Using Labdoo to Bridge the Digital Divide: A New Form of International Cooperation

With the advent of ubiquitous wireless access to the Internet, computers take an essential role in the fight against global education inequalities. The objective of Labdoo is simple: to provide laptops for every school on the planet so that children can gain free access to sources of education. Although this is not a new concept, what differentiates Labdoo from a traditional nongovernmental organization (NGO) is the approach it takes. A key concept behind Labdoo resides in the notion of solving a mission without incurring additional economic or environmental costs, because the acquisition of such costs implies, by definition, a disinvestment in other crucial humanitarian aid programs such as the provisioning of food and health care. Three current factors make this idea viable: (1) the massive amounts of excess capacity generated in the developed world, (2) the maturity of our information systems, and (3) the wealth of networks or our new capability to break down a very large task into millions of smaller subtasks and execute them ad hoc from different parts of the globe. To maximize the gains from each of these factors, the Labdoo Project is built on the notion of a fully distributed NGO: instead of building a centralized organization, our effort focuses on building the social network tools needed so that every laptop owner on the planet can take upon the "minimission" of bringing his or her own unused laptop to a child. This paper describes the socioeconomic factors that make the Labdoo Project possible and how its implementation can help us to understand a new breed of international aid organizations capable of solving global problems by using global means.