Eymund Diegel is an environmental planner working to improve local water quality issues with his neighbors near the Gowanus Canal, a heavily polluted industrial area in Brooklyn, New York City.

He trained as an urban planner at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, mapping people selling vegetables on the side of the road, and scratching his head about what was needed for more friendly urban futures. He collects old maps, and likes canoeing looking for old streams among the sewage, knowing they will still be there long after we are gone.

When the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science gave him a big bright shiny silver balloon, and showed his friends how to tie a cheap digital camera to it to take better "Grassroots Mapping" pictures of the Canal area, he had such a big smile that they decided he should be on Public Laboratory's Board of Directors.

Little did they know that he was just having a childhood memory about playing and having fun.