From Friday November 14's workshop

 Gives you a feel for the emerging ambiance of the workshop. This has to grow in a natural progression of shared interest and motivation or forget about it. It's a volunteer effort. 

Hilding "Gus" Lindquist, the old geezer in the video,is a retired systems analyst and programmer. Gus started writing code in Fortran back in the mid-1970's on a DEC 10 distributed processing computer at the John Locke Computer center at the University of Washington while working on a administrative management system for Pacific Coast Banking School, including a complete accounting program. He had previously developed the accounting system for the reimbursement of costs in the North Slope/Prudhoe Bay Sealift for Arctic Marine Freighters, a Crowley Maritime Company, at the time one of the largest sealifts, if not the largest, by tonnage ever. After leaving PCBS he moved on to become the Data Quality Supervisor for the Department of Energy's North Slope/Adjacent Arctic Ocean CART Site's Science Team, working out of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Gus then became involved in educational outreach to underrepresented populations in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). 

Quoting form elsewhere:

This will be "the team's" fourth major venture into educational outreach to those underrepresented populations.

The first, starting in 2000, was a three-year met tower installation at Plainfield High School that led to the Essex-Stevens Model Research Lab program that Professor Lvov has administered so successfully these past ten years, and which in turn led to the Summer Science Program at Valley Settlement House in West Orange, that is now in its eighth year and coordinated by Luis Grados, who was recruited out of the Essex-Stevens program while attending ECC.

Luis is a key advisor to the new initiative--the fourth major venture--in which we are doing the following:

• Providing an open court workshop for young people to learn coding of apps and create content every Friday afternoon from 4 to 7 pm at The Rack Cafe, 1844 Springfield Ave, Maplewood, NJ 07040, (973) 327-2353, https://www.facebook.com/TheRackCafe, with an open mic showcase from 8 to 10 pm on the first Friday of the month. (The next one is December 5th.)
• Exploring the development of an Environmental Science & Earth Systems Urban Laboratory (ES2UL) to work on increasing the recycling of what is otherwise waste material/garbage. This initiative includes the planned experimental use of a wine/cider press to extract the liquid from fruit/vegetable waste to reduce the weight of food waste from cafeterias and restaurants. (In fact, we would welcome the opportunity to work with the ECC cafeteria, and for which their is the prospect of NJ State funding, and you may want to talk to Professor Lvov on what steps we could take to explore this route.)
• Exploring the marketing of pedestrian safety reflectors to help fund the above initiatives.
• Livestreaming our activities in tandem with the tech workshop, including a live discussion of our ES2UL initiatives and their impact on the community, seeking input on how to improve our efforts from a wider audience.
• Looking toward the installation of a Free Space Optics (FSO) link to provide high speed/high bandwidth communications for the workshop.

 We plan to restart the open court workshop at Valley Settlement House in West Orange as soon as possible, with the same potential set of initiatives.