 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell here in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 2020. Joining me today are Dean Nelson, founder and chairman of iMasons and Jeff Omelchuk, executive director of iMasons. Thank you both so much for joining us today. I wanted to first start a little bit to talk about iMasons and you know a lot of times we have our clients, partners, people in the industry asking us about it and you know a lot are interested, some are already members, but definitely interested in hearing more. Can you tell us a little bit more about iMasons? Yeah infrastructure Masons is a professional associations of the builders of the internet of everything. So think of the people that that build the underlying foundation that enable all of us to operate on our devices and we are focused on four primary things. First it's about the individual so it's not about the company we leave the companies at the door and we are there to help our members connect grow and give back. So we have four strategic priorities we're trying to increase the industry awareness. People don't know what we do and why we do it but they all depend on it. Education there's not enough programs out there they're going to attract right kind of people into our industry itself. D&I because we've got to expand that out there's too many over 50 Caucasian white men in this industry we need and I'm one of them and so we need to expand that one and the last one is sustainability. Our companies make huge decisions about the planet every day and so they've got to make those and we really help align that to to make every transaction on the internet green that's really what our goal is trying to be. And the other thing that we know about you is that you're good at giving money away. Jeff would you be able to tell us a little bit about some of your scholarships? Sure yeah so the primary way we give money away today is through scholarships as you mentioned. So we've had the pleasure of awarding I think it's 22 scholarships going into this this academic term and and we haven't yet put it on the website but we just awarded five additional scholarships this year. Three to women two to men at five different universities and one of the things I'm particularly pleased about is we also in addition to that made an additional award to our first PhD student who's studying at a school it's not one of the ones we usually award but she's focused on digital infrastructure topics and we want to find a way to advance advanced education and bring people into the industry so it's going really well. Well that's fantastic it's such a great thing that you're doing for the industry as a whole. So it sounds like you've raised a lot of money so far for your scholarships how much would you say to date? Oh I Mason's members have been so generous and they're really putting their wallets where their heart is so we raised 89,000 at the London meeting and 100,000 to follow up on that to even top it at the Bay Area meeting so we're over a hundred three hundred thousand dollars in raised for scholarships today but that's not enough to make the change that we want to do and so we think we can do better Dean do you want to talk about that? I understand that I mean it's an amazing start obviously and I understand you're maybe going to spin that off into a charity of some kind do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely so in November of 2018 we put a challenge out to the industry to raise a million dollars because we'd raised 50,000 we said let's just be like hyperscale and go 20x okay cool well now that we raised 300,000 we're on our way towards that million it's still not good enough so we decided that we're going to spin our charity off into the digital infrastructure futures foundation and so it's a an actual 501c3 in the U.S. so we can take all matching donations it's really structured well but we want to do that same I'm going to take that million dollars and we're going to make it 20 million so we're shooting for the sky here because we need more people and so the new futures foundation is going to be the the nexus where we bring everybody together to raise that money and then we're going to be awarding scholarships out of that charity so we're really excited about this that's fantastic you also have events I believe that you're supporting and creating opportunities for people to come out and learn more can you tell us about that? Yeah we've got primary events across the year itself our global member summit that's where we bring all of our folks together that's happened in April we've got our advisory council sessions as well as these leadership summits in London and in Monaco and I think we've got 11 events is that right Jeff? Something like that? Four kind of primary ones the advisory council meetings and then a whole bunch of others and and what's neat is we get together and the members connect grow and give back again we said leaving their companies at the door so that's liberating you know nobody's in there to get sold to it's really about them their their network their career and making those connections that are going to advance everybody in the industry so that's what we love and that's what's a differentiator within our group. I see and and I know you've been growing right so you know just having watched the growth and the sort of momentum that's building around infrastructure masons is there anyone in particular that you really target that you think it would be you know sort of a perfect place perfect opportunity for them? Oh man that's a great question the core of our membership I would say have been the hyperscalers and kind of data center focused but it's really important to understand that iMasons is intended to be full stack and we are indeed full stack so you know all the way up to the application layer and and here at PTC we're in sort of telecom land and connectivity world and this is really a huge area of growth for us we really are seeing a lot more people from the broad sector that's why we call it the digital infrastructure industry not the data center industry we're a lot more than than just data center okay and and looking ahead then if you look at you know some have said that the industry you know it could be called stale maybe but you know over the last couple decades you know maybe not a lot of transformative change what do you see that looking like in the future or what would you like to see in that area? That's one of the primary focuses again to that masons when we come together we have these top of mind sessions and all we ask is what's top of mind for you and three hours goes by and it's because everybody's dealing with different challenges and you find out they're common challenges and so when you start to think about them together you can solve some really big problems and also you can be very innovative and there are some very innovative people in our industry itself there's a lot of opportunity to disrupt and transform what's going on in that digital infrastructure stack as Jeff was mentioning and this is the place where we actually have those conversations. Amazing it's creating a think tank almost for your members but okay we really really appreciate that you've shared all this and I know a lot of people are going to be interested in learning more and you know finding you where can they go to find more information? iMasons.org we are the builders of the digital age join us. iMasons.org thank you everyone for joining us today on JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking!