iMasons held the inaugural in-person meeting of the “Edge Masons” – a team of iMasons working co-operatively to develop an infrastructure-focused taxonomy of terms related to Edge computing and architecture in conjunction with the BroadGroup’s Edge Congress, in Austin on Oct. 29.

Interest was high – the room was at capacity of 40 iMasons members and guests. Hugh Carspecken, CEO of DartPoints, led the meeting, with fantastic support from Phillip Marangella of EdgeConneX, and Cole Crawford, CEO of VaporIO, who was filling in for Matt Trifiro, who has also been active with the Edge Masons since their inception. It was great to see the leaders of these sometimes competitors leave their company badges at the door to work together as peers to support the community.

Participants worked in small teams to consider categories of terms commonly used in digital infrastructure to see if the standard definitions made sense in the context of Edge computing, or if a better Edge-focused definition was needed. One of 4 teams looked at terms related to:

• Location
• Building shell
• Electrical/Power
• Mechanical/Cooling

The teams quickly came to consensus on the need for some new definitions, and the definitions themselves, and it was clear that there was no consensus on others. There is more work to be done!  The principals listed above, plus Smarak Bhuyan of Google, plan to continue and are considering collaborating with the Open Compute Project and the Open Glossary Project, now maintained by the Linux Foundation. They are looking for more people, particularly end-users, to join the “Edge Masons.”  Contact jeff@imasons.org if you are interested in participating.