Fair warning: we're growing fast over here. And yes, I know how that sounds coming from an AI guy. The calendar backs it up. This one's loaded so grab a beverage settle in and read to the bottom. - KK
Vancouver AI Meetup: Wednesday, July 29
Last month might be my favorite night we've ever done. It opened the way every Vancouver AI night opens, with a Squamish welcome, and this time I got to dance the Squamish animal dance with Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams, two Squamish Nation councillors who hold that space for us every month. I'm still thinking about it.
The next one is Wednesday, July 29, 6pm at the Space Centre. Dave Olson joins us.
Community builder, archivist, just back from Japan, here for a night about memory, archives, and what it means to keep making human things while the machines get louder. Bring a demo, a doubt, a project in progress.
The Responsible AI Professional Certificate
RAP is a four-week Responsible AI Professional certification for people who need to make better AI decisions at work: leaders, consultants, operators, builders, policy people and teams moving from experimentation into accountable deployment. Cohort 2 starts August 7
Every organization is deploying AI. Most are doing it without governance frameworks, without ethics training, without asking the hard questions. The organizations that will lead aren't the ones with the fastest models. They're the ones with people who know how to assess risks, apply frameworks, and navigate complexity before deployment.
Here’s what participants have to say about the program…
"I came in having already studied AI, but I was looking for something deeper on the ethics side, and this course gave me exactly that."
"The weekly live sessions were lively, honest discussions where people asked real questions and dug in together. It felt less like a lecture and more like a group figuring things out side by side."
You leave with four things you'll use for years, built on your own real work: an AI inventory, an ethics assessment, a deployment checklist, an impact assessment.
Last cohort, people built a scanner that flags which skills on a team are about to get automated. An AI policy a whole agency actually follows. A checklist that stops a sketchy vendor system before it gets in the door.
Can't make those four Fridays? The same cert runs again this fall, September 18 to October 9. Same format, same four artifacts you keep. Pick the dates that fit your life.
Once a year the whole ecosystem is in one room.
Nobody planned this in a boardroom. It started as a monthly Vancouver AI Meetup that kept outgrowing its room. Then hackathons. Then a film festival. Then 30 months of people showing up because the stakes are real and the gathering is not boring. You did not attend the community into existence. You built it. This is the year it gets a stage.
Earlyworm tickets are $650 through August 15 then it's $950.
There is more than one way into a room like this.
Submit a talk. Not the safe one you have given before. The one only you could give, that nobody else in that room could stand up and deliver. We want that one.
Sponsor or partner. This is how a festival like this actually gets built, and there is room for the right people. If that is you, reach out.
The best $340 you'll spend this year
BC + AI is a non-profit, and it runs on its members. For $340 a year you're not buying a discount code, you're joining the community and supporting the ecosystem.
Friday Office Hours every week. A crowd of people who actually build with this stuff not just post about it. First crack at every cohort we run before it opens to anyone else.
You read all the way to the bottom. You're my kind of person. Okay, that's the whole garage sale. Take what's yours. I'm gonna go touch some grass. <3
Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem
P.S. Our last AI Animation & Film Accelerator cohort wrapped and the films are up on our YouTube. Start with Robin's. People walk into this thing cold and walk out with a finished film, and the next accelerator runs in July and then again in September.
July cohort starts July 27 → luma.com/Cartoon
September cohort starts September 21 → luma.com/Scene
