Two Years of Building in Public

Hey friends,

It’s Monday morning, second week of December.Sun’s up, birthday around the corner (mine)… and our community’s birthday too. Our little Vancouver AI experiment is officially TWO YEARS OLD!

For 24 months in a row, on the last Wednesday of the month, we’ve dragged some of the most creative, sharp, technically-fucking-astute humans in this city into the same room…. people who care about where this is all going.

Every month has been a silo-busting, genre-smashing good time exploring what it means to be human in an age of synthetic everything. We explore what this wave of AI makes possible and we ask the tough q’s:

• Where are we actually headed?

• Where do we want to be headed?

• And what are we going to do when we get there?.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ve got four events queued up, including our December 17th community meetup… the official 24-month mark.

Check out the upcoming event list and our draft calendar for next year including the themes we’re digging into, the formats we’re experimenting with and the collaborations we’re lining up! :)

We’ve already sketched out a full year of programming. We’re not winging it. We’re building it on purpose.

This year, we turned the meetups into a nonprofit and started building real infrastructure around the community; so far, 150 people have stepped up as founding members, and together we’ve been piloting programs, partnerships, and new formats to see what this thing can really do.

We’re keeping the Founding Member drive open for 3 more weeks. After that, we close this chapter, the price goes up, and we lock in the next phase of our program.

We’re organizing to be more than the sum of our parts.

• To go after projects bigger than what any of us could pull off solo

• To make Vancouver the centre for AI in Canada

• To do it with rigor, ethics, creativity, and a sense of humour

And we’re not doing it alone.

With partners across creative tech, space and science, and the indigenous technology worlds, we’re already pushing on what’s possible and what’s responsible.

YOUR MOVE

If you’ve been orbiting the community, coming to the odd event, or lurking on the edges thinking:

“Yeah, I should really get more involved…”

This is the nudge.

Lock in the early chapter with us. Help shape what this becomes, not just watch it from the outside.

Upcoming events are listed below. I’d love to see you at one of them… or in the chats, on office hours, or inside a project we haven’t even named yet.

See you out there,

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

P.S. If you're already a member, forward this to someone who should be in the room. We're building the network. You know who else belongs here.