Vancouver AI Community Meetup: Data for Good!
Vancouver AI Meetup #32: August 26 at the Space Centre
On August 26, 2026, Vancouver AI returns to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for Meetup #32 under the dome.
This is a working room for people paying attention: artists, researchers, builders, students, founders, skeptics, teachers, organizers, public-sector folks, and the AI-curious.
We gather to compare notes, test ideas, ask better questions, and meet people who care where this technology goes.
Theme cue for the month: Data for Good!!
Featured Conversation
Taleeb Noormohamed
This month has a featured conversation with Taleeb Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and MP for Vancouver Granville.
Vanessa Gonzales & Makaidea Gonzales
Squamish Nation
chiyakselut (Venessa Gonzales) opens the night with a Squamish West Coast welcome, song and blessing, alongside her daughter Makaidea. Her lineage bridges three nations: Squamish, Musqueam, and Cree from Saskatchewan, the same territory beneath the Space Centre. Venessa harvests traditional medicines, makes healing salves, and works in glass etching, wool weaving, and cedar weaving, and she teaches traditional games so the knowledge keeps moving to the next generation. We open every meetup this way. Not as performance, as the ground we build on.
Gordon Hamilton
Data for Good Society British Columbia
Gordon Hamilton runs Data for Good Society British Columbia, a network of roughly 1,600 data volunteers who donate their skills to nonprofits that could never afford them, including a free Data Foundations track that mentors people into the work. This is the heart of the theme: not data as extraction, but data in service of the people doing the actual good. Gordon is bringing a fast, concrete set of stories from BC nonprofits putting data and AI to real use, the unglamorous kind that rarely makes the keynote circuit. Come find a cause worth your evenings.
Kris Krüg
ED, BC + AI · Curator, Futureproof Festival of AI
Kris Krüg is the founder of Vancouver AI and executive director of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, the nonprofit that grew out of these monthly gatherings. A photographer and creative technologist by trade, he has spent two decades documenting culture and building rooms where people actually talk, and he now curates the Futureproof Festival of AI, October 28 to 30, also at the Space Centre. He hosts these nights the way he wants the future built: curious, a little irreverent, and allergic to hype.
Event Details
Date: August 26, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT
Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9
Format: Community talks, demos, conversation, and open networking
Who This Is For
People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing.
Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, founders, students, educators, and public-sector teams.
Anyone who wants a local, grounded, human room for sorting through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions.
What To Bring
Bring your questions, demos, doubts, experiments, and projects in progress. The point is not to clap for every new model. The point is to learn in public, notice what is real, and build relationships with people who can help make the work better.
It Takes a Village To Raise a Meetup
Big thanks, and please support our sponsors and partners including Internet Archive Canada, HR Mac Millan Space Centre and Intellomx AI Drug Discovery CEO Simon Haworth.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and her team are preserving 30+ years of the open web while everyone else locks knowledge behind paywalls, and they are co-building the AI Builders Fellowship with us. internetarchivecanada.org
HR MacMillan Space Centre: our venue partner, who hosts us under the dome every month and does not kick us out when the conversation runs past ten. Vancouver's gateway to space and science for everyone from kids to the cosmically curious. spacecentre.ca
Intellomx: Simon Haworth's AI-powered drug-discovery platform, reading transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to cut pre-clinical costs, recently into J&J's JLABS. Backing the ecosystem from the deep-science end. intellomx.com
Want To Support The Mission?
Interested in partnering, sponsoring, volunteering, or helping shape a future meetup? Reach out to the BC + AI team and we will find the right way to plug you in.
About Vancouver AI Community Meetups
The Vancouver AI Community Meetups are for people who are paying attention. Artists, researchers, builders, students, founders, skeptics, teachers, organizers, and curious weirdos gather every month to work through what AI is doing to our tools, our jobs, our stories, our culture, and each other. We are not here to clap for every new model or pretend the machine is magic. We are here to learn in public, share what is real, test ideas, ask better questions, and build relationships with people who care where this goes. Some nights are technical, some philosophical, some get gloriously messy. Come deep in the field or just getting started.
About BC + AI
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association building public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia. Not a corporate lobby, not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance. Vancouver was just the start; the ecosystem keeps growing across BC, from Surrey to Victoria to the Comox Valley and beyond. Join or support: bc-ai.ca/membership
About Futureproof Festival of AI
Futureproof Festival of AI is BC's homegrown festival of AI, October 28 to 30 at the HR MacMillan Space Centre. Three days of keynotes, performances, and facilitated dialogue, built the way this community likes it: experiential, human, and honest about both the promise and the cost. Think a homegrown Web Summit with a West Coast conscience, half the room from out of town, all of it grounded right here. Tickets are open now. futureproof.website