Vancouver AI Commuinity Meetup: 03/25
March is Education + AI night.
Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum... builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused. This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.
March's meetup is hosted by our BC + AI Education group. It’s where teachers, professors, youth-program builders, edtech makers, students, and AI practitioners compare notes on what’s changing.
Education is the canary in the coal mine for every tech revolution. AI is no different, except this time the students saw it coming before the administrators finished drafting the policy.
Youth in our network are already in motion: facilitating workshops, building accessibility tools, organizing their peers around inclusive AI practices.
Teachers are piloting classroom assistants that measurably improve outcomes, while surfacing the harder question: if the machine can grade and explain, what’s the human work that actually matters?
And the equity gaps are not theoretical. Kids with ChatGPT Plus at home. Kids whose schools blocked everything. English language learners getting flagged by AI detectors more often than native speakers.
Districts debating data consent while private tutoring platforms quietly harvest whatever they can reach.
March 25, we put the whole system in one room.
Students shipping projects. Teachers sharing what’s working in real classrooms. Administrators navigating impossible decisions. Technologists building tools. Community organizers building infrastructure.
Everyone asking variations of the same question: how do we make sure AI expands opportunity instead of hardening inequality?
This isn’t a panel about “the future of education.” This is the present. Messy. Urgent. Being figured out in real time by people who don’t get to wait for perfect answers.
We’ll weave together Ethos Lab youth builders, TheUpgrade.ai training work, and post-secondary student leadership through Sasson and the UBC AI Club, alongside educators, researchers, and edtech makers across the BC + AI Education community.
When: Wed, Febuary 25, 2026 · 6:00–10:00 PM (doors 6:00, program ~7:00)
Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (1100 Chestnut St) — yes, the UFO roof
Accessibility: Fully accessible · transit-friendly · parking available
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. We run until 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Doors + mingling 6:00
Demos + lightning show-and-tell (2 min, scrappy encouraged)
The real work: conversations under the dome
Tool + workflow swaps: what’s working, what’s fake, what’s fragile
Real talk: jobs, education, ethics, climate + infrastructure costs, governance
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Plug into the bigger organism
This meetup is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association a member-driven nonprofit where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership
Start the year with intention. See you Jan 28. 🖤❤️✊
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
THE SPONSORS
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Rival Technologies: Vancouver-grown leaders in conversational research + insight communities (aka: turning “surveys” into actual conversations). Market research platform that gave us $10K+ in hackathon prizes and actual BC survey data to train our models on real problems.
Segev LLP: Lawyers who can actually talk about tech without reading from Wikipedia, active in our community since early days. They're a full-solutions business and tech law firm with out-of-the-box thinking and high-quality legal work, recognized by Chambers as a leading firm in Canada for gaming sector emerging tech (blockchain, esports, IP).
Atono: Vancouver team building a SaaS platform that helps product teams ship clean software faster with better collaboration and development workflows. Thank you for investing in sanity as a service.
Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and the team at The Permanent are preserving 30+ years of the open internet while everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls. They provide universal access to all knowledge—web archives, digitized books, TV news, audio collections—and they're co-creating the Archive Builders Micro-Fellowship with us to train the next generation of builders on how to actually use these massive datasets for good.
TheUpgrade.ai: AI training company walking the walk on democratizing AI skills: Fortune 500 workshops, creative pro certifications, and corporate training that doesn't treat people like idiots. They help organizations and individuals harness AI to amplify creativity and accelerate learning through practical, hands-on training
Community Partners
Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab are leading research in AI-driven creative systems, generative art, and computational creativity at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver's creative community since before "community building" was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.
HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn't kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They're Vancouver's gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.
Ethos Lab: Vancouver's Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February honouring Hogan’s Alley.
About Vancouver AI
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans mapping the terrain between technology and consciousness. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops because the future doesn’t get built in one kind of room.
We run monthly gatherings where builders, researchers, artists, educators, founders, and students trade demos, tools, ethics, and hard questions. No gatekeeping. No outside agenda. Just a self-organizing community that gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create 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 AI was just the start. The ecosystem keeps growing across BC... Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, and beyond... each node bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/