Coordinator FAQ

Our cost is based on the total of our expenses divided by the number of computers we expect to ship in a year. As we grow to a larger scale - our cost per computer will decrease. In negotiations with UN ICT Task Force, I have said WCE will drop our cost per computer 25% if they guarantee funding for a demand of 25,000 (not including direct shipping cost which differ dramatically in land locked countries like Uganda). A committee of the Board is going to work on what could happen if we had a guaranteed fudning for a demand of 100,000.

If an organisation's implementation plan is approved by our Board of Directors (based on our selection criteria), then any WCE Partner can save the shipping cost by picking any number of them up themselves on a "cash-and-carry" basis at our regular $57.50 per Pentium and $40 per Power Mac. We have to be careful to have them come when you already are going to have someone with the computers anyway so that this side "business" does not cause any volunteer stress and we need to be sure that the WCE Partner only takes a fair ratio of the better computers (like PIIs) so that all partners get the same quality.

If a strategic ally of WCE (like Asha) helps with gathering donations to WCE we can negotiate to give them a $5 credit toward future WCE services. If they help with the testing, packing, inventorying, and palletising - we can give them an additional $5 credit.

No, it causes many problems for our partners if we remove the drivers for scanners and printers etc. If the donor wants to remove any files from their computer for security reason, this is their responsibility - not ours. Please be careful not to promise that WCE will take responsibility for removing peoples' files.

Try to get the donor to drop the equipment off at your site. If this does not work, see if they can ship it to you or to Hull. If they have a lot of computers, see if they can put them on a pallet and then you should get a freight company to bring it to you. (Please remember to get pre-approval of the expense once you know it.) As a final resort if it is "enough" computers try to have one of your volunteers who is going that way anyway pick them up. If you need to rent a truck, please get a price quote and then pre-approval. A good rule of thumb is that it is NOT worth it if it costs more than $10 for a full, working computer set delivered into your warehouse - after you total all of the expenses including travel costs.

Pam Cooney (pcooney@worldcomputerexchange.org) regularly updates our posting to NetAid so make sure she knows about your plans. The WCE San Francisco Office has had success with the following sites for posting a month ahead for a public computer- donating event: http://www.volunteermatch.org, http://www.idealist.org, local volunteer centers like this one: http://www.vcsv.org, local community service sites like this one: http://www.craigslist.org, and internal newsletters of major employers.

• Recruiting Volunteers: coordinating the recruitment and assignment of volunteers - especially for picking-up, testing, inventorying, and packing donated Pentiums and Power Macs
• Recruiting Computer Donations: cold calling the IT staff or purchasing staff of 250 largest companies and universities and museums and local school systems to see if they are interested in donating their computers to save cost of someone else taking them away and getting a tax -deduction and not dumping working computers - giving them a new life
• Recruiting Sister-Schools: coordinating the recruitment and helping with connecting sister-schools from your area to locations where your office is about to ship or has recently shipped
• PR: helping to get press for WCE in your area and for the public computer-donating event
• Event Coordination: coordinating the planning of the logistics of an public computer donating event
• Fund Raising: this could be a donation of cash from foundations, corporations, or individuals
• Local Content Development: working with us on helping schools and a partner in a specific country to develop local content. This might be in collaboration with teachers at the schools where the office has packed a shipment. This would be after some of the others.
• Administrative Focus: Each office selects a skill area that they have the capacity to help the rest of WCE. This usually evolves over the first year.
• Geographic Focus: Each office selects an area of the developing world that they are most interested in assisting. This usually evolves after the office does its first shipment - although Seattle's interest in Guatemala preceded our shipment there.

The WCE Board has declared that WCE is aggressively for OS independence. A subtle but important difference. All WCE staff and volunteers are fully free to have your personal opinions on all of this - but you may want to always gently clarify to the readers when it is your personal opinion and when it is a WCE position.

We need to work together in choosing a destination for the computers donated to WCE during your public computer donation event. This depends on both your being ready and funding having been received by WCE for the particular shipment to cover your event expenses and the shipment. Also, we usually do the event as a last push in getting the final computers together for a container of 200 or 400 computers. We would also want you to have good relations with a local recycler so that if you are short on some particular item like mice or monitors, you will have a fall back so that the container would not be packed but not yet able to be spent - this becomes expensive!

It is very difficult for us to "enforce" any of the many agreements that we enter into with our partners and they with the schools they recruit. How do we keep all of the computers from being resold for personal private profit? We only can do so by transparency, clarity, and follow-up through a network of partners and allies. We know that almost none of the countries we ship to have existing standards on this but we felt that we needed to start somewhere. We are certainly interested in helping local groups to accomplish the setting of these standards and the establishment of recycling centers and helping them to make these sustainable.

We do have a draft WCE Org Chart. At this point, it is a useful summary of all of the different parts and players of WCE. Our actual organizational structure is still evolving. The roles of WCE offices, WCE Steering Committees and WCE Coordinators are defined on our website. These are drafts and we welcome your improvement of these documents.

SPACE: Identifying some donated storage space where you can store computers until you have enough computers to fill a container of 200 or 400 or until you have enough that we can ship to another city that has a shipment planned. We will sometimes ask newer offices to start with a shipment of 50. When you are looking for space, it is good if it as close to where you can drive a rental truck or borrowed van as possible. It is also very helpful if there is space where you can "palletize". It is also important that you have a space with electricity where you can test the equipment prior to packing. If you cannot locate any free space, please check on the best prices for paid storage space and then call WCE-Hull for pre-approval. VOLUNTEERS: Next it is good to begin to get word out that you are looking for volunteers on local websites and by contacting community service offices at local colleges and high schools. We have a summary of community service ideas and a Internet Ambassador School sample that may be useful in your communications. You will need volunteers for finding, transporting, testing, and packing computers. COMPUTERS: Next you need to begin to make cold calls to some of the larger businesses (the Chamber of Commerce or a local business newspaper may have a list) and to universities, school districts, and large nonprofits. We keep an updated copy of our standard computer solicitation letter and a WCE summary page and a summary brochure on the WCE website homepage. The other major activity would be to identify a date with WCE-Hull for a public computer-donating event.

WCE-San Francisco has a Coordinator, a Donations Team with a lead person, a lead PR person, a lead sister-schools person, and Events. It could be useful to have a volunteer coordinator. WCE-Miami has a Fund Raising lead person.

It is important to keep a clear simple inventory of what you have. It is good to make clear how many of each of the following categories you have: Power Macs, pre-Power Macs (we no longer accept these), Pre-Pentiums (we no longer accept these), Pentium Is, Pentium IIs, Pentium IIIs, and Pentiums IVs. It is also good to keep a running count on how many power cords you have (remember you will need 2 for each computer set), how many PC and Mac mice, how many PC and Mac keyboards, how many printers with data cables, and how many PC and Mac monitors with video cables. We need you to send this information to WCE-Hull at the end of each month to help us plan for our next shipments.

As one of the steps in forming a WCE office, we request that you submit a brief budget for the remainder of the fiscal year (ending in June). This is so that we can match expectations. We still ask that you seek pre-approval from WCE-Hull of specific expenditures as it is usually better for us to pay the larger expenses like truck rental and bubble wrap this with our credit card. WCE does not yet have a budget for any food or entertainment except for pizza (or something similar) for our volunteers at a public computers donation event, when palletizing, or when they are packing a container. Each expenditure by a volunteer needs approval by their Coordinator and Steering Committee Chair. If you have an idea for how spending more money will result in more computers for our partners, please let WCE-Hull know!

Please forward any first contacts from developing countries to WCE-Hull unless it is a country that your office is coordinating in which case please keep us briefly informed on your progress in your monthly report. Sometimes it is clear that people send to every contact in WCE, you do not need to forward these.

WCE-Hull has UNsuccessfully approached several of the computer manufacturers in the past and they have said no for 3 reasons: image (people getting to know computers on a used one of their products might lead them to another company for the one they buy), income (most have a fee built into their contracts for recycling and this is millions of dollars - most go right into a lucrative secondary market - prior to us in a tertiary market), and market (they think that these poor schools might buy a new one if they don't get a used donated one). We are still hopeful that as our credibility, capacity, and contacts improve, we will be more successful. If you have contacts at a particular computer manufacturer, please coordinate this with Timothy Anderson.

WCE-San Francisco, WCE-Washington, WCE-Burlington, and WCE-Boston have ongoing relations with local recyclers. These are great for filling in shipments with items for which you are short. WCE-Hull will from time-to-time pre-approve of the purchase of equipment. We encourage all offices to form good relations with a local recycler. This will become more important as we increase the number of shipments because of the multi-container request from our partners in Bolivia.

WCE has found that these "competitors" can be our best allies. They hear of computer donors who are more interested in making a donation in support of schools in developing countries and we hear of donors who are more interested in giving locally. Sometimes they may have surplus computers that they cannot make use of in local schools and might be willing to donate them to us. It is good to seek out any of these groups that are located in your area and form a relationship with them and be as helpful as possible as we share similar missions.

Answer is on the website under “WCE Offices” tab at “summary of public computer donation event” http://www.worldcomputerexchange.org/offices/event_summary.htm

We continually pitch articles about WCE in relation to each shipment and each public computer-donating event. We also have worked through our being selected as a model by World Economic Forum.

Press advisories, calendar notices, public service announcements, and press releases. Samples are on the website under “offices” tab.

We do not pay for ads – we send PSAs, etc.

esources? Financial? We word with the donors to raise the donations needed to cover WCE’s administrative and sourcing costs (which include packing) as well as the costs of the ocean shipping. Sometimes the UN has paid for the shipping. Most of the packing is done by volunteers.

There are usually extra pallets at warehouses. Usually you can get some free from warehouses and from large companies from their loading dock. The shrink wrap we have bought at large packing companies or from U-Haul.

Priority is always to find ways to reduce all costs. Getting a good storage/testing/packing location would be great. Right now we pay for the storage we use in Columbia. About $250 per month.

Most of the offices do not have any operating expenses except for the storage and for the events – mostly bubble wrap purchase and refreshments (sometimes an awning)

So far it has been easy enough to ask the volunteer techies to let us know if the computer boots up and if the monitor shows what is on the computer. When this is all set up on a table – it is pretty fast to test multiples. Usually they want to do more – but this takes longer so it depends on what else needs to be done. In SF, a few volunteers come in to test once a week. They take turns and while they are there, the public can also drop off a computer to the storage facility and get a receipt. (we have receipts that I can send you)

Word of mouth, website and Net Aid. Some of the offices have posted volunteer opportunities with their local community service or volunteer website and/or with community organization like United Way. See the website for an article 12/27/02 from PC World and an article from November in the SF Chronicle.

Yes they all do. One of our Strategic Allies has also helped – Digital Partners in Seattle.

Once each office is operating, we ask them to form a team to cold-call the top 250 companies in the area. Most of them lease their computers – so there is no need to recall them. Then the most likely 100 we try to call every 9 months.

Sometimes our volunteers get a list of largest companies from a local business newspaper or Chamber of Commerce. Once a company has a successful donation with us, they often repeat a couple of times a year. We have a standard solicitation letter on our website.

Yes, we do have a thank you template letter that you can send out.

Not sure what you mean. Our FY’03 plan is on our website as well as our financial report.

WCE BUSINESS MODEL: WCE seeks to continually improve so that it can more rapidly grow to scale at the lowest possible cost. WCE does this by (1) working through lead partners in developing countries with sustainable implementation plans, (2) opening offices in cities in industrialised countries to leverage the donated resources of businesses, strategic allies, adult volunteers, and students in community service programs, and (3) building a reputation among donors for providing working donated equipment at the lowest cost ($35-$57.50 per set plus shipping and options). WCE is a nonprofit organisation that strives to operate in ways that strengthen civil society, are respectful and transparent, and experiment with being as "virtual" as possible through this website.

We try to not use the word “regional” – simply WCE office. Yes, we ask for a brief budget estimate and then try to find ways to decrease the costs.

As president, I do with oversight from our Treasurer and help from our Operations Director.

Same. We ask for a brief budget estimate and once it is approved, local office makes arrangements to rent the awning, pay for storage space, rental truck, pizza, bubblewrap, etc. Usually using WCE credit card. Coordinator presents to me and Pam any expense for pre-approval with a copy to the chair of the local Steering Committee (yours is Tom).

We don’t ship until our costs are covered. Sometimes this is from local community fund raising by our partners, FM radio station, UNDP, USAID, expatriates from the country living in the USA, foundation, corporation, other.

So far, our coordinators have not helped with fund raising. It would be great – but first priority is to get computer flow moving along with some techie volunteers who can test the computers and monitors. Sidney Brien, our new coordinator in Miami has a lot of experience with fund raising and as he pilots this, he may have some ideas to share with the other coordinators.

Their role is defined on the website under “offices” tab. I would like the DC Steering Committee to become more formal and have a meeting shortly after you decide if you are interested in being the WCE DC Coordinator. I would plan on attending. The meeting will force the decision of a few of the potential members. This is currently happening in Seattle.

If for some reason, people have to spend their own funds instead of use the WCE credit card, then Pam sees that they are reimbursed as soon as she gets the receipts and the Coordinator and Steering Committee Chair’s approval.

See website under “offices” tab for timeline for an event.

The CEOs of the 1,000 largest companies in the world. They meet in 7 regional summits and in an Annual Meeting with the Presidents of most countries in Davos. We competed and were selected to be helped to come to scale by their Global Digital Divide Initiative. There is a lot of detail on our website on our homepage – 2nd link on the left
http://www.weforum.org/site/homepublic.nsf/Content/Global+Digital+Divide...

So far, we are still operating in the red so good ideas like this are not something we can afford without funding for this. In each of the 6 countries where we are piloting our initiative with the World Economic Forum, we have included this in the budget. So far not funds but we hope that this will change at or before Davos later in January.

None of the offices have selected these countries. Closest is San Francisco where the Steering Committee Chair went with me to visit the Forum pilot sites in Vietnam and Georgia.

Partners are selected based on our Board-approved criteria on our website under “administration” tab policies link. They each present an implementation plan and draft list of schools or centres. A summary of what is required is on our website under the “to partner” tab in one of the toolkits in different languages.

Strategic Allies are organisations that have proven to be constructive builders globally and that believe that by sharing and helping other organisations they better accomplish their mission instead of fearing competition! These organisations behave in this way and it is infectious! Each has agreed to work collaboratively with WCE in multiple countries to accomplish projects within our mission.

I am assuming that you are referring to Strategic Allies here. Other than World Economic Forum, I think that Asha for Education has helped us better understand how to work with expatriate professionals now in the USA. World Links has taught us how to maneuver to come to scale sooner. Computer Aid International has shared how they function and have backed-us up when we have been short of computers. NetAid has been the source of over 100 volunteers to help us in developed and developing countries. The roles of each of the 24 and how they work with WCE are listed on the website under our homepage in the link “Strategic Allies”.