Here is updated information on our programs. If you’ve been following us for a long time, a lot of this will be familiar to you. If you’re just finding out about us (Hi!), this is the crux of what we’re trying to do and how we are trying to do it.

Overview:

The Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) creates and incubates small-to-medium enterprises that provide underserved communities in developing countries with affordable, locally produced and environmentally sound technologies to meet their energy, sanitation and water needs.

We provide our businesses with financing in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. Recognizing that capital is not the only barrier that prevents engineering talent/budding entrepreneurs in emerging markets from forming such businesses, we also provide business training, technical training, legal assistance as well as help navigating government bureaucracy.

By operating in the missing middle, i.e. providing more funding than a micro-finance institution, but less than mid-scale investor, we target a level of service provider that is vital to the development of local economies. Our businesses can create jobs and deliver services that can be transformative for families and communities, but that are too large for an informal sector micro-entrepreneur and too small for a major government development initiative.

We have three primary programs: Incubation, Education, and Outreach. While these three programs have a high level of interdependence and rely heavily on each other for execution, the core of AIDG is the incubation program. We currently maintain operations in Guatemala and Haiti.

Incubation Program:

The goal of AIDG’s incubation program is the creation of independent locally owned enterprises that can serve the infrastructure needs of impoverished communities using appropriate technology and market mechanisms. Currently the focus of this program is the formation of enterprises in the arenas of Energy, Water and Sanitation. Future arenas under consideration include Communications, Housing, Transportation and Agricultural Processing.

The incubation program relies on a 2-3 year agreement between AIDG and a locally owned formal sector company (either pre-existent or that we help entrepreneurs form) that combines technical training, investment, and service contracts. After the incubation period a member of AIDG’s team retains a seat on the business board of directors for a standard board term. We operate the program through five steps, Talent and Opportunity Identification, Program Related Investment Lending, Tools and Equipment Provision, Training and Research, Contracted Services:

I) Talent and Opportunity Identification

The identification of talent and local business opportunities in the small-scale infrastructure sector is one of the areas where AIDG sets itself apart from other SME lenders. Our community partnerships with civil society, community leaders and local university and business groups, formed through our outreach program, have given us a tremendous network of referrals for local talent and potential business opportunities. We have leveraged these networks to create a catalog of unmet community needs/business opportunities as well qualified human resources who can solve these problems.

As we expand the number of enterprises we can support and the number of businesses we incubate, we anticipate that our opportunity and candidate stream will only grow. We foresee significant growth in our enterprise incubation both in replicating businesses we have experience with (e.g. establishing another stove manufacturer in a new region) or expanding to meet new demands brought to us by our constituent networks (e.g. establishing a producer of no head hydroelectric systems for the Peten).

Market opportunities and technologies are reviewed in group meetings and are scored in a competition matrix based on price point, market demand assessed through community surveys, cost saving impacts for communities, viability within local material streams, and manufacturability. Technologies are tested up to a year through outreach projects and community feedback before they are placed into consideration for an enterprise.

Individual candidate or enterprise vetting is accomplished through a multistage interview process. Local human resource and business conditions influence the decision of whether to go work with a group of entrepreneurs of a previously established business. For example, XelaTeco was founded with electrical and mechanical engineers who were underemployed in industries ranging from weaving to beer bottling. They were coalesced into a new company because there were no local renewable energy companies that could be strengthened into doing micro-hydroelectric systems. By comparison, where we are based in Haiti, the pool of qualified entrepreneurs is more constrained, partially due to limitations of the educational system. There, we are looking to train several existing enterprises who engage in traditional sanitation work in the installation of Biogas systems. Additionally, the legal process for establishing a formal sector business in Haiti is 3 to 4 times longer than it is in Guatemala.

II) Investment Lending

We provide our businesses with financing in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. The amount of the loan depends on the scale and scope of the enterprise. The interest rate (fixed) of most AIDG loans ranges from 0% to 5%. The lent capital is divided into a series of disbursements granted over the incubation period. No interest is accrued until the end of the incubation period. The companies having the option of paying down the principal at any time.

The loans have very generous repayment terms and schedules to accommodate the enterprises we support, which operate in difficult market environments. Since our goal is enterprise success and not fund return, loans made by AIDG are intentionally below market rate. We attempt to use the loans as an extension of our training for the enterprises, to help them develop their revenue sources and the fiscal discipline to be able to approach larger investors as needed for future stages of expansion. For those future stages of funding we hope our PRI fund will to allow AIDG to act as a guarantor with local capital partners, such as banks or other SME lenders such as E+Co, Acumen Fund, S3IDF, Agora Partnerships or Root Capital.

With XelaTeco, our first enterprise, lent capital was derived from AIDG’s unrestricted funds/donations. We are in the process of attracting funding to build a restricted program related investment fund. We are building the fund initially with donations and grants. We hope eventually to fulfill SEC requirements to be able to attract social investors seeking returns. This fund is not for general operations use, though provisions have been made such that the board can vote for emergency disbursements in case of fiscal crises that pose a threat to organizational continuity. Loans from this fund will be presented to the board for approval quarterly.

III) Tools and Equipment Provision

Most of the enterprises that we aim to incubate require some level of specialized equipment (e.g. foundries, milling machines, computer aided circuit design software). AIDG provides an equipment grant of $2,000 to $25,000 of either purchased or donated equipment to help the enterprise get itself on its feet.

IV) Training and Research

Our training services are at the core of our incubation program. It is easy to find a welder or civil engineer or electrician in Guatemala, but pulling those individuals together into an enterprise than can install a village scale hydroelectric system requires technical training, aid in negotiating legal processes and training in business and project management.

Our training involves direct mentor pairing between members of our internship program and member of the enterprise. To date this has revolved around skills assessment and skill building exercises in both technical and business realms, ranging anywhere from electronics to accounting. We are in the process of developing a standardized training curriculum for each skill set. Additionally, we are working with teams of experienced professionals who can come to the field for shorter terms and give very specific skills based training to augment the intern mentorships. For example we are bringing down experienced foundry workers to improve XelaTeco’s metal casting skills. We also contract local experts to give trainings where appropriate, for instance on Guatemalan Tax Law and Health Care requirements.

We retain legal services to start the enterprises but have found many of the barriers to enterprise formation in the bureaucracy are reduced the more contact you have with the officials. By incubating many enterprises we develop an advantage in corporate filings, shipping and receiving, telecommunications provision, etc. that an individual entrepreneur entering the formal sector for the first time would not have. Leveraging the same local vendors across multiple companies also gives us an advantage in securing better pricing and deals for the new enterprises.

AIDG also acts as a research and development arm for our incubated enterprises working to solve individual technical challenges based on customer feedback and ideas about product improvement.

V) Contracted Services

Much of AIDG’s outreach work is accomplished through the contracting of our incubated enterprises to perform infrastructure projects in local communities. This both provides us with real world environments to train business team as the enterprise is getting started. It also builds awareness of AIDG’s work and programs in the region and serves direct charitable purposes for schools, daycares, orphanages and other community organizations. During the 2 to 3 year incubation period of AIDG businesses, the enterprises are responsible for implementation and product delivery while AIDG acts as project manager and monitors project quality on contracted work. Outside of this period, the businesses do both project management and execution.

Occasionally we will contract the incubated enterprise to work in partnership with another NGO for the pilot or demonstration phases of a potentially longer-term contract for our enterprises. For instance, we are funding a portion of a solar installation by XelaTeco at a radio station in partnership with another NGO that maintains a network of 140 community radio stations in Guatemala. The pilot should lead to a significant long-term contract for the enterprise.

Education Program:

The Education program relies on AIDG bringing down experienced engineering and business students and professionals to work directly with our incubated enterprises. We have a steady stream of graduate students from Stanford, Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Berkeley, Michigan Tech, and other institutions who commit 3 to 9 months working on with our enterprises on skills building and novel technology research and design. This educational exchange goes both ways, building skills in our incubated enterprises as well as educating the university students about the challenges of working in resourced constrained environments in developing countries.

Our research work primarily revolves around adapting appropriate technology solutions to local supply chains and the introduction of technologies that are established in other regions, but are new to our areas. For example there are millions of biogas systems throughout India, but only a few dozen in Haiti. Unfortunately a standard fiberglass dome KVIC biodigester design from India cannot be reproduced in Haiti due to a poor supply chain for fiberglass. Interns prototype and develop new or adapted designs that can be taken to production quality by our incubated enterprises.

This focus on design around local materials and teaching engineering students to adapt to local conditions has attracted the attention numerous groups doing more traditional design at the bottom of the pyramid work in the states. As a result we have worked with EWB San Francisco, Humdinger Wind Energy, UC Berkeley, and MIT D-Lab on multiple design projects. Our community partnerships through our outreach program have given us numerous locations to field test emerging technologies and evaluate real world effectiveness.

AIDG is working to try and strengthen its physical resources in Guatemala to have a proper test and development center for students and groups interested in design for the other 90%. We hope that as our incubation program grows we will be able to leverage research done in this center across multiple enterprises and multiple regions.

Outreach Program

AIDG’s outreach program is aimed at providing services to communities and community organizations. As stated earlier, the vast majority of our outreach work is accomplished through contracting of our incubated enterprises. The work contracted by our enterprises helps us leverage volunteer resources effectively and guarantee high quality results to our constituents. For example stoves contracted from and manufactured by XelaTeco can be installed by a TecoTour team and then put through performance and community feedback testing for model design revision by engineering interns. Short-term visiting engineers generally lack the real world production and construction sills that we work to develop in our incubated businesses. The workmanship also has the guarantee and consistency of the incubated enterprise.

Additionally we will do outreach in response to natural disasters. After Hurricane Stan, we contracted XelaTeco to produce several hundred emergency camping stoves to be distributed with food aid and to perform electrical repairs in residences hit by flooding and mudslides.

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The Rocket Box Stove manual’s still not ready for prime time, but we do have a basic pictorial how-to for how to build it.

Guidelines for Assembly

Background technical information can be found in the document:
Design Principles for Wood Burning Cook Stoves A provecho Research Center, Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, Shell Foundation, June 2005 [pdf]

A pre-measured template is used to cut the pieces to form the outer bracket

The bracket will support a standard 2-ring plancha

The bracket pieces are fit and welded together

The sheet metal sides and bottom are riveted to the bracket

Cutouts are made in the front and rear for the combustion chamber and chimney

Baldosa tile is cut and assembled to form the rocket combustion chamber

Combustion chamber: side view

Combustion chamber: rear view

Combustion chamber: front view (without the front panel)

Pumice stones are separated by size

The stove body is filled with pumice, with larger pieces at the bottom and smaller pieces at the top

A small smoke chamber is created in front of the chimney using Baldosa

The plancha is set on top. Clay can be used to fill the gaps around the side of the plancha to keep smoke from escaping and to provide insulation to prevent heat being conducted from the plancha surface to the stove body.

Testing the finished stove:

Specs

Tech Tuesday: AIDG’s Rocket Box Stove

Get the Guide Assembly as a pdf.

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Engineers Without Borders Bring Tech to Villages Without Power

EWB-SF’s Malcolm Knapp and Heather Fleming with low-cost turbine that they helped design. It will be tested in Quetzaltenango this spring. Photo courtesy Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the San Francisco chapter of EWB on a low-cost windmill design as part of our Project Placement Program. The goal was to create a windmill for under $100 that could power LED lights, a cell phone, a radio and/or other small appliances.

Unlike the large-scale assemblies found in wind farms, the roughly two-foot-wide and three-foot-tall turbine has a vertical axis. Matt McLean, a mechanical engineer and the EWB project leader] said that orientation worked better in the choppy conditions likely to meet the turbine out in the field, where it’ll be bolted on to buildings, towers or even trees.

Next Sunday, the prototype will undergo its next-to-last build before [Heather Feming, a member of the design team,]and another volunteer head down to the Guatemalan manufacturing facility, XelaTeco, with the building plans in hand.

The engineering team had to make their design simple enough that it could be assembled from cheap and widely available components. As a result, their plans call for building the turbine out of hard plastic (or canvas) bolted on to a steel-tube structure. The rotor, which creates mechanical energy from the movement of the blades, runs into an alternator (actually a cheap DC motor running in reverse), which converts the mechanical energy into electricity.

Related Links:
Appropriate Technology Design Team
EWB-SF
XelaTeco

Related Posts:
William Kamkwamba - TED Interview (Video)
12 Days of Xmas: 3 Turbines
Link of the Day: Wind Turbine Buyer’s Guide [pdf]
Ecotricity - Bristol Port - Wind Turbine Construction Video
IEEE TV: Wind Power - The Technology

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about XelaTeco potentially piloting a customer credit program to allow the women’s group at San Alfonso to buy stoves. After discovering that the women couldn’t pay full-price up front and that there weren’t microfinance options that would let them buy XT’s stoves at a satisfactory interest rate, XT offered them a deal. Buy in bulk (8-10), pay 50% up front and pay the other 50% over time, get the stoves after the final payment. A bit like layaway at K-Mart.

Here are excerpts from Katie Bliss’ report on negotiations.

The women liked the idea of the credit system to be managed from within the community and are going to go off and elect their encargada… They are also going to speak with XT today when they finally have an absolute number of women and stove order (although at this stage it all depends on what we can offer them in terms of the payment system).

Unfortunately the women felt that they could not afford to pay 50% of the price upfront. There were various concerns voiced about this. Namely that it would take time to save up the money, in the meantime they would not be making the savings from the stove. For example one woman stood up and said “What you need to understand is that our husbands will not pay for something that they do not have, if we do not have the stove they will not let us pay for it, we live in a machismo society”. Another woman stood up and said, “We are poor, we cannot pay so much at once, this is a lot of money for us”.

Fair enough. It means XT has to go back to the drawing board and find that sweet spot in the deal that would allow the customers to pay and them not to go broke in the meantime. The lay-away part probably won’t work; personally I’m not a big fan that set-up either.

This next comment/complaint that arose from the women is a TOUGH one to deal with and an issue that comes up frequently for them.

“Other projects donate stoves. I don’t understand why we have to pay. We are poor people…. “

So in the domain of stoves, XelaTeco is competing with free. Eeek!

Katie continues:

The community have known form the start that we are only selling the stoves, and have heard the explanation of XT from us and the girls a number of times. The girls and I explained again, that it is a business, and you buy your technology the same as you buy anything else…

Ultimately those explanations are just not going to cut it as they don’t illustrate why XT’s customers should go through all the trouble of buying from them rather than just waiting for some NGO to come around. The current explanation does not include the benefits to the customer. Rather it revolves around the limitations of XT which are not the communities concern. Sigh.

Ironically in this situation, we’re in a similar position as the music industry when they complain about piracy. A huge chunk of their customer base has grown used to the idea that their main product isn’t something that you pay for anymore. Some critics of the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist Association) feel that the body should spend LESS time suing customers and developing onerous digital rights management (DRM) strategies and MORE time figuring out how to compete with free. This ultimately means figuring out a value add for customers.

So what could some of XT’s value adds be. Here are a few that we’ve come up with:

• Future customer discounts. XT have products that those stove giving NGOs don’t. Being a customer now means they could be eligible for great customer discounts in the future.
• Immediacy. Because of the budgets that the other local NGOs have available to them, they could be waiting a long time to get a new stove, or they could get one now. They can start saving money now; less exposure to harmful kitchen smoke that is hurting them and their children.
• Maintenance. After their purchase, they would have access to maintenance for a specified period.
• Different product selection. For now we have one stove that local NGOs are not offering, the Rocket Box Stove which is based on design by… It has a feature set that the more commonly available masonry stoves don’t have.

If you folks have other suggestions that we could present to XT send them along.

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Energy

Village-Scale renewable energy in Guatemala. AIDG & XelaTeco provided over 150 families (700+ people) in rural Guatemala with renewable electricity. A micro-hydroelectric system installed for the Chantel and La Fe communities saved them $2000/month in fuel costs during their coffee harvest. Our total installed capacity as of December 2007 is 91 kW.

Helping families breathe easier with cleaner burning stoves. We installed and upgraded 20 biodigesters and improved stoves for rural families in Guatemala. Our higher efficiency stoves cut indoor air pollution, a major ‘killer in the kitchen’.

AIDG Stoves: participatory design at work. Through active community outreach and R&D, AIDG developed stove designs that use 50-60% less wood than a traditional wood fire. For families that buy their fuel wood, this could save them 14-30% of their monthly income.

Sanitation

Waste-to-energy: Home Grown Power in Cap-Haitien. We opened a new office in Cap Haitien, Haiti. In partnership with Oxfam, SOL/SOIL, and the Mayor’s offices of Cap Haitien and Milot, we are starting a project to create a municipal-scale waste-to-energy plant. When online, the plant will serve an estimated 10,000 people, improving sanitation and providing a valuable energy source.

Improving sanitation in Cap Haitien. Working with our community partners, we have already completed a dry composting latrine to serve 300 people in Petite Anse, a neighborhood of Cap Haitien. Building new public latrines and upgrading existing ones will give many more of the city’s residents access to basic bathroom facilities as well as protect groundwater from contamination.

Water

Hot showers for cold kids. As an outreach project for a childcare center in Guatemala, we installed a solar water heater to improve hygiene for the center’s 45 children, particularly during the cold winter months.

Affordable solar water heater. AIDG partnered with the University of California - Berkeley to develop a low-cost solar water heater for under $100. Commercial systems cost $400-$1000.

Water testing. We collaborated with MIT’s D-lab for water quality testing training for XelaTeco. Lack of access to safe drinking water is a major cause of death for children under five.

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In a previous post where I detailed some of the specs of AIDG’s rocket box stove, I mentioned that we would need some creative financing to make it affordable to communities who would most benefit from it. Pete pointed out that we don’t so much need creative financing. The practice of setting up charge accounts for customers, which was more common in the pre-credit card era, could do just fine.

First, a wee bit on the history of credit from Direct Lending Solutions [Credit History: Before there was Plastic…The Earliest Charge Accounts]:

Long before there were credit cards, or even plastic, for that matter, Americans relied on credit, which, for day-to-day matters typically took the form charge accounts with local retailers.
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[F]or many retailers, particularly those in rural, farming country or those that were in company towns, without being willing to extend credit through credit and charge accounts, they would not be able to stay in business at all. Credit and charge accounts were mutually beneficial to consumer and retailer, with many retailers having more charge account business than actual cash at the time of sale business.

Because of the more personal nature of the business relationship, repayment schedules tended to vary, according to when the consumer had funds available. A farmer may pay with the yearly sale of crops, whereas a wage worker would pay upon receiving his salary, whether that was weekly or monthly. During hard times, fluctuations of fortune or illness or injury, retailers would often extend credit to tide a trustworthy, longtime customer through, even though payments were sporadic or widely spaced. It was one of the advantages that this local, more personal system had.

Given that a lot of XelaTeco’s customer base are farmers or member’s of cooperatives, this strategy of extending line of credit to customers makes a lot of sense financially. Here’s why:

• Community members are really interested in buying the rocket box stoves, but can’t pay the full cost out of pocket.
• XelaTeco can’t lower the price of the stoves any further or they won’t be profitable.
• Microfinance options in Guatemala seem to favor entrepreneurs buying items that will make money and not individuals buying consumer products that will save them money.
• There are not many other types of financing available to the XT’s customer base even though they may be a safe bet. FENACOAC offers a ‘community lending’ option of up to 1000Q per person if a group is already organized into an association/cooperative. However some community members are concerned that the payments/interest rates would be higher than they could manage.

Here is an outline of a pilot plan that we’re working out with a women’s weaver’s association at San Alfonso, one of our community partners, and XelaTeco.

• Clients organize into a group to buy stoves in bulk, then pay a percentage of the full cost to XelaTeco up front. In the case of San Alfonso, the women from the cooperative agreed to a 50% down-payment.
• XelaTeco extends a line of credit to the community effectively giving the community a no-interest loan. *** Caveat: This is a pilot. We’ve made it very clear to the community that this is a pilot and that the terms (interest rates, payment period, etc.) will mostly like be different for future buyers.***
• Community members pay XelaTeco back over a pre-determined period of time. We agreed that 10 months was doable for them. The women decided they could manage the payments amongst themselves and would make a single joint payment each month to a pre-specified account. This is particularly important as XelaTeco doesn’t have the manpower to chase down a lot of individuals if they fail to pay.
• If someone fails to pay 2 payments in a row without good reason [e.g. illness, bad harvest, natural disaster, etc.], XT will return to the community and retrieve the stove. This idea came from the community itself, so we’re confident that there will be enough peer pressure/communal spirit within the group that this shouldn’t have to happen.

Wish us luck.

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Haiti: Access to sanitation and clean energy in Cap-Haitien

1. Municipal Waste-to-Energy Plant. Begin building a municipal biogas plant in Cap Haitien to improve local sanitation and provide renewable energy to the city’s residents. Once online, the plant and associated waste collection services will serve an estimated 10,000 people.

2. Compost Site with SOIL. Collaborate with local partners to establish a community compost site using effluent from the biogas plant.

3. Job Creation. Create an enterprise to manage the biogas system and collect waste for processing. Revenue will be generated from biogas sales and waste collection fees.

4. Pilot Projects: Community Biogas and Upgraded Public Latrines.

• Install several community and family-scale biogas systems as outreach to test and promote the technologies. One such system will be installed for a pottery collective in Lori, Haiti to generate fuel for one of their kilns.
• Help improve sanitation infrastructure by upgrading existing public latrines.

Guatemala: Access to renewable energy and water for under-served communities

5. Achieving XelaTeco’s Triple Bottom Line Goals. Cement XelaTeco as a sustainable business that provides significant social, environmental and economic benefits to the communities it serves in Guatemala. XelaTeco’s primary focus is clean energy/energy conservation systems (micro-hydroelectric, biogas, higher efficiency ‘improved’ cookstoves).

6. Community-scale Renewable Energy Systems. Help XelaTeco provide micro-hydroelectric systems for three rural communities and, pending funding, help another 12-18 communities perform micro-hydro feasibility studies and system design.

7. Delivering Water to Isolated Communities. Prepare to start AIDG’s 3rd enterprise in 2009 that will focus on delivering water supplies to isolated rural communities.

8. Pilot projects: Water Supply Delivery, Small Scale Wind Power, and Solar Hot Water.

• Perform hydraulic ram pump projects to deliver water to isolated communities in Guatemala.
• Conduct research & development on small-scale wind power and solar hot water systems.

AIDG: Expanding and Growing our network of businesses

9. Growing our network of businesses. To achieve our goals of providing families and communities with affordable energy, sanitation and clean water, we will continue to optimize our business incubation, training and financing model so that it can be replicated and scaled.

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Summary

The Rocket Box stove is a lightweight portable stove, recently developed by AIDG’s R&D interns as a lower-cost, pre-fabricated alternative to common masonry stove models.

The Good

The Rocket Box uses 50-60% less firewood than traditional cookstoves and fires. This provides a huge costs savings for families that buy fuel wood. For instance, women we interviewed at San Alfonso, a cooperative in Guatemala, reported spending 28-56% of their monthly income on wood.

This stove design shows similar fuel efficiency to masonry stoves, but is up to 50% cheaper. Being portable, it is particularly useful in communities where residents are living in temporary housing and/or want more flexibility in where the stove is placed in their home. Like most good ‘improved’ stoves, it comes equipped with a chimney that vents smoke out of the home and thus cuts exposure to the ‘killer in the kitchen’.

The bad

Wood needs to be cut into smaller pieces than typically used in traditional open fire. However, it’s not too much extra work for someone skilled with a machete. (See instructions for how to use below.)

Many families who would most benefit from this tech may still need creative financing to make it affordable. We’re working with communities to figure out adequate funding mechanisms.

Why it’s great for XelaTeco

Compared to masonry stoves, the type of improved stove most commonly installed by NGOs in Guatemala, Rocket Box stoves are much less labor intensive to produce and use fewer materials, two things that increase affordability. They can also be mass-produced and distributed in local markets like Xela’s Democracia for direct sale to consumers. XelaTeco is already taking advance orders on this niche technology from women’s cooperatives and will begin production in early 2008.

Base Specs

Parts:Sheet metal for the body, plancha, pumice fill for insulation, and Baldosa tiles for the ceramic combustion chamber
Chimney: Yes, smoke vented out of the home
Fuel efficiency: Uses 50-60% less firewood than traditional wood fire.

Cutaway of rocket box stove in Solidworks. Not shown: pumice fill for insulation or plancha cooking surface

View under the plancha - Pumice Fill for insulation

Pedro and Natalia making tortillas on the plancha

Rocket Stove Instructions [Spanish]. View Larger Version

Update:
Rough Guide on How to Build a Rocket Box Stove

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This video gives a brief overview of our energy projects in Guatemala.

Special thanks to the 2007 TecoTours crew who participated in the filming of this piece, Corey Tatarczuk for doing a awesome job editing, Jonathan Argudo for some sweet flash animation, and our good friends at Wedia for funding the film team who visited us this past summer.

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