Who is the person behind the of voice this podcast and what drives him to take time out of his life to bring Masonic education to the world?

First and foremost I am a husband to an incredible woman and father to two fantastic kids. Everything else I do is in support of them and our family. Both kids are early in their school careers and have taken to heart the challenges of learning as is constantly reflected by their outstanding report cards. We live the in the neighbourhood where I was born and raised. We live three blocks up the street from my childhood home or what the kids call their "second home" at Grandma and Grandpa's. I say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree while my wife would say that I can't cut my mother's apron strings. In reality it is one of the best and most desirable neighbourhoods in the city and is only 20 minutes via public transit to work. Besides this and more importantly, the people are unbelievable.

Through friends and family, I have taken on many roles within the community which has culminated with my volunteer role as the President of our community association. Normally this would not be a too heavy a role, but there are a number of issues that are directly impacting our neighbourhood as it relates to municipal, provincial, and federal governments. What I had hoped would be an opportunity for me to practise my leadership skills in a safe and quiet environment has turned into a very public role for me dealing with all three levels of government, First Nations, and the constant barrage of media inquiries and interviews. So I continue plod along and do what I can, but always feel that I am not doing enough in this role for the people, my neighbours. It is a far cry from what I see the role of our community association as being - inward-looking and building up a stronger sense of community and activities and not a political entity.

My interests outside of community involvement have always lead me in many different paths. I have always had a keen interest and skill in technology. This has proven me well in the 22 years I have been at the same large corporation. The beauty of being situated at its head office has provided me the opportunity to have many different careers at a single company. During the past seven years, my focus has been outside of technology where I spent some time doing formal project management of computer infrastructure projects in the range of $400K-1,500K. My wife would say that it was the control-freak in me that lead me to this role.

Through my work at identifying changes to project management processes in our corporation, I, along with a few others, was tasked with generating a work management process that would allow for the forecasting of office workers' time and identifying and addressing variances. While this doesn't sound too exciting, it gave me the opportunity to help lead a substantial change in a computer department of nearly 500 employees. As this neared completion, I came to the realization that I am enjoying and am good at being an "agent of change" and that these skills were applicable in other areas of the corporation and not just the computer department. Thus the move to the Engineering group to continue my role as managing change and taking a larger role as a leader. What I have learned over the years of progressing roles is that I am not comfortable with leadership of people directly. While my work would predict that I am, the amount of energy that it takes for me to successfully do this burdens me too much and leaves me in an intellectual and emotional state of depletion. When trying to quantify something, it is sometimes easier to describe what it isn't vs. what it is. I believe Sherlock Holmes call this "deductive reasoning."

Growing up I never had Masonic ties of any sort with the exception of my maternal grandfather who passed away long before I arrived on the scene. Near the closing of the 1980s, I somehow stumbled onto the existence of Freemasonry. Seeing as this was before the Internet was widely available and I had no family or friends involved in it, I poked around for a bit and then it petered out due to lack of progress with getting information which would satiate my curiosity. There was one factor which turned me off of Freemasonry when I encountered a older gentleman wearing a Shriner lapel pin and I asked him if he was a Mason to which he replied "No, I'm a Shriner." Looking back at this from my current vantage point, I am disappointed that men like this, who actually have to be card-carrying Masons, would say something of this nature to an young and enquiring mind. Hopefully this attitude is disappearing as the tight-lipped men of this generation pass the torch to the next generation.

Ten-plus years later, I noticed a sense of need for some other moralistic tool to be hung off the tool belt of my life. I had become more involved in my church and in my community. But being a tactile learner, I needed something different to help me gauge my current state and to work on becoming a better person for myself and everyone that relied on me in whatever fashion. While I had likely been a Mason in my heart at least since the late 80s, I was at the point in my life where I was ready to progress towards capturing the essence of what Freemasonry had to offer. I attended my neighbour's Christmas open house, where by chance, I struck up a conversation with a man who had a Masonic lapel pin. He was much more open than the Shriner I had previous met. We had a conversation about it and he mentioned that my next door neighbour (and host of the party) was also a Mason. This openess was all that I needed to proceed with becoming a Freemason finally.

Once I became a Mason, there were so many questions that I had and no real avenue to get them out and answered. My lodge didn't have a website and I saw this as a means of applying some of the skills that I had to help support the lodge. It also gave me a way of finding out more about the Craft. This was a double-edged sword as it did help the lodge out immensely; it uncovered even more questions that swirled around in my mind about Freemasonry. By this time, podcasting had been around for less than a year, but had become a rather stable, if not still new, platform. With the inclusion of podcasts in iTunes in mid-2005, I began to listen to them and was intrigue by what it had to offer.

In the fall of 2005, I created a podcast from my lodge's website. It was a service to Masons and the public around the world and was a flagship product that the lodge could tote as providing back to the Craft. Selfishly, I saw it as a way of focusing on a single Masonic topic for a week at a time and allowed me to ignore all the other questions that I had in my mind. During the course of the next couple of years, the popularity of the podcast grew substantially and I literally have had emails from all four corners of the earth.

While the lodge had been supporting the financial cost of the website, I was looking to give the podcast an identity of its own. In some respects the podcast had grown up and it was time to leave the nest. In the fall of 2007, I created the basic website for the podcast and continued to deliver the episodes as regularly as I could manage. Interest in it continues to grow and I keep increasing the number of Masons from around the world that I am keeping in contact with. The costs associated with hosting a website that requires substatial network bandwidth is within the ability of me to manage, but I am always accepting of donations to defray the costs by those listeners who feel they are receiving value from the podcasts. 

Apart from the podcast, I was very active in my lodge and had progressed to the office of Inner Guard. The commitment from the office of Junior Deacon onwards was noted to me as being a five year commitment. Given all the other loads on my time, I couldn't commit to following through on this. So with a heavy decision made, I felt it better to let current officers know that I would not be continuing rather than likely leaving a big hole in the officer's line at a later date. In 2006 I also had the opportunity to be the Secretary to my lodge's district and support and travel with our District's Deputy Grand Master who is also the Secretary of my mother lodge and a Masonic role model for me. This Secretary role was one that I enjoyed doing and hopefully added some of my "agent of change" talents to.

Late in 2005, early 2006, I started looking into what had driven me to join the Craft and if these needs were being addressed by what I was doing. I came to the realization that there were aspects of my need from the fraternity which were not currently being met. I spent the next year attending many of the 20+ lodges in and around my city to see if there were any that better satiated my needs. In the fall of 2007 I made a decision that one had the best potential for me. I petitioned this lodge and affiliated with them in January 2008. I still maintain my membership with my mother lodge and visit occasionally when my work load permits.

Looking foward, there have been some requests of me to take on roles in Grand Lodge, but I am not committing to anything or even hinting that I will take anything on until the load of my volunteer roles drastically reduces sometime by the end of 2008. I'm in a tough position because some of these roles require me to be a Past Master, so there would be many years before I could take these on. Suffice it to say, that I'm quite content at this point to continue doing yeoman's duty in lodge and helping where I can for other issues.

None of us can say with complete certainty what our futures hold for us. Suffice it to say that I will likely continue to my involvement in the community and the fraternity as an "agent of change." While Freemasonry is not a purveyor of great innovation, I see that there are areas which can be updated to keep it relevant. I see my duty as being one of many Brothers to apply my operative skills in keeping it relevant as society and its men continue to change. This includes our sons and grandsons.

My tools will likely be focused on the moving the Craft towards the digital age, and thus I am "The Digital Freemason."

Sincerely & fraternally,

The Digital Freemason