User:Jordi.ros/Labdoo

File:Labdoo-logo.png

Labdoo is a humanitarian social network project with the mission to mobilize every laptop on earth to bridge the digital divide between the rich and the poor and eliminate electronic waste (eWaste).

Distributed project

Unlike the traditional NGOs that deploy technology in the developing countries, Labdoo operates in a highly distributed manner. Instead of utilizing a few large centralized set of resources, Labdoo leverages on a large number of small and highly distributed resources (this concept, which is similar to the way wikipedia operates, is well explained by economist Yochai Benkler in his work). Every owner of a laptop constitutes a resource and Labdoo aims at empowering users around the globe with tools to mobilize their laptops to bring them to a child in the developing world.

Labdoo provides a Web 2.0 social network site (www.labdoo.org) that every owner of a laptop can use to carry out his or her own Labdoo mission. A laptop is first tagged with a globally unique identifier. Using Google maps technology, this allows for the creation of a well-organized worlwide inventory of laptops. The current inventory can be found at www.labdoo.org/map.

Tagging

Labdoo users control and track their laptop as it makes progress toward a child using the Labdoo dashboard. Labdoo members across the globe learn to sanitize their laptop, to install Linux and Edubuntu (the education software package for the children), to maintain a distributed inventory and to monitor the laptop as it travels toward a child.

Such distributed approach introduces certain benefits: it removes any potential centralized point of failure, makes large-scale corruption practically impossible, provides accountability, empowers each individual donor, unleashes the true potential of a large number of very small and highly distributed resources, and uses only excess capacity (making the opportunity cost of the overall project practically zero).

The distance between a child and a laptop is four

There exists a notion of distance between an unused laptop sitting somewhere in the developed world and a child in the developing world that has no access to education. Under a simplified model, four events need to occur so that a child can receive a laptop:

- Somebody in the world has to first donate a used laptop.

- Somebody (not necessarily the same person) has to volunteer 45 minutes of his/her time to condition the laptop.

- Somebody (not necessarily the same person) has to provide a place to store the laptop while a suitable recipient child is found.

- Somebody (not necessarily the same person) has to bring the laptop to the child.

These four elements, referred as (1) laptop, (2) conditioning, (3) inventory and (4) shipment, characterize the chances of a child receiving a laptop. A traditional NGO would carry out this four elements in a centralized manner, typically requiring substantial amounts of funding and earth resources. In reality though, none of these elements need to be carried out by the same person or organization. Instead, efficiently using networking technologies, each of the above tasks can be executed independently by individuals and organizations working at different levels of granularity from different places of the world. Effectively, every time a volunteer donates one of the four elements, a laptop is one forth of its way closer to a child. It is then the job of the social network system to assemble all the independent small contributions together toward achieving the final goal.

A goal in Labdoo is that every laptop owner in the world should carry on a mission to bring his or her laptop to a child.

This model enables a system capable of leveraging on resources that have zero (or practically zero) opportunity cost (sustainability).

Labdoo State Machine (Work Flow)

The meaning of tagging

An important concept in Labdoo is that tagging a laptop does not equate to donating a laptop. That is, if a laptop owner tags a laptop, that action does not imply that he or she has to donate the laptop. Tagging is both a symbolic gesture to tell the world that you are aware of the digital divide as well as a powerful logistical mechanism to keep people well informed and mobilize resources efficiently.

Tagging is synonym of organizing the world's inventory of laptops. The idea is that if we can build such inventory, then we will be able to make smarter decisions on how to efficiently connect supply (the children that need laptops to access education) and demand (those in the richer countries that have excess laptops). A mechanism to enhance the matching of supply and demand is given by Labdoo's worldwide call for laptops. Labdoo cooperates with organizations like Engineers Without Borders that know where the sources of laptop demand are (schools in the developing world). With such information, Labdoo then makes a call for laptops to all the people that have tagged a laptop providing information of which projects have a demand for laptops. Labdoo also provides the logistical tools so that laptop owners themselves can virtually bring the laptop to a specific project in a developing country, with the help of the Labdoo network.

Going back to the original equation, tagging is not equal to donating; rather, tagging is equal to information. Ultimately, laptop owners are free to decide the destiny of their laptops, all that Labdoo does is procure that such decisions are as well informed as possible.

Origins of the project and ownership

Labdoo is the project of every one. Labdoo only provides tools to connect people toward a common goal: eliminate the digital divide. So the soul of Labdoo is every person that decides to join this mission, while Labdoo's skeleton is the software tools that make the logistical process possible.

The origins of Labdoo can be traced back to 2004 when a group of students from the University of California, Los Angeles, were working together as part of the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Student chapter. While the UCLA chapter was running several projects mostly based on civil and environmental engineering, some of their members, having a background in computer science, pushed the idea of building a computer lab at a school in the developing world. After a year of planning, design and implementation, in 2005 they traveled to Antigua, Guatemala, and implemented a computer lab as an official EWB project. Since then, the group has been working to bring more laptops in Central America.

The Labdoo idea came from the realization that the project the group was developing had a capacity inherently limited by the amount of resources in the team, which was only made of a few students. Labdoo provides a mechanism to remove this constraint: instead of having a team doing every single task, the team (mostly made of computer science students) decided to dedicate its time to develop a set of social network tools so that every laptop owner on earth can participate and contribute.