Hello signal chasers & story-hackers,

Trump’s still floating the “51st-state” idea. Up here, we just voted in a new Prime Minister—who turned around and named the world’s first federal Minister of AI. Feels like the right moment to pause, breathe, and ask a simple question:

With help from our hackathon partners at RIVAL Technologies we polled 1,000 people coast-to-coast. The answers don't line up neatly—and that tension is where the real work lives. Raw social data that captures a country trying to figure itself out while the world shifts beneath our feet.

What does a country in flux feel like?

This round of the Vancouver AI Data Storytelling Hackathon is where you take raw social inputs and build something alive.

Emotionally intelligent artifacts.

Take that civic hum and shape it into something people can feel: a short film, an interactive space, a choir of synthetic personas—whatever medium helps the data speak. Insight is the floor; emotion is the ceiling.

Your Toolkit

Just suggestions. Use whatever tools move you. Open-source is a plus. Weird is welcome.

Use what you know. Learn what you don’t.

What Would Actually Work

Skip the "AI poetry about maple syrup" approach. The dataset lives at canada.bc-ai.net—but the real data is in the contradictions:

• Build something that shows how Canadians define themselves against America while consuming American culture

• Create agents that embody different regional perspectives and let them argue in real-time

• Map the linguistic fault lines—how does "Canadian identity" translate across French/English/Indigenous languages?

The winning project won't be the prettiest. It'll be the one that makes people uncomfortable about what they thought they knew.

The Stakes

• Submission Deadline: June 11, 2025 @ 11:59PM PT

• Prize: $2,500 + featured slot at the June 25 event

• Team Size: 1–3 people

• Dataset: canada.bc-ai.net

• Register Now: Hackathon Round 2

Last month Sev Geraskin’s “Hot Dogma”—an agent-driven, 3-D riff on the eternal hot-dog-vs-sandwich debate—took the $2 500 purse and proved the cheques clear. Twelve other projects ranged from AI comics to voice-cloned docudramas. The bar is set.

The Deeper Game

This hackathon is actually asking: Can AI help a country remember who it is?

That's not a tech question. That's a cultural survival question.

The real innovation isn't in the tools—it's in using those tools to surface stories that traditional media won't touch. Stories about what happens when a country's identity gets stress-tested by fascist neighbors and rapid technological change.

Don't build for the judges. Build for the future Canadians who need to understand what happened during this moment.

What story about Canadian identity in 2025 are you brave enough to tell with code?

— Kris Krüg
BC + AI Ecosystem | Vancouver Hackathon Crew

Speaking of Canadian identity work—we're exploring these questions live this Wednesday. While Web Summit fills hotel ballrooms with networking theater, we're gathering the curious minds who love to tinker, question, and create.

May 28th at the Space Centre. Carol Anne Hilton opening minds with Indigenomics AI. Gabriel George Sr. connecting us to the land beneath all our code. Kushal Goenka showing how AI reads between your keystrokes.

This isn't another Web Summit satellite event—it's where BC + AI community shows up to share what actually matters. Raw insights from people knee-deep in the work they love.