We’re heading into next week and our Infrastructure Masons’ sessions  at the Technology Convergence Conference  next week in San Jose.

There will be three Infrastructure Masons sessions overall. First Board-member Maricel Cerruti will lead a panel-discussion on Women in Technology Infrastructure. The session will address the concern that there is not enough diversity, and specifically not enough women, in the career pipeline of the digital infrastructure industry.

Next, Dean Nelson and Mark Monroe  will lead a session on a proposal for a data center performance rating. Judging from the high level of engagement leading up to the conference, I’m sure the discussions there will be both lively and engaging.

In the final session I’ll be leading a discussion of the Infrastructure Resource Gap. This discussion will be specifically around the hot topics the Education Team is dealing with right now as an initial set of priorities.

Our Infrastructure Mason’s Education Priorities are to:

1. Quantify the Worldwide Infrastructure Resource Gap.
2. Launch a High Visibility Infrastructure Mentorship Program.
3. Build Curriculum Recommendations with Academic and Industry Experts to Optimize Career Opportunities.

We have limited time at the conference, so we’ll narrow the discussion a bit to focus specifically on getting input from Infrastructure Masons on the next level of detail. Specifically, in what ways and how do we begin to take action on these?

The first Item I want to address is to get input on what an “effective” Mentorship Program would entail.

• How would mentors be selected?
• How would students and early career professionals be recruited?
• How do we make it highly visible?
• What is highly visible?
• Are there models we can build on or copy?

For this part of the discussion we plan to turn the questions over to the attendees and gather their inputs to help shape the actions of the Education Team.

The second item to address is recommendations for curriculum. We included a preliminary table of skills and curriculum options in our original “Thought Paper” which was vetted within the team, but has not been widely discussed outside that group. The purpose here will be to get input from attendees on three parameters:

• Their job role
• the two or three “top” classes they found most valuable to their careers
• the stuff they wish they’d had exposure to, but didn’t.

As we go forward with the Education Team, I look forward to building out Priorities into actionable plans. These kind of “listening sessions” with the larger Infrastructure Masons community will provide necessary input to make the programs both grounded in reality and aspirational in goals and impact.

So. If you haven’t already signed up for the Technology Convergence Conference, please consider doing so. We are counting on strong attendance from Infrastructure Masons to help up continue to build this strong organization.