Day 3 – What's in it for me?

Today we are going to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart, and that is Return on Investment (ROI). Another way to think about ROI is to ask yourself what you will receive in return for the risks you take when investing your time, energy, or money? What's in it for you?

To simplify the discussion we will assume that everything can be calculated into inputs and outputs and summarize our arguments down to how much you put in vs how much you get back to help identify whether our ROI is positive or negative.

Let's start with an example of what I would consider a great ROI... When you plant an apple tree, it may take a few years to start producing but once it is producing it should continue to produce for decades to come. You have a one time upfront cost and you receive a dividend for as long as that tree is cared for. To help illustrate in dollars and cents, assume you spend $200 a year on apples at the store and the alternative is to spend $200 worth of time, money, and energy to plant your own apple tree. You will have returned your original investment once that tree has produced $200 worth of apples. If it takes 5 years before it starts producing the first yield of $200, you would have earned 20% ROI on your initial investment – averaged over the 5 year period. The real fun comes from the fact that on the 6^th and subsequent years, you will be receiving 100% ROI from your original investment for every $200 worth of apples the tree produces.

Try getting that yield in a local bank account!.....

Article 21 of Natural Building and Appropriate Tech Internship

So frankly we have a lot of different projects and sometimes we aren't very well organised. Sometimes we begin one project and don’t finish it or want to begin a project but don’t know where to begin. So Angry Ben created a list of all the projects and how they are link to each other. Then he wrote down basics steps to take the leadership of one project. Like speaking to Bob and Tim for the brief, locating the materials, checking how many people are associated to the task etc. It is a very empowering process to have created this project poster. It directly had an impact on the motivation of us all. Boosting our will to take more responsibility of the projects.

Some of you, having looked at the title may be going ”uh oh“, some may be going “great something about buddhism“ still others may be going “whats he going on about?”. This story is for everybody. I don’t know much about Buddhism except that as religions go, it seems pretty balanced. In the area we used to live, the kids did buddhist studies at school and a lot of what came home seemed to sit well with how we, as a family lived. Getting back to my knowledge of buddhism, as I said  its pretty thin, except that the term “walking the middle path“ which is a central concept of Buddhism, just so happens to pretty much perfectly sum up my personal philosophy on dealing with the challenges in my life and the changes afoot in the wider world.

In my last post, I showed a picture of a wood powered water heater, so we'll roll up our sleeves and get into how this was designed. But first a warning! Boiling water is easy to do, boiling water in a closed container and not blowing yourself up is much trickier, in fact I've heard it said that there is the equivalent of a stick of dynamite in 500 grams of boiling water ! So if you blow yourself up be it on your own head . Having said that I have spent a fair bit of time creating a design that is simple to build, safe and efficient.

So where does the "appropriate" in Appropriate Technology come from? To me, it is technology that "fits" well into a place or setting. No further enlightened? Okay, I'll make some generalizations and go from there. For the "technology part," I like W. Brian Arthur's definition whereby technology is the capture or use of a phenomena for a specific purpose. So this could be everything from construction of a compost pile, (consciously promoting the action of bacteria to break down organic matter for whatever reason) to a system of community governance. The "appropriate" comes in when you recognize that some ways of developing local communities resonate better with human behavior than others, say community land trusts as opposed to landlord/tenant arrangements.