cleaner place while spreading education.
4. Spread the word outside your company boundaries. You can do all the above by letting other companies (maybe you suppliers, your customers or collaborators) know about Project Labdoo. Maybe your company has a booth at a tradeshow and you might be interested in doing your CSR work by advertising the Labdoo cause from your both. It can be as simple as printing the Labdoo CSR Package Flyer and distributing it away.

The task of implementing the World Ambassador CSR module is in fact simplified because the Labdoo tools already provide most of the material you need to help spread the word out. For instance, you can freely print the Labdoo poster to help explain the movement, you can attach the Labdoo videos to your outreaching messages, you can print out the Labdoo CSR Flyer to distribute to your collaborators, or you can even create your own roll up by using the Labdoo roll up design. You can readily find all of these outreaching materials and designs in the Labdoo toolkit.

3.2. World Activist Module. The World Activist module includes the World Ambassador package plus additional contributions made directly by the company. In particular, your company will be recognized with this contribution level if one or more of the following tasks are carried out:

1. Dootronics contribution. The company contributes more than 50 unused laptops or tablets in a year.
2. Dootrips contribution. The company contributes more than 10 dootrips in a year.
3. Hub contribution. The company creates a Labdoo hub as part of its community work and helps to collect and sanitize more than 10 laptops a year.

3.3. World Changer Module. The World Changer module includes the World Ambassador package plus additional contributions made directly by the company. In particular, your company will be recognized with this contribution level if one or more of the following tasks are carried out:

1. Dootronics contribution. The company contributes more than 1000 unused laptops or tablets in a year.
2. Dootrips contribution. The company contributes more than 100 dootrips in a year.
3. Hub contribution. The company creates one or more Labdoo hubs as part of its community work and helps to collect and sanitize more than 100 laptops a year.

4. Other Special Contributions

Some organizations may be able to participate in Labdoo's CSR Program by contributing other resources not specified in the above packages too. This allows these organizations to better leverage their own specific capabilities, resources and know-how. Examples are organizations which can contribute other types of goods such as books, photo and video cameras, or large scale awareness campaigns, to name just a few. When an organization offering these special contributions wants to join the Labdoo's CSR Program, the application will be considered on a case by case basis. When accepted, these organizations will also be given one of the above recognition levels (world ambassador, world activist or world changer) depending on their degree of contribution.

If you would like to suggest a school or a hub to write their own Labdoo story, you can copy and paste the following text and send it to them. This text is only provided as a template to avoid having to retype all the time the same paragraph, feel free to adjust it to the context of your own conversation with the school or the hub:

---

Dear $PARTICIPANTNAME,

Thank you very much for the wonderful work you do in $COUNTRYNAME to help give a chance at education to so many students.

We would love to publish a brief story of your work as part of the Labdoo Stories Series released within the Labdoo.org Platform. We were wondering if you would like to write a brief description of your project and how it's using the Labdoo laptops to help bring education to your students. The story can be as short as 3 paragraphs with some pictures (or more if you'd like). Besides being published as a Labdoo Story, there is also a good chance that your story is also featured in the next Labdoo Global Newsletter which gets sent to all the Labdoo users and which can help bring more awareness about the great work you are doing. You can write about subjects such as: What challenges did you have to overcome? What motivated you to create your edoovillage or hub? What are the anecdotes and inspiring moments of your story that are worth sharing with the world? How are the laptops helping you and other people to gain a better education and in which ways?

You will find some examples of Labdoo stories from the following link: https://www.labdoo.org/labdoo-stories.

And in this page you will also find some additional information: https://www.labdoo.org/content/labdoo-stories

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach back to me. Thank you.

Best regards,
$MYNAME
Tag a laptop, spread education
Labdoo Team | www.labdoo.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMLAoeq0T54

Labdoo is a global social network platform, which is funded in part from the USA, and we thank you in advance for your financial support. To provide transparency and to better explain how Labdoo can be sustainable with minimum funding, this section of the wiki page is to provide an overview of Labdoo's financial health, past year's financial statements, and different money donation methods.

Labdoo, as a global organization, is present in many different countries. Each country has a separate accounting system to abide by the local regulations. Please get in touch with your regional hubs if you are interested in finding out how Labdoo works financially in your area.

The mechanism to deliver Labdoo's mission is via the creation of a humanitarian social network. This social network provides the following functions:

• It provides an efficient way to organize information: identification of sources of demand, supply, laptops, dootrips, QA resources, etc.
• It provides a way to break down a very large mission (solving the digital divide) into a very large number of very small tasks (tagging, sanitizing, storage, dootrip, etc.). Each of these tasks becomes so small that its cost is negligible.
• It provides a way for everyone to be part of the solution (community building). Every person can have his/her own mini-mission.
• Since all the information and activities are openly available through the humanitarian social network, it provides transparency.
• As a flat humanitarian project, it helps to break barriers and stereotypes between the beneficiaries and the benefactors. For instance, in the Labdoo network, aid can originate from the developing world and be received by the developed world.
• It is fun.

Labdoo provides an open and free tool: the tool is the humanitarian social network and the toolkit found in it that allows everyone to carry out his or her own mini-mission. The tool is provided “as is”, which means that people developing it cannot be liable for how the tool is used. This concept is similar to other well known projects such as the GNU Project.

The source code that runs the Labdoo social network is fully and freely available from the following github repo: https://github.com/labdoo

Our philosophy

You may have noticed that within the Labdoo.org system there is no place for people to make a monetary donation and the platform is 100% advertisement free. That's because Labdoo runs simply out of people's goodwill through the contribution of people's time (global collaboration) and unused resources such as laptops or travelers' luggage space (excess capacity), and therefore we require no investors to carry out our cause. We call this a "zero funding organization".

The Labdoo team presented the idea of zero funding organizations in the paper “Humanitarian Social Networks and Positive Sum Development” presented at the 2013 International Conference on Sustainable Development Practice, in New York. Zero-funding organizations are a special case of traditional 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 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. A zero funding organization is a special case of a nonprofit organizations because it generates no monetary profits, only social profits. It is also a special case of Yunus’ concept of social businesses because, since there is no money involved, its objective can only be social.

In summary, zero funding organizations are both nonprofit organizations and social businesses that eliminate money from the organization’s operational equation.

The benefits

The Labdoo founders decided to build the Project as a Zero Funding Organization because of several important reasons:

• To run Labdoo, there is no need for money. The world has so much excess capacity (laptops, travelers, connectivity, goodwill, etc), that we have the capability to solve the digital divide problem without incurring any additional cost (economic or environmental).
• By removing the money factor, the project's mission becomes clean and focused. This approach implies that there is no possible confusion on what the objective of the project is and it strengthens its values. The only possible motivation supporting the project is one of making a contribution to the global community.
• This approach makes Project Labdoo resilient against global economic crisis. A paradox about our economic system is that when there is an economic crisis, social projects are the ones who get the biggest hits in terms of budget cuts. Hence, those that need the biggest help are the ones who get hit first and harder. This is so because of the money-dependency factor in practically all social projects. By removing the money from the equation, Labdoo can continue to operate normally even in the presence of economic recessions. In fact, Project Labdoo was created in the midst of one of the biggest economic recessions of the last 100 years.
• Money does not teach global citizenship, global collaboration does. If we took the shortcut of soliciting and using lots of money to resolve our mission, then all right, we would solve the problem, but we would not learn anything along the way. It is the 'doing of things together', in collaboration, that teaches us all concepts like making our planet more sustainable and understanding that we are all part of the same global community helping each other.
• The opportunity cost. If we invest $100 in bringing one laptop to a needy school, automatically we are des-investing $100 from all other humanitarian projects such as the provision of health care, clean water, shelter, etc. Let's use the money for those projects that really need it.
• If we were a company, our best "marketing strategy" would be to advertise how low our costs are. In humanitarian aid, when it comes to choosing social projects, we believe people are very sensitive to the approach taken by the organization. If our costs were high, this would turn people off. If we keep our costs very low, that is an indication that we are taking the right approach, which helps to get more people on board.
• It substantially simplifies the paperwork and the logistics of international cooperation. Could you imagine the headache of administering money donations for a project that operates in more than 100 countries?
• It allows for exploring new and more sustainable ways to organize global communities toward solving global problems. We love to innovate and innovation happens in all possible fields, not just technology, but also in ways we organize our workflows. We see the zero funding target objective as innovation in terms of how humans can organize to achieve common objectives in the most possibly efficient way.
• The 'how' can be more important than the 'what'. There is a famous sentence that was told once by a famous President: 'We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." This idea reflects a very important concept in human society: the destination you choose to target is important (the 'what' you propose to do), but the path you choose to get there (the 'how' you propose to get there) can be even more important. The reason is that it is the path to that destination that makes you stronger, as a person, as a team, as a society. By choosing to go to the moon, it is not so much what you achieve in reaching a planet that has barely any resources, but it is more about what you learn along the way as a team by attempting to go there together. Through that journey, many new technologies were invented that today we enjoy, and society became more united and encouraged to take positive action than ever before. A new generation of kids became fascinated with what we achieved together and they too decided to become astronauts, scientists, mathematicians, doctors... simply, good men and women. At Labdoo we take the challenge of bringing education to every child in the Planet as an opportunity to make each of us stronger and more united. By choosing the path of open global collaboration, we empower everyone to take action, to learn the skills and to discover the global citizenship character that it takes for all of us to succeed together as one. This intangible, the 'how' you do things, the path you choose to achieve your target, can often (if not always) be more important than the destination you are aiming at itself.

The meaning of targeting zero funding: Cost per Dootronic (CPD)

Of course in reality from time to time there will be unavoidable costs. For instance, let's say a hub is presenting the Labdoo idea to its community in a local event; there will be a need to build tools to help outreach and communicate. Perhaps there will be a need to create a roll up or to print your own outreaching cards. Because these costs are small, most labdooers tend to absorbe them out of their pocket (for instance, since most of us have printers at home, it costs practically nothing to print a few flyers). However, certain hubs grow to support a network of hub branches and as they organically grow, their fix costs increase too: e.g., it is not the same for a small hub at a high school to sanitize 20 laptops a year than for a few united hubs and branches to sanitize 1000 laptops.

The meaning of the words 'targeting zero funding' is not so much about the fix costs, but about the marginal costs of the project. The marginal costs are defined as the Cost per Dootronic or CPD. Our goal is to keep the CPD of the Labdoo project as nearly as possible to zero. While we understand that absolute zero is not feasible, we operate with the target to keep it as low as possible by leveraging the two pilars: (1) excess capacity and (2) global collaboration.

Today our CPD is about 3 dollars per dootronic (this includes all possible costs, including transportation). This makes Labdoo more than 100 times more efficient than other initiatives such as the One Laptop Per Child, which had an estimated cost of more than 400 dollars per computer. It is important to notice that this is the average cost per dootronic (summing up expenses divided by numer of dootronics). Occasionally a laptop may cost higher than this value, but by leveraging scales, the average stays low. The CPD can be kept low because Labdoo relies on collaboration and excess capacity. The CPD value includes all the associated costs such as sanitizing unused laptops, loading the education software using free open source technology, transportation using CO2-neutral dootrips, deployment and post-deployment services via the collaborative Labdoo Global Support Program. Our goal is to continue to keep this number as low as possible.

Labdoo is a humanitarian social network where everyone can participate. Organized according to their function, the network is composed of the following non-exclusive participating groups: the grassroots, hubs, edoovillages and beneficiaries.
All of Labdoo's general values, philosophy and principles described in this document apply also to all of Labdoo's participating groups.

Labdoo has earned its great reputation for trust and confidence because its volunteers hold to a higher standard by adhering to commitments, displaying honesty, integrity, respect, and conducting honorably.

Everything we do in connection with our work at Labdoo is measured against the highest possible standards of ethical conduct. Our commitment to these standards ensures that great people join our network, be they volunteers or partners.

The following document presents Labdoo's official code of conduct. This document helps us follow some guidelines on how to behave and how to handle different scenarios when interacting with other volunteers, NGOs, schools, companies, organizations and people in general.

Please read the Code of Conduct and follow both its spirit and letter, always bearing in mind that each of us has a personal responsibility to incorporate, and to encourage other Labdooers to incorporate, the principles of the Code into our work.

Thank you.

[Download Labdoo's Code of Conduct]

Digital Divide: A global problem arising from the fact that those who do not have access to the Internet, cannot have free access to sources of education, which leads to lesser opportunities with respect to those who do have access to the Internet. Since those who have access to the Internet learn education at a much faster pace
than those who do not, the digital divide leads to an ever increasing socio-economic gap between these two groups.

Dootronic: An electronic learning device stored in the Labdoo database.

Dootrip: The action of transporting a laptop from one location to another in the luggage of volunteering travelers who have to undertake that trip regardless of the
laptops. Dootrips effectively provide a transportation system with no economic or environmental cost.

Edoovillage: A location where the Labdoo network has a school project where laptops are sent.

Electronic Waste (eWaste): A global problem arising from the ever increasing consumption of electronic goods that at the end of their life time do not get properly
recycled back to planet earth.

Hub: A hub is mainly a group of people that get together from time to time to carry Labdoo activities

Global Inventory Checks (GICs): A tracking system which can track deployed dootronic status. It can be used to quickly update all the dootronics assigned to an edoovillage in one shot.

Labdoo: It stands for Laboratories for Education—the mission of the Labdoo project is to use social network tools to bring laptops to children without incurring additional costs to Planet Earth.

Labdooer: A Labdoo activist.

Labdoo Global Support (LGS): A support system to provide online technical help to schools around the world who receive dootronics

Mini-mission: The mission of bringing a single unused laptop to a school so that children in that school can gain free access to sources of education.

Labdoo Circle of Life: It is the life-path that every laptop should undertake to ensure sustainability, including the extraction of its components from Planet Earth, their assembly into the actual laptop embodiment, its usage, its delivery to a child for education purposes using dootrips, and its final recycling back to Planet Earth.

Team: Labdoo provides a communication tool to help labdooers manage their own projects and activities in collaboration with other members. We call this feature "Labdoo teams".

Wiki: Wiki pages allow users share knowledge and best practices in document format.