Vancouver AI Meetup #30: June 24 at the Space Centre

Thirty Months In

We started this thing in a room full of people trying to figure out what was going on with AI. Artists, coders, founders, teachers, researchers, skeptics, people who were excited, people who were worried, people who were both.

Mostly both. That is still the point.

You can be amazed by these tools and still be mad about how they were trained. You can build with AI and still care about artists, water, power, kids, consent, Indigenous data sovereignty, public memory, and who gets paid. You can be curious without joining the cult.

That is the Vancouver AI lane. Both hands full.

The City That Keeps Showing Up

Yes, this is happening in the middle of World Cup madness. Canada plays Switzerland at noon at BC Place. By evening, the city will be full of jerseys, tourists, barricades, branding, noise, money, and everyone trying to figure out who Vancouver belongs to this week.

After the game, come to the Space Centre. Come because cities are made by the people who keep showing up in them. Come because public space matters. Come because the future of AI should not be decided in hotel ballrooms by people who flew in yesterday.

The Story So Far

January was Alexandra Samuel and Viv, Maya Bruck keeping vibe coders honest, and Erica Lapadat-Janzen naming the soft violence hiding inside so-called ethics discourse.

February was MAC night, where we let the consciousness people take the wheel and asked what love, embodiment, synthetic empathy, and “real” even mean when language gets cheap.

March was Both Hands Full. AI is extractive, biased, thirsty, dangerous, powerful, useful, weird, and making a lot of us more creative than ever. All true. Then Lawrence brought robots, because of course he did.

April was ethics with teeth: care, fairness, scams, governance, street-level wisdom, and what happens when we stop pretending productivity is the only thing worth measuring.

May was the AI commons: Internet Archive Canada, Rachel Horst’s anti-slop machine, Gabriel George opening the room, public memory, creative systems with fingerprints, and the reminder that the commons does not build itself.

Featured Talk: From Research To The Marketplace

From Research To The Marketplace: What I have witnessed over the past year as B.C.’s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies.

Rick Glumac, B.C.’s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies, brings a tech-sector and computer engineering background to government. He has worked across animation, video games, mobile apps, and public technology policy, and will speak about B.C. research moving toward market-ready companies, responsible AI, and how to grow the ecosystem without losing the plot.

Guardrail: Rick is joining as a featured community speaker. This is not a sponsorship, government endorsement, or policy announcement.

Opening Ceremony: Grounding The Room

Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams bring the opening grounding for Meetup #30, centering local relationship and respect for where we gather before the room accelerates into demos, policy, and future-talk.

Community AI Charters, Youth Power, And The Blackathon

Anthonia Ogundele is the founder of Ethos Lab, a STEAM innovation hub serving youth in K-12 education. Her work sits at the overlap of educational technology, equity, community values, and young people becoming creators and decision-makers, not just users of tools designed somewhere else.

Creative Production, AI Animation, And The New Studio Layer

Mayumi Rollings is a Tiny Ghost Studios founder and Chief Executive Officer, bringing operational finance, people-first leadership, and creative studio infrastructure into the AI animation and production conversation.

Food, Hospitality, And Community Care

Aliza Schwartzman and Noa Titievsky of Slapd Treats bring hospitality to the room. Food is not decoration here; it is part of how a community gets people talking, fed, and actually looked after.

The Flow

Doors at 6:00 PM. Program starts at 7:00 PM. Everybody out by 10:00 PM.

Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score. No aggressive pitching. No AI worship service. No doom panel cosplay. No gatekeeping. Just real people trying to keep their ethics, creativity, humour, and agency intact while the machines get louder.

Community Partners

Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real: Metacreation Lab for Creative AI, Creative Mornings Vancouver, H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, and Ethos Lab.

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 does not 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.

About BC + AI

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.

Register And Get Involved

for the June meetup, or explore BC + AI membership if you want to volunteer, speak, sponsor, bring a demo, or support the community beyond this one night.

QR card destinations verified on June 4, 2026: both QR cards resolve to https://bc-ai.ca/.