From the communityAuthentic photograph, not AI-generated
AI meets culture in a building where everyone gets a say.
Photo: Michelle Diamond.
About · From the meetups to Futureproof Festival
The meetups became a festival.
I've long dreamt of an avant-garde festival of the future, a mix of culture and business and science and art. I didn't start these meetups to start a meetup. I wanted to have this big event, but I didn't have any community yet.
So we started hosting meetups. And the meetups took on a mind of their own. It led to the nonprofit. It expanded. Which brought us here.
Kris Krüg · Festival Director
Vancouver AI community members together on the Space Centre stage. Photo: Michelle Diamond.
From the festival director
Here's the thing.
Since 2024 the best AI conversations in this city have been happening at the Space Centre on a weeknight. 250 people packed in for the January meetup. Kevin Friel starting a film club in 2025 and running a whole festival out of it. Nobody planned any of this. People showed up, found each other, and did the work.
I built Futureproof Festival to take those questions further, with three days to learn across disciplines and examine the choices ahead. Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive is going to talk about saving the web and what a library owes the people who haven't been born yet. Amber Case is going to ask what AI should feel like when it's actually made for humans. Michael Running Wolf is bringing the Indigenous language reclamation work and the harder question of who owns the systems underneath it. Taleeb Noormohamed is coming straight from the federal AI policy table. Philippe Pasquier is making art with the machines without handing them authorship. That's 36 people so far. Nobody is coming to sell you a roadmap.
A festival ticket is CA$950. That's opening night, both days, and the closing party, done. If your plans change, hand the ticket to someone else, free, right up to the day before doors. Bring a decision you're working through. I want you to leave with a deeper understanding of what's possible, what's at stake and what you want to do next.
Kris Krüg
Festival Director. Also the guy who runs BC + AI.
The decisions you make about AI will outlast this year's tools. What should you adopt? What deserves scrutiny? What must remain a human responsibility? Futureproof Festival brings research, creative practice and public leadership into the same program so you can examine those questions from more than one field.
How we do ethics here
Care is in the details.
Curiosity in one hand, care in the other. Here's what the care part looks like when you actually show up.
We use AI. We also use our heads.
The AI policy says where the machines help, where they never get the final word, and that people own the consequences.
Read the AI policy →Real photos say so.
A “Not AI” label means a real photograph from the community. Campaign art never pretends to be one.
How we handle art and photos →Tell us what access you need.
Captioning is not confirmed yet. Tell us what you need before you come, and we will reply.
Captioning and access →Plans change. Your ticket can move.
Hand your ticket to someone else for free, right up to the day before doors.
How transfers work →An ethics community that meets every month.
The AI Ethical Futures Lab is BC + AI’s ethics community: a monthly working room for people who want what AI makes possible and still want a say in it.
AI Ethical Futures Lab →Who it's for
Choosing where AI belongs in your work? Bring that decision. Hear from people who build the systems, study the consequences and live with the results.
Students, emerging practitioners, and people still making up their minds belong here too, and the festival is better for them.
BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Founded in Vancouver in 2024, the BC + AI Ecosystem Association has spent 28 months building what AI conversations mostly skip: genuine public participation. It runs the monthly Vancouver AI Meetup and supports the educators, researchers, and practitioners working at AI's intersections. Futureproof Festival extends that work into an international program of AI research, professional learning and creative practice.
28 months of community
The community, before the festival.
Vancouver AI Meetups. Ethics community sessions at the Space Centre. Community members who keep showing up because the stakes are real and the gathering is not boring.
From the communityAuthentic photograph, not AI-generated
A real Space Centre gathering, already full of people paying attention. Rare and useful.
Photo: Michelle Diamond - Vancouver AI Meetup - 2026
From the community
The ethics layer is not a slogan here. It has chairs, faces, and homework.
Photo: BC + AI Ethics Community
From the communityAuthentic photograph, not AI-generated
People who came to take part.
Photo: Michelle Diamond - Vancouver AI Meetup - 2025
Festival artwork
Who gets to shape what shapes us?
Futureproof Festival art layer
At the Space Centre
The venue has a body: planetarium dome, civic weirdness, water nearby, and enough sky to make the conversation behave differently.
Photo: Socratic, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Vancouver AI, in pictures
The conversations, experiments and people behind this community. Explore a few moments from Vancouver AI and BC + AI, with individual photographer credits in the gallery.
Explore the photosFurther reading:the BC + AI regional story behind Futureproof FestivalStreet-level AI culture at ALL IN MontréalWhat the national AI argument looked like from the floor at ALL IN
Make room for deeper thinking this October.
Bring a challenge from your work. Bring a notebook.
Opening night plus two program days. October 28-30, 2026.
