Building Sovereign AI Infrastructure for What Comes Next

Twenty people log into Zoom from Chilliwack to Chile. Gabriel Zaro catches it right away: “There’s as many AI note takers in this meeting as there are people. We’re that type of crowd, eh?”

That’s how you know. This isn’t another panel discussion about AI’s potential. These are people who already eat, sleep, and dream in machine code. They’re not talking about transformation. They’re shipping it.

The BC + AI Ecosystem nonprofit is live. After two years of Vancouver AI meetups packing rooms, after Surrey AI and Mind/AI/Consciousness groups sprouting like mushrooms after rain, after hackathons that went from Word docs to GitHub pull requests, we got structure. Not corporate structure. Community structure. The kind that actually works.

From Discord Server to Government Stakeholder

Here’s how it started. November 2022, I’m farming on Galiano Island. Someone shows me Midjourney. I start a Discord that same day. Five friends became fifty in a month. Now it’s a thousand person hive of builders and dreamers making things happen across BC.

Three years later? We’re sitting at government tables. Yin Lau, who runs a fractional EA business with seven people, she books me with the Honourable Rick Glomack’s chief of staff. I tell the group: “They identified us as a legitimate stakeholder. We’ll be invited to these roundtables they’re having.”

This isn’t lobbying. This is the government finally catching on that AI transformation is happening whether they write policy or not. Better to have people who actually build this stuff at the table than consultants who couldn’t deploy a model if their life depended on it.

Technical Evolution in Real Time

Watch the hackathon progression. Round one: people email Word docs. Round two: PDFs and YouTube links. Round three: “Six of the projects submitted via GitHub, which I considered a really cool win for the whole project that we were beginning to use in this tech first.”

But here’s what kills me. They’re not just using Git. They’re using Claude Code and Cursor with their GitHub credentials, telling robots to handle their version control. “These are advanced AI engineering techniques that we’ve kind of adopted into the hackathon process.” I’m showing Dean Shev’s bcai.dev on screen share.

Dean built seventeen AI songs with a full analytics dashboard. Not just robot music. Data visualization of machine creativity. Traffic sources, engagement metrics, what he calls “a crazy vibe coded system on top of the Rival dataset.” We played the whole album on Andrew Reid’s boat to Bowen Island, celebrating round two of the hackathon.

Luke from Tiny Ghost Studios breaks it down: “We’re building a platform that people can upload their own scripts, and AI kind of reads it and puts it into a narrative game.” His life partner runs CEO. They got collaborators in Toronto. This is what distributed creative production looks like when AI is the connective tissue.

The NASA Partnership Changes Everything

https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/2025/local-events/vancouver/

Space Center was already solid. Lorraine Lowe sits on our board. But this NASA Space Apps Hackathon? Different level entirely. October 4 and 5, overnight at HR McMillan Space Center. Twenty four hour access.

“NASA puts out like 20 datasets,” I’m explaining to Michel LeBlond, who calls himself our “West Coast elder” cause he’s over 60. Guy’s learning jazz while building apps. “Some of the datasets are like live satellite feeds from NASA satellites monitoring groundwater or something like that.”

Evan Digby from some aerospace AI robotics company, he’s bringing fifty professionals. We’re mixing aerospace engineers with creative technologists with climate activists. Michel’s already registered. Already has his project mapped out.

Regional Expansion Without Empire Building

Dale Evernden from Rival hits me at dinner: “Have you ever considered Chilliwack?” My answer shows you how this whole thing works: “The way that these things emerge is that someone like you says to me, hey, have you ever considered Chilliwack, and then me and you together can see if there’s other people with energy around that.”

Eduardo joins from Chile. Cloud architect who knows AI deployment inside out. His five month old is sleeping on him during the call.

Will Monjack pops in during lunch from his electrical contracting gig, working out how to get AI into construction workflows.

Joy runs AI for Women, these Thursday tea talks for people who “cannot join these events which happen mostly around the corporate.”

This is what distributed leadership actually looks like. Not franchises. Not empire building. Communities self organizing around real need.

Infrastructure That Compounds

Gabriel Zaro comes from EA and 2K Games. Knows community architecture. He’s building the stuff that matters: onboarding surveys for our 500 to 1000 person community, automated matchmaking for projects, real stakeholder interviews for code of conduct.

“The idea is to get more information about all of the people that we have, create some automation in the backstage to help facilitate connections and relationships and collaboration between members.” Someone in Chilliwack wants to build something? System finds others in Chilliwack who can help.

Udbhav Kansal’s finishing his CS and AI degree at UBC while building agent prototypes for what I call “pretty high profile people.” He handles the plumbing. Stripe integration. Member onboarding. The boring stuff that makes community work at scale.

Platform strategy is simple. WhatsApp got us here but it doesn’t scale. Discord gives us structured discussion plus voice and video. SparkJoy website gives us permanence and payments. David Monty and I mapped this on the boat. Different conversations need different homes.

Resources as Public Goods

Check the resources section if you want to understand the philosophy. Every Angus Reid survey of a thousand British Columbians about AI? Free download.

Five hundred entity Notion database with university AI departments and funding sources? Yours. Ten tier funding list that already got people paid? Take it.

“Udbhav has gotten a couple of cool little contracts out of our community from some pretty high profile people doing some pretty futuristic stuff.” This works. Carla got funded. Udbhav got contracts. Infrastructure creates outcomes.

Wanda from Green Carbon Corp needs AI for carbon credit communications. I built her a writing tool that makes articles with diagrams in her voice. Imran Saleh brings investment banking chops, helping AI companies structure for funding while building bridges to Middle East markets.

The Human Layer

Dimitri Schwartzman drops in late. Local realtor who “dabbles in AI.” His whole family’s in this now. Son Matthew, daughter Eliza hitting Surrey and Vancouver meetups, more kids showing up every week. Three generations learning AI together.

Gabriel nails it: “This is the type of thing that gets me out of my brain state.” That’s the other thing this does. Human connection while everything shifts under our feet. Fiann O’Hagan runs Mind, AI & Consciousness monthly. “Can LLMs be conscious? Is ChatGPT conscious today?”

These aren’t stoner philosophy sessions. These are builders wrestling with what they’re creating. Technical and philosophical threads tangled up together.

Weekly Rhythm, Annual Vision

Calendar structure came from need. Weekly Friday coaching calls for problem solving. Monthly coworking for deeper stuff. Quarterly state of the union for big picture.

“We made a till the end of 2025 and 2026 Google Calendar.” Structure without choking creativity. Framework that lets things emerge.

Nonprofit status unlocks money we couldn’t touch before. Provincial grants, city funding, arts funding.

Revenue moves from my company to the nonprofit. Board is Lorraine Lowe from Space Center, Carol Ann Hilton from Indigenomics Institute, and me.

The Technical Truth

“We’re all getting more technical together.” That’s the real story. Not that AI transforms industries. Obviously it does. But communities can level up their technical game collectively, fast, without schools or bootcamps.

Six months back these people sent Word documents. Now they’re telling AI agents to manage their Git workflows. That’s not incremental. That’s jumping timelines.

The Rival survey data sits in our GitHub. Thousand British Columbians talking about AI. Free. Open. Ready for anyone to dig into. This is ecosystem building: share the primitives, let builders build.

What’s Actually Next

Office hours start next week. Newsletter for community news. Discord server with actual organization. Chilliwack meetup with Rival money. NASA hackathon logistics. Gabriel’s stakeholder report.

But the real next is harder to say out loud. It’s twenty people showing up Friday lunch because like Gabriel said, it gets them “out of their brain state.” It’s Eduardo from Chile with his baby. Michel learning jazz at 60 while shipping apps. Joy running tea talks for people locked out of corporate AI conversations.

This is infrastructure for what comes next. Not the AI revolution. That’s happening anyway. Infrastructure for humans adapting to machines adapting to humans. For leadership that spreads instead of concentrates. For innovation that doesn’t wait for permission slips.

BC + AI Ecosystem isn’t another innovation hub. Isn’t another accelerator. It’s practitioners building bridges while crossing them. No safety net. No corporate sugar daddy. Just people with GitHub accounts and Friday lunches free, making tomorrow accessible to anyone willing to build.

That’s what we’re doing. Twenty people on a Zoom, AI note takers recording everything, building the infrastructure for whatever the hell comes next. Not because someone told us to. Because someone has to. Might as well be us.

Meeting Overview

This inaugural weekly community call launched the BCAI ecosystem’s regular connection opportunities. The call established a weekly rhythm for community members to connect informally, share updates, and collaborate. The format is intentionally casual – “a chance to hang out” while still maintaining some structure to ensure productivity.

Organization Structure

BCAI has recently formalized as a non-profit organization
Vancouver AI serves as the flagship event under the broader BCAI ecosystem umbrella
Current board includes Chris, Lorraine Lowe (Space Center), and Carol Anne Hilton (Indigenomics Institute)
The transition from for-profit to non-profit structure enables better access to funding and support
Regional expansion is underway across BC (Chilliwack, Vancouver Island, Kelowna, Prince George)

Community Infrastructure

New website developed in partnership with SparkJoy
Discord implementation planned to complement existing WhatsApp groups
Improved member onboarding process with Stripe integration
Udbhav and Gabriel Zaro are developing surveys to understand member needs
Resource section on website includes datasets, funding sources, and AI project databases
Community newsletter in development

Hackathon & Projects

Recent hackathon submissions showcased on shared link
Dean’s AI music project (bcai.dev) highlighted as standout submission
Increased technical sophistication with GitHub integration for project submissions
Survey data from 1,000 British Columbians available as datasets

Upcoming Events

NASA Global Space Apps Hackathon collaboration with H.R. MacMillan Space Center (October 4-5)
Monthly online co-working sessions being scheduled
Quarterly “State of the Union” community catchups planned
Potential new Chilliwack AI meetup being explored

Partnerships & Connections

Yin Lau now supporting administrative coordination
Meeting secured with AI Minister Rick Glomack’s office, positioning BCAI as stakeholder
Connecting with other regional AI groups like Maple Ridge AI
Mind, AI, and Consciousness group continuing monthly discussions

Action Items

Members to fill out profiles on the BCAI website

Gabriel Zaro to create Discord onboarding guide

Gabriel Zaro and Udbhav to finalize and distribute community survey

Eduardo and Dean to follow up with Chris about potential Chilliwack meetup

Members to consider participation in NASA Space Apps Hackathon (Oct 4-5)

Yes. Paranoid. No, it’s just how it is these days, you know. I’m removing a couple of them. It’s automatic. Yeah, exactly. They take up a lot of space. I’m gonna grab my power supply, but this is actually just a chance for us to hang out. I got a few agenda items I want to run through, but it’s just a chance to hang out, so I’ll be right back. What were you saying?

It’s coming, Chris. It’s coming.

Oh, Yin! Hi, everyone! Hey, Yin! That’s the first time I see you. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. Yeah, I’m doing good, I’m doing good. Busy, but we’re good. I bet, I bet. Alright, we’re waiting for for Chris to bring the the agenda topics and for more people to join I guess. In general there won’t be an agenda so I’ll explain a little bit more but the idea of this in general is to like just have a

A weekly hour on the books with an open zoom where we can kind of come and check in and stuff. Like I was saying I want to like, I’m still pretty stoked about the hackathon submission so I want to pull open like the hackathon page and show you guys a couple things.

Gabe and Uvda have been working on a couple things. Hey, what’s up, y’all? Gabe and Uvda have been working on a couple things they might want to share and talk about. But in general, it’s like we made a… Till the end of 2025 and 2026 Google Calendar and it’s got weekly this session in it in addition to some other things we’re rolling out like we’re also going to be doing like a monthly one night a month online like co-working session maybe be a little longer again probably like

Unstructured chance for people who are available to pop online once a month, do some co-working. Obviously folks can other things can spring up too, but this is just like a little bit of structure to To get things going. Hey, Michelle, and then we’ll be doing these like wider quarterly like State of the Union address type things that just might be more of like a community catch up, whereas

Those will be more structured and more like us giving presentations and shit and not just us all chatting and stuff but ideally I guess someday people who have a hard time scheduling might bring questions here. Ideas are just a chance to get together and connect.

Sounds awesome. So, for those of us that are here, I’m plugged in. I’m in Chilliwack. Let’s just do a real quick round the room of who’s here. Who you are, how you’re showing up today. What’s on your mind? Starting with Zara. Hey, that’s easy. Put me on the spot right there. Yeah, I’m Gabe Zarro, for those who don’t know me. I’ve been working with community for a long time. I joined Chris on helping launching this and having…

Having a great time just getting to know everybody. What I have on my plate right now is… How you showing up, man? Where’s your head and your heart at? I mean, I’m here. I’m excited, man. Like, this is the type of thing that gets me out of my brain state of, you know, just worrying about that shit.

So it’s good. I appreciate having this type of situation. Luke, who are you and how are you showing up, bro? So I’m Luke and I founded a game studio called Tiny Ghost Studios with my partner Mayumi and we have another partner in Toronto named Zach and so Mayumi is my life partner and she’s also the CEO of the company.

We are building a platform where people can upload their own scripts and AI reads it and puts it into a narrative game. So people can share, we’re trying to build a platform where people can, like a social platform where people can share their own narrative games and stuff like that. But yeah, we’re also, I’m also doing a lot of like animation. I come out through animation.

So I’m really involved with the AI Film Club. So now I’m here. Instead of lunch with Kevin, I’m here. Cool, cool. Darren, who are you and how are you showing up? Hey, everybody. So I’m part of a couple of companies, but the main one is VHT. I’m the chief commercial officer. Dean is the CEO and co-founder.

We’re just starting to get rocking after a slow summer because I was doing a lot of camping, but we’re literally incorporating two companies in the next week or so in Washington and just starting to get things rocking so We’re just trying to plan out the next month or so, and I’m here to have lunch with Chris, because I don’t have a lot of time with my man there, so getting to spend time with Chris and Dean was worth driving out to Chilliwack, and that says something.

Darren, I thought you lived out this way when I was like, hey, I’ll just come out your, I was like, I’ll come out your guy’s way. Let’s meet at Dean’s. And I thought you were, where do you live? I live in Coquitlam. Ah, gotcha. So we have an hour and 20 minutes for me this morning too. So I have to take a gym session in, first thing this morning and then come out here, so. Oh dude, you must be hungry.

I haven’t had a red-white wait-up. I’m on my first slice. Kevin Hayes, who are you and how are you showing up? My name is Kevin Hayes, and I’m… I do have a few businesses around marketing and AI, and today I’m just showing up, hoping to contribute and just be a part of the community, and I love the connection, and I’m a part of a few other communities.

Hey everyone, I am Uddhav. I am helping with the VCI ecosystem. I have been working in the AI space for a while as an industrial automation consultant. I am also finishing my degree in computer science and AI from UBC in the next three months and doing some research with Professor Patrick and stuff like that.

Yeah, trying to get us deep into the field and grow with the community. So excited to be here. My company, um, before the nonprofit existed, just to get this thing off the ground, needed some help. So, uh, the upgrade gave, uh, Ubedaab a $1,500 contract that runs through the end of September.

He’s been helping out with onboarding people and setting up stripes and all sorts of. He’s been super helpful and there’s a couple things we can’t talk about yet, but UBDAVS has gotten a couple cool little contracts out of our community from some pretty high profile.

People doing some pretty futuristic stuff just like getting paid to make little agent prototypes and different things that are being used as like You know proof of concepts to run ideas up the executive chain and stuff so super proud of the work you be doing for us dude and out there in general and

Was maybe more available for work than he is right now, but also interested in the best gigs. Keep your ears out for the best gigs for Ubdub. Also exciting stuff coming from the upgrade very soon. So yeah, everybody’s excited. And yeah, yes. Happy to see Yin Lau here.

Who are you? And how are you showing up today?

Hey everybody, I’m Yin. I run a business as a fractional executive assistant. I’ve got a team of about seven who assist me so I work with many. Across many different areas, admin, marketing, social media, websites, event planning, I’m here to organize people’s shit that they don’t want to deal with.

It’s essentially what I’m around for. So I love what I do and it’s kept me very very busy. And this week coming into September, oh my god, everybody is ready to kick off. So you’ll be seeing a little bit more of me. Over the next little while, as Chris is setting up the ecosystem and I’ll be sort of helping out in the background.

Amazing. Yeah, Yin has been working with me for one week officially, and like, so she helped me book the AI minister, the Honorable Rick Glomack. I had a good connection with him, and then he’s like, yo, get in touch with me. Get in touch with my assistant and book a meeting.

And it’s really hard for me to go through the rounds of cycles of emails that it takes to like get that actually nailed down with their chief of staff. So that meeting already happened. I was able to brief the chief of staff of the AI minister on everything that we’re up to and stuff.

It was a super productive meeting. They identified us as a legitimate stakeholder and we’ll be invited to these roundtables that we’ll be having and it are going to be. I can’t even keep up with the back and forth that it takes to land the fish, so Yin’s been super helpful putting together the proposal and doing the chitchat back and forth that it takes to get me in there to do the part that I really like to do, which is lead creative teams around AI and stuff like that.

Thank you, Yin. And she’s not just here because she’s my assistant. She also took the AI upgrade course last year. She’s on her own AI journey. How many meetups have you been to, Yin?

Most of them, pretty much since the beginning, since you’re an oral student. Hey, I’m Lloyd Mann. I do software development at Affinity Bridge. I work with Matt Carty and Roman Puga and we’re all trying to figure out where to use these tools and how to do it.

I’m going to be dropping out and disappearing for a while because I’m going to Poland to help my wife’s family with some things. I’ll be back in October and back for the October… So just be able to talk and say hey. Cool. That brings up something I wanted to mention so I’ll do it now so I don’t forget. There is a bit of a distinction between the Vancouver AI meetups and the BCAI non-profit that we just registered. And I just want to explain that now because you’ll be able to stay connected to us through calls like this and the other kind of co-working sessions if you choose to or whatever.

So some of you, not all of you, but some of you bought annual memberships last year into Vancouver AI and we had our private channel and stuff like that. And then a whole bunch of stuff has sprung up alongside of these special interest groups and these other regional meetups.

So it made sense to make some umbrella to stick them all in. So when Andrew Reid came around with the rival prize money hackathon stuff, I said to Andrew, I’m only going to do this with you if you help me use it as a catalyst to get the AI meetups out of my company and into a non-profit and the non-profit can hold this wider mission for the BCAI ecosystem.

So that’s why sort of this is all happening right now. It’s because Vancouver AI is going off. All these other things springing up. Rival comes to the table of money. I didn’t want to take the money into my corporation. I needed to make this was the time to set up this non-profit that could hold

And so, you know, what we’re rolling out with this being the first thing ever is really the official programming of the BC + AI ecosystem nonprofit, which will include calls and We’re co-working sessions and other hackathons and other stuff, but and that’ll be separate from the meetups And we welcome you back to the meetups then too and stuff like that So and I can answer more questions about that along the way It’s a little confusing for some people because we’re moving one thing from one thing to kind of another

But I think it’s all pretty clear and I’ve been throwing it, I’ve been building the whole thing with you all in public so uh it’s all down on the permanent record one one place or another. Eduardo who are you sir and how are you showing up?

Hello, everyone. Laura here. I’m actually in Chilliwack. So, virtual is great. I’m a cloud architect. I work for a company called Doit. We do a lot of consulting. I specialize in what is AI. I do a lot of work with companies around the planet there. I have been doing this coding specifically for AI for the last two years. Previously, I have been doing a lot of metal AI, more on the traditional side.

Which seems odd to me in deep learning, which was pretty cutting-edge at some point. But I like how this goes. But yeah, that’s new. I’ll piggyback off that for a quick sec as well, the Chilliwack connection. So I was at Bowen Island last night with the rival team for Round 2 Hackathon winner’s dinner.

Andrew boated us all over there for a rad dinner. And Dale Avernden, who’s one of his key vice presidents there in the rival business, we were sitting together at the table. And I was getting a chance to tell him the bigger arc of the whole story of what we’re doing too. And I was telling him about the like regional, like the Surrey I meet up and the Squamish I meet up. He’s like, have you ever considered Chilliwack?

And I’m like, well, the way that these things emerge is that someone like you says to me, hey, have you ever considered Chilliwack? And like, and then me and you together can see if there’s other people with energy around that. And then if there is, then that can emerge and be a part of the situation too. So to the extent, and I meant to talk to Dean about this today, and that’s why I’m bringing it up right now. So Dean, Eduardo, to the extent you’re interested in possibly doing some sort of.

You guys self-organized in Chilliwack once a month kind of get-together. Rivals offered to sponsor it and be a part of it through Dale Ivernden who lives out here too so. Follow up with me. And one of the reasons why these calls are going to be so valuable for me and for the whole organization is it gets stuff like that out of me onto the transcribed permanent record so we can follow up on it.

If you guys want to do that, let’s do it. Imran, we’re going around the room just saying who we are and how we’re showing up. I’m gonna skip you right now so you can hear a couple more and then I’ll let you jump in, but that’s what we’re up to. And I’ll also say, if y’all gotta drop, drop. Over time, this will be maybe less structured, but we’ll see. But people can pop in and pop out and see if we’re here, say hi, whatever.

Michelle LeBlond, you’re up next, sir.

And if you want, you can turn on your microphone and then otherwise we’re going to just pretend we know what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I brought the camera back on so you could know I was here and I got the mic on now, so that’s good.

So yeah, I’m dropping in today to see what everybody’s up to and to participate in the buzz and tell you a little bit about stuff I’ve been working on. So I’ve been working on some of my apps and my big… Condo in space project. I’ve been learning jazz a lot I’m not coming to grips with being some kind of West Coast elder because I’m over 60 now I’m an old school activist from a long time ago, but since then I worked for corporations. I’ve been like a union activist guy

Have fun with it, and just learn everything that I can and make it happen. Basically I’m a detox, I’m a detox all over the place. I met this guy called Evan Digby. So, sorry, let me take one step back. With our partnership with the Space Center, they’re always wanting to do more cool shit. And they consider us very innovative. And we kind of have a blank check, like in terms of their space, to do whatever we want.

They said to me, literally they’re like, yo, Chris, you’re the innovator. Bring us whatever you want and we’ll, you know, but we work in these very strict parameters with because we’re a city venue, but we’ll try to do it. So one of the things we wanted to do was to align ourselves with the NASA Global Space Apps Hackathon.

There’s this really cool hackathon that happened like the last 10 years. It’s like the premier hackathon of all hackathons in some ways. Especially as it comes to distributed hackathons, so NASA puts out like 20 data sets They put out like 20 problems like some of the data sets are like live satellite feeds from NASA satellites and stuff monitoring, you know, like

Hydration on surface groundwater or something like that. I mean, it’s amazing data that you get access to so Space Center wanted to do something there said that we kind of could do something there. So I was like All right, let me see what’s going on out there. When is the dates even for the Space Apps Challenge and what’s going on? So I looked it up. Turns out there’s a Vancouver group that did something at UBC last year run by this guy, Evan Digby.

It works for some aerospace company in AI and robotics or something like that. So I started reaching out to him. He was amenable to hearing from me. And then Space Center was amenable to hearing from him. So I put them together. And the announcement is BCAI plus NASA plus the H.R. MacMillan Space Center are putting on a hackathon, an overnight real-life real hackathon, like not our distributed ones like we have been running where they run over six weeks. But this is like.

Locked in, not locked in, but you know. Space Center access, 24 hours. We’re gonna come together on Friday. I think it might even be two nights and present our projects on. Sunday. Teams are already forming and stuff like that. There’s probably you can propose your own project or align with one of the ones that are out there. If you look, it’s pretty interesting. There’s already like

50 people or so that Evans bring into the table plus whatever we bring to the table with it’s gonna be free He’s not allowed to charge money there might be some ways to monetize it somehow but like like selling shirts or hats or something, but Yeah, so we’re gonna help put on a like a space pack-a-thon at Space Center with these guys I think it’s October 4th and 5th, but it’s on the website. We’ll figure it out

So maybe maybe you guys want to help organize or document our side of that or something Michelle or get involved in some way I don’t know yeah I saw that yeah thanks I’m already on there now I’m on it I got a project too I love it, dude. I love it. And connect with Evan Digby. He came to our last meetup and he’s joined our groups. I think he even paid to be a member. I think he’s a member and stuff. So yeah, Evan Digby, keep your eyes and ears out for that guy.

Ms. Wanda, who are you and how are you showing up? Well, I’m good, thank you. I’ve been working on green carbon credit stuff. But it’s going really well. It’s kind of global. I got hundreds of people and it’s keeping me really busy but I love AI and what I want to do is hopefully use AI to craft some of the

Excuse me, trading software I want to build. So I’ll probably come to you for, you know, maybe Udbob or somebody. Lots of people in your group that are coders and programmers that could help me with that. Yeah, I’ve been able to help Wanda a little bit.

I built like a little AI writing tool that takes Wanda’s ideas about… It generates articles with diagrams and stuff in her kind of voice and style that she can use for her comms and PR needs and stuff. I haven’t barely even got a chance to show anyone that yet, but it works and it’s really cool. So thanks for being here, Wanda. Fionn, you’re up next, sir. Who are you and how are you showing up?

Um, I’m doing pretty good, actually. Feels like the end of summer here in sunny Haiti, but I’m still pretty happy the sun is shining. I work on website performance and I’ve got a few new projects coming out of how to How to build a performance education and practice then for teams of developers and websites. Yeah, cool.

Yeah, Fionn’s a big part of the Mind, AI, and Consciousness group, which is one of the thriving subgroups in our little world. You want to mention what’s up with that, maybe? Yeah, um, and so I will say my name’s Finn, but despite weird spelling it’s confusing. God bless you correcting me because I have been saying it wrong. I was saying I spelled it Fionn some places and stuff, so thank you sir.

I’ve been used to it my entire life, don’t you think it’s? Yeah. Yeah, so mind, AI, and consciousness, I guess most of you probably… It’s really a reading group on philosophy discussion. The next one, we skipped August. It’s usually once a month. I’ll look it up and put it in the chat in a minute, but just maybe mention what it is. Yeah, yeah, so the next one is around quantum…

Quantum computing and how that might be interesting for consciousness and more generally we’re really talking about, on one hand, can LLMs be conscious? It’s actually PC-conscious today, and if you don’t believe that, could it be maybe, like, a couple of years from now? And also, even more so, what does that tell us about humans? What’s interesting about how people think?

based on what we know from like something that looks like another conscious person but is obviously very alien in the way that it’s built and doesn’t think in the same way as There’s people, so lots of interesting chats. And yeah, join the WhatsApp group if you’re not on it. Thanks, Finn. Up next, I got the AI and construction guy, Will Munjack. I saw him a second ago. If you, yeah, there he is.

My computer doesn’t like zoom, so no camera. Yeah, good to see you all. What’s up? I’m the AI and construction guy. I’ve worked in the construction industry for a few years. I’m looking at how we can use AI in construction workflows and helping with the change management of AI at my company. I work for an electrical contractor.

Yeah, I’m still on my lunch break to be honest. I’m like half listening, half replying to emails. I just wanted to see what was going on. Welcome sir. Joy, and I’m not sure if I met you yet unless that’s Jyoti. Oh, yes, it is Jyoti. Hello, Joy. Hi. Of course, that’s me. So, yeah, thanks, Chris. Thank you for putting up the thing. I think I’m able to see everyone.

For those who haven’t met me yet, I go by Joy, and my name is Joy Sharma. I work as a SP, ERP consultant, with a service company. I’m pretty new to the field. I have started exploring on ethical AI. And happen to join you can safety AI safety school and I’ll be completing my course in the next six months, sorry six weeks and as soon as I complete it probably I’ll be joining.

I’m researching more on ethical AI. That’s where my interest is for AI. And you’re getting an event started or something? Yes, I have started AI for a living community because I felt the need that everybody needs to know what kind of data we are. Giving to these data models and what’s happening around. Many of the people don’t know about it because they cannot join these events, which happen mostly around the corporate.

So this one is more like a tea talk and people just show up and we meet every Thursday for an hour. Joy was the one that broke the Guinness Book of World Records last weekend. Doing what? That’s really fun. Joy’s been showing up at all the coolest events around town and somehow she showed up at ours and we connected strongly and she’s been out to the Surrey AI event and it’s just been fun fun getting to know you and nice to see you at work.

I’ve always seen you off duty so it’s it’s cool to see your your work. It’s at home. Like, work at home. Awesome. Thank you all for having me, firstly. Chris, for introducing me to Vancouver AI. My name is Imran. It’s been two years that I’ve settled in Vancouver. I’ve been born and brought up in the Middle East. And a few years back, I got my interest in

So I’ve been through the journey of crypto development. I’ve been a CTO for that. I’ve been in consulting for 10 years, construction for 10. But lately, I I got a few years back, my interest in finance. And ever since I’ve been wife coding for finance teams basically.

Helping them with AI, one of the key things I bring in is I help a bunch of investment bankers and advisors to invest in AI companies as well as Prepare companies to set up their structuring for investments. So that’s one of the things we do and I’m heavily vested.

in AI in the Middle East. So hopefully learn something from there and take it to other regions as well. chance to experience the culture. There’s two months so it was like just long enough for the the newness of it all to wear off and me to start to actually observe some of the more under the surface differences. So it was pretty cool man. Welcome.

Okay, I got a couple things I want to point you all at and then we’ll maybe we’ll do just a bit of a who has things they need to share and then I’ll check with Ubdop to make sure there’s and Zaro to see what they got but Um, drop the link on the chat. This is the hackathon submissions. The ones that are marooned are kind of the top projects It’s one missing as a top project One, two, three

I feel like I’m missing one but that’s okay. Oh, where’s Bear and Bunny?

Anyway, I think I might have deleted one somehow. Do you guys see Sev on there?

Isn’t it the second last one, Ben 7? Yeah, I don’t see Sev, Bear and Bunny. That’s so weird. Well anyway, I’ll grab that one too. Sev was one of the top projects also and I don’t see it here. I probably accidentally cut and pasted it. Oh, I guess it was probably number 6.

Here’s a little Notion tutorial, Zorro. You guys know that Notion is my tool of choice and so if I find that page for round three…

Because you’re giving a tutorial, but probably in another browser. What’s that? If I… there’s just like shit all over my screen from running this Zoom, you know. If we go here and we go to version history, it saves out all your versions from since the beginning of time. Let me just collapse that so I can see. And so when did I delete Sev?

Wasn’t yesterday.

There he is. He’s back. Oh, Dimitri just joined. All right, there he is. Hey Dimitri, we just went around the room and said who we are and how we’re showing up. Why don’t you say who you are and how you’re showing up, sir?

Okay I found it so I’m gonna restore from here. In a second after this is done if you guys restore that there you go if you restore if you refresh that page that I sent you the link in the chat. They should all be there now. So anyway, yeah, this is all the projects. I’m glad I noticed that I deleted one. You should check through them. Underneath these things, there’s a lot of awesome shit. There’s everyone’s actual submission. This is like a 15-minute poetry video.

There’s actual documentation and stuff like that. And some of my AI summaries of things and some screenshots of their stuff. So if you wanna check out that. And like, you know, don’t snooze on Dean’s project, right? If you haven’t explored it, it is so cool.

You go to bcai.dev

I’ll drop the link in the chat in a sec.

You’d think as much time as I spend on Zoom, I’d be super expert in navigating my way around all the different widgets and shit, but… Oh good, someone got… someone beat me there. Um, okay, so right, it’s this website and stuff, and you know, you can play songs right here from the, um, top bar. Is the music coming through? No, okay, music’s not coming through.

Play it on your side. You can go through. These are all the songs. If you slide down a little while, farther right to advanced AI music dashboard. You know, he’s got all these stats on everything, what the songs are all about. I forget exactly where the lyrics all live, but he’s got all the lyrics all in here and stuff. And the album’s fucking great.

There are some songs about you people. You can download the mp3s here. He was doing statistics. Where did the statistics go?

Anyway, we listened to this album on the boat last night on the way up, you know top engagement most liked songs and then like, you know here he’s got where the traffic’s coming from and crazy vibe coded system on top of the the rival data set but but check that one out it’s one of my my favorite projects and you know check out Prajwal and Sav’s projects too because they’re highly technical.

And they’re worth digging into. In fact, our GitHub…

There’s a GitHub project repository. So we’re all getting, one of the cool things about this hackathon is we’re all getting more technical together. So the first couple rounds of the hackathon, I had people emailing us in, you know, Word docs and PDFs and YouTube videos.

This time around, I’ve got people checking the data out from our GitHub repository and checking their projects back in. And it’s kind of cool because we’re all forming connections between each other on GitHub and other side conversations and it increases the interconnectedness and technical chops of everyone who participated in the hackathon together. And I think it really kind of increases what we’re capable of as a group.

So I think it’s pretty cool. The project lives somewhere here. I wasn’t prepared to do this right this second. But event and hackathon 03. I think next time around I’m going to run it as an actual project and I think I just um so this was like where you could download the survey data from.

A bunch of people merged in pull requests with their projects onto this submissions folder here. You can see six of the projects submitted on VIA. GitHub. Which I considered a really cool win for the whole project that we were going to be using this tech for. And a lot of people did it by using tools like Cloud Code or Cursor that had their GitHub credentials and they were telling their AIs to check code back in and out and stuff too.

So like… These are advanced AI engineering techniques that we’ve kind of like adopted into the hackathon process. Let me take a breath. And throw it to Zara.

Why me? Dimitri, he just joined. I would love to hear from him. You asked him, I don’t know if he was listening, but we just went around and did the rounds. Everybody introduced themselves and talked about how they’re showing up, so I would love to hear that.

Yeah, just like a quick, who’s Dimitri and how are you showing up today? Well, I just managed to glance at my phone and it had a Zoom link and I saw Oupdava. I’m thinking, OK, I have a few minutes of time. I would love to join in. I’m sorry I missed the rest of you. I don’t think I know most of you, but I know some of you well. I’m a local realtor who dabbles in AI and tries to use AI to the benefits of my clients.

Good deals out there and I’m a sponsor of AI event. I think it’s one of the best things that I’ve joined up a number of months ago, maybe over a year ago now. And I’m just thrilled to be learning a lot of things and sharing my knowledge with people that are interested.

They’re interested in AI and what it’s capable of. Great to see you, Dimitri. And popping in and popping out is totally appropriate. Sometime if you guys have this call on your schedule and you just want to come in and say hi, we’ll try to make time. Thank you everybody.

Met with Chris and we started to chat about communities and was lucky enough to get involved right before we turned this into the NPO situation and launched it like this. So what we’re preparing on the backstage here is we’re getting out some onboarding steps, a survey that will go out for all the members and all of the casuals as well, not only the

I’m looking at the members here and thinking you guys are core now, but there’s also like the big group with brain trust and all those 500 up to 1000 people. So the idea is to get more information about All of the people that we have create some automation in the backstage as well to help facilitate connections and relationships and collaboration between members so if someone is

Looking to create a project that’s very close to someone else’s idea. We’ll be able to find that and introduce people. If there’s someone that wants to fund a project or create a new SIG, a new group, a new meetup like you guys were talking about, chill and walk here.

This system would help us find all of the people in Chilliwock and say, hey, here’s a group for you to start talking about it and see if it’s if it’s viable. So the idea is to create this brain, this. Onboarding that then feeds a data set for us to be able to create this matchmaking sort of system on the background and also for us to help define.

What BCAI’s objectives are from a more global perspective? What are people coming in to to see happen? What are people coming in and wanting to see happen and how can we help? Reach those objectives and goals. Yeah, that’s also like people have had a lot to offer too, and we haven’t had a structured way to receive a lot of people’s offers. They have volunteerism or, you know.

Things, you know, that are useful to the… And so this will also ask, you know, what people have to contribute or what they want to share or, you know, roles they want to play and stuff. Will you also talk about the interviews leading to the Code of Conduct and all that kind of stuff?

Precisely. Yeah, so expect a survey from this this novel that I just talked about. It will be coming soon. On top of that, I have been to try and define what we were going to do a survey people on. I was meeting with some prominent members. I have to meet up with you, Dimitri, later on as well. Some people that have been here for a long time and that have very different angles on how they see BCAI.

I’ve met with Loki, I’ve met with Patrick, I’ve met with Udbav, I’ve met with Lorraine from the Space Center and everybody has a very specific point of view of what BCAI should serve and how it works and how it started and what they would want to see happening.

So I’m also preparing a report on those interviews and it should be very interesting to see some soundbites from very different perspectives of what BCAI… is able to achieve just by meeting with these people, but also what we should be aiming for, you know, from their perspective. So it’s an exercise of understanding and identifying the community as one.

and also understanding what people join this community for and are expecting of it. So it’s awesome to get this from a fresh perspective. kind of new. I think I’ve come to only four events so far. But yeah, getting this is really fun. And also, one last thing.

Starting to prepare us as Chris kind of spoiled uh sent out a spoiler alert there uh we’re trying to prepare a discord server so that we have options for keeping up forum organized thoughts the whatsapp is becoming bigger and bigger with more and more people so sometimes it’s hard to come in and see that big stream of you know like just messages and you don’t know where to start or where to to look for

This should help create this forum where you can come in and see the topics and then click on the topics and then see the conversation so that you can follow up with what you want more than like just trying to find. The needle in the haystack. That’s right. I want to open up to questions in just a minute, so I’m going to be blurting out a couple things pretty fast as we… We are going to end this at 1, because that way people know that it starts at noon and ends at 1 and they come and we don’t hang out all afternoon.

Yo Zara, it was a good thing I did that spoiler alert because I invited David Monte on the boat last night and so we got a chance to sit down and David Monte runs SparkJoy and SparkJoy built our website and so… The ability to take payments for memberships is only one of the cool features. It was the first one, the one that’s necessary to bring us together. But another one is going to be some other threading of forums and some archiving of what’s happened to this thing and stuff.

So we talked about that, but the reason I bring it up is because he said, yeah, I heard you and Zara are doing some Discord stuff. That’s great. He understands better now how the website and the Discord and the WhatsApp will sit together to serve kind of like the variety of kind of communications needs.

And so. WhatsApp’s not going away, it’s what brought us together, but now that there’s a bunch of us, it’s not the right place for like, the Matt group is the perfect example. Their talks are deep and intense and. They’re hard to thread through and also they’re of value once the discussion is done and so you want a permalink there and you want to be able to share that and stuff so we’re going to have some discord threads for members some areas you know for people who want to connect in that way we’ll keep running whatsapp in the way that we do.

And then we’ll have some website stuff roll out over time through SparkJoy and stuff like that. So that’s kind of the plan around that.

Feel free to, let’s do like 10 minutes of questions and then wrap this shit up. If there are no questions, we’ll throw it to Oobdob for some updates, but.

Feel free to jump in or raise your hand. I’ll call your name, whatever you like. Hey Chris, I have a question. Thank you. About Discord. I’ve used it a little bit. I’m sure most of the members have used it much more than I have. If I wanted to find out…

Where to learn the basics of it? Do you just go on YouTube and figure that out? Or is there a quick thing that you can maybe send out that you think is the best one? I think both of those things are a good idea. I’d throw to Zara, but I think we’ll make a little onboarding guide for people moving from WhatsApp to Discord.

And then, you know, there’s a variety of things out there for sure. Best in class tool, but at the same time I ain’t gonna send you off to the public internet just search around for discord tutorials So what you gotta say Zaro? No, that’s a great point. That was part of the conversation when we were trying to define the Forum should we go to reddit?

Should we go to discord? Should we do something else? One of the things was like, well, Discord is not as, you know, general yet, but it’s a very good tool. So yeah, let’s definitely, I’ll investigate and do like at least a quick playbook so that people know how to onboard and how to use it right away and are not lost.

I got one more little editorial here. So amongst like… Tools of this class, there’s pretty much like Slack or there’s Discord. And we do get Slack for free through our new non-profit and stuff like that. But Discord is well established in like the AI communities. A lot of AIs started there. Like mid-journey, before it ever had a website or a user interface, the only place you could use it was Discord.

Suno and Udio, those music ones that are so cool now, they didn’t have apps last year. They did websites. They were on Discord. And so in that way, and then also, you know, gamers, geeks, builders, it has chops in those areas, whereas slack is more common with our work lives and our work selves and that and even like the business kind of side of things versus like the builder side of things.

So like, let’s just call the two tools equal more or less. But I’m kind of like, and at some points you got to choose and some people will like one more and some people like another more, but but discord seems like a good place because it’s sort of like AI centric first.

DIY ground up first. It’s not necessarily a corporate tool. You’re gonna be issued when you start work at KPMG or something So that’s a little bit why they’re both good. We’re gonna go this way We may go another way someday, but we’re not gonna whiplash everybody all around.

We’re gonna do it gradually

Another question, if you don’t mind. Discord versus Reddit. What are the benefits of one or the other? I’ll let you… Gabe, sorry, you got some answers to that, but I mean… Yeah, no, for sure. I think that Discord has a little bit more of the live conversation benefits, you know, like the WhatsApp. You can see it was…

online at the moment and you have like a live real-time type of conversation. You also have the voice channels and the video channels just like Zoom. You can join like with Private and permalinked and secure. And like, there’s just a thousand tools, you know? And so, yeah, it’s a fun discussion, but it also can also end up in like an evangelical war between people who love this tool more than that tool or whatever. And so I’ve been trying to avoid that a little bit while also kind of keeping everybody.

Oh, Luke’s got one in the chat. Let me just take a quick. Can you talk more about the nonprofit and how it fits with community meetups so far? Is it gonna change anything practically? Very, very practically, it’s just gonna take the revenue out of my company and into the nonprofit when it comes to the Vancouver AI meetups. I think it will actually provide a lot more infrastructure over time because it is the vehicle that can receive a bunch of like…

Provincial, city, arts funding type stuff where my company wasn’t the right vehicle for a lot of that. Does that begin to touch on the things that you’re talking about? I wonder what else I could say. Yeah, I think so. I was just wondering if there was much of a distinction or if it’s just kind of more structural change, which I think you’re saying it’s more of a structural change in the background, right? I would think of it as a distinction. The way I think of it is Vancouver AI is the flagship event of BC + AI ecosystem, of which there’s like seven different types of events that take place that you’ll see on our events calendar.

from Surrey AI to Mac to the education and AI ethos labs. So I think of all those as like kind of distinct subgroups and event series that take place under now this kind of non-profit that is able to provide Some funding, and connection, and support, and infrastructure, and community over time. Cool. Also, like, our bylaws are brand new. I haven’t published them anywhere yet. I plan to share them with y’all. I made a…

Notebook LM podcast from it that was really, really interesting. And I shared that on some channels. I can share it again. And we’ll start to collect those things together into some spaces. There are some things that are wrong on the website right now.

Some like placeholder content from my notion that got moved through the spark joy process ended up on our websites. It’s just like, I’m not the executive director. I’m just a director. There’s just some little updates that need to be changed. Nothing of consequence or substantial, but poke around the website. And then also, I’ll drop a link to the Notion, which has a lot of supplementary stuff as well.

Is there, do you guys have a board yet? Yes, Lorraine Lowe from Space Center, myself and Carol Anne Hilton from Indigenomics Institute are the board. That is accurate on the website at the moment. Nice! Um, hold on one second.

And…

And um You know, we’ll be open to all sorts of things like How people join the board and how sub committees are formed and shared and stuff But like we probably won’t be adjusting the main structure of things for the first year we’ll be trying to like build the infrastructure underneath kind of at as it is and then like

Probably once, you know, because also like we’re not critical mass or quorum yet vis a vis where I see the room growing, you know, I could see, you know, maybe by next week having 100 people was the goal for today, but I haven’t quite looked but I could see having 100 people soon.

500 by the end of the year. I’ve been doing lots of work on Vancouver Island, Kelowna, Prince George You know this group will continue to grow to not just be a Container for Vancouver AI but to bring together some other groups that are happening around in the province And I’ve already started to do that. Like I found a Maple Ridge AI crew. They came to our last meetup They want to be a part of the thing

So I’ll be looking to connect with others, share the vision, invite them in, see what happens. Yeah. Nice.

BloopDop, you got anything you want to share?

Yeah, we’ve finally gotten a smoother onboarding process for our members with payments and stripe set up better. I’ll be working on the community onboarding and stuff. And yeah, we’re excited to launch these. office hours and newsletters that you’d see coming in for the next week and officially sharing the annual calendar with you guys.

So that’s where we’re at, yeah.

Anyone else have questions or things you want to talk about? One quick one. This Zoom will be saved somewhere, right? Yeah, I think that’s the idea. I think I will… I think I’ll do a few things. I’ll transcribe it and post the video, probably to Notion for us. And then I’ll probably use the transcript through my assistants to write some sort of a…

Recap output thing that I’ll share on the channel, something like that.

Great, thank you.

In the resources section on the website there’s some kind of cool and useful stuff that will give you an idea some of the types of things that I want to be building out over the next little while.

Also things that you can kind of like contribute to or might get your wheels turning about stuff. So if you go to resources.

You know, like, so this is all of our hackathon data sets, which are, you know, so we ask questions through Angus Read Forums to a thousand British Columbians at a time, and the data that comes back is freely available to you all, and it’s pretty interesting if you want to know about it.

Canadian identity or British Columbians’ attitudes towards AI, kind of interesting. This is just a ChatGPT chatbot that has a lot of our docs and programs and stuff like that in there as well as a whole bunch of industry data and whatever I can kind of dig together from my personal knowledge base as I’ve been building this stuff over the last two years.

cool chat GPT. This is a like 500 entity notion database with all sorts of AI projects and departments of universities with contact information and all sorts of. stuff, you know, funding data, things like that. This is a actual list of 10 tiers of different types of AI related funding for nonprofits, individuals, companies.

Ove’s been funded out of here. Carla’s been funded out of here. There’s, there’s, there’s, this, this has been my best attempt at keeping on my running list and then I just made it pretty and put it on the internet for everyone or whatever, but. And also Vanessa Sanchez helped out with that a little bit too last year. So yeah, that’s some of the type of stuff that other resources we want to make available. I can give you access to lots of these things if you want to.

Add more ecosystem data, find more funding sources, or make any of these things better. These will be things for us to maintain together over time. Yeah. So Chris, I have a question. What is this process to kind of submit some sort of a community news?

We don’t have one yet, but we’re developing it. So it will be maybe just get that over to Zaro and Ubdov, and maybe they might ask you to, they might develop a process around your request and then ask you to go through the process. So it might take double time the first time and then save everybody else time the next time, something like that.

It’s probably like, what do you want us to share? Give us a link, give us an image, something like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, on that note, we’re also preparing like, the newsletters, so. Those are, there’s space for some information to come through those as well. This is where our yet-to-be-developed community guidelines meet our submission forms. It’s like.

It’ll say on there somewhere, or I’ll even just say now, it’d be great if the things that are submitted are of value to the community beyond just an advertisement or a click my code, you know, or whatever. So either it’s personal commentary, and I’m not calling you out, Imran.

I’m just putting it down on the record that the things that will be chosen for the community newsletter will be the things that are of value to the community from the things that are submitted. or something like that, so, yeah.

Sounds good.

Because I ain’t gonna spam you all up with everybody else’s offers or something like that. There might be an extended section at the bottom where it’s like, and everything else.

All right. Cool, well thanks for coming everybody. Welcome to just keep telling folks what we’re up to, dropping them links and letting them know that… There’s something going on here, and it’s a good time to become a part of it. You’re all founding members. Oh, fill out your little profile on the website if you haven’t already. There’s an ability. If you don’t know how to do it, Oobdobble will sort you out.

I just got mine filled out yesterday, but you know, it’s a chance to see our faces and click each other’s links.

Any closing words, anyone? It was just awesome to see everybody here. Alright. Nice to meet some of you that I hadn’t met yet. Thanks for watching! Hey Ubdov, is it a recurring meeting that you sent out? This one wasn’t. So the next time you see it, it’ll be a recurring one and you can just add it and drop in when you feel like it. Beautiful. Yeah.

Much appreciated, nice to meet you all. KK over and out from Chilliwack. So soon all. Bye. Bye.

Meeting Overview

Organization Structure

BCAI has recently formalized as a non-profit organization
Vancouver AI serves as the flagship event under the broader BCAI ecosystem umbrella
Current board includes Chris, Lorraine Lowe (Space Center), and Carol Anne Hilton (Indigenomics Institute)
The transition from for-profit to non-profit structure enables better access to funding and support
Regional expansion is underway across BC (Chilliwack, Vancouver Island, Kelowna, Prince George)

Community Infrastructure

New website developed in partnership with SparkJoy
Discord implementation planned to complement existing WhatsApp groups
Improved member onboarding process with Stripe integration
Udbhav and Gabriel Zaro are developing surveys to understand member needs
Resource section on website includes datasets, funding sources, and AI project databases
Community newsletter in development

Hackathon & Projects

Recent hackathon submissions showcased on shared link
Dean’s AI music project (bcai.dev) highlighted as standout submission
Increased technical sophistication with GitHub integration for project submissions
Survey data from 1,000 British Columbians available as datasets

Upcoming Events

NASA Global Space Apps Hackathon collaboration with H.R. MacMillan Space Center (October 4-5)
Monthly online co-working sessions being scheduled
Quarterly “State of the Union” community catchups planned
Potential new Chilliwack AI meetup being explored

Partnerships & Connections

Yin Lau now supporting administrative coordination
Meeting secured with AI Minister Rick Glomack’s office, positioning BCAI as stakeholder
Connecting with other regional AI groups like Maple Ridge AI
Mind, AI, and Consciousness group continuing monthly discussions

Action Items

Members to fill out profiles on the BCAI website

Gabriel Zaro to create Discord onboarding guide

Gabriel Zaro and Udbhav to finalize and distribute community survey

Eduardo and Dean to follow up with Chris about potential Chilliwack meetup

Members to consider participation in NASA Space Apps Hackathon (Oct 4-5)

It’s coming, Chris. It’s coming.

Who are you? And how are you showing up today?

Thank you, Yin. And she’s not just here because she’s my assistant. She also took the AI upgrade course last year. She’s on her own AI journey. How many meetups have you been to, Yin?

Michelle LeBlond, you’re up next, sir.

I feel like I’m missing one but that’s okay. Oh, where’s Bear and Bunny?

Anyway, I think I might have deleted one somehow. Do you guys see Sev on there?

Here’s a little Notion tutorial, Zorro. You guys know that Notion is my tool of choice and so if I find that page for round three…

Wasn’t yesterday.

You go to bcai.dev

I’ll drop the link in the chat in a sec.

There are some songs about you people. You can download the mp3s here. He was doing statistics. Where did the statistics go?

And they’re worth digging into. In fact, our GitHub…

So like… These are advanced AI engineering techniques that we’ve kind of like adopted into the hackathon process. Let me take a breath. And throw it to Zara.

And then we’ll have some website stuff roll out over time through SparkJoy and stuff like that. So that’s kind of the plan around that.

Feel free to, let’s do like 10 minutes of questions and then wrap this shit up. If there are no questions, we’ll throw it to Oobdob for some updates, but.

We’re gonna do it gradually

And…

So I’ll be looking to connect with others, share the vision, invite them in, see what happens. Yeah. Nice.

BloopDop, you got anything you want to share?

So that’s where we’re at, yeah.

Recap output thing that I’ll share on the channel, something like that.

Great, thank you.

In the resources section on the website there’s some kind of cool and useful stuff that will give you an idea some of the types of things that I want to be building out over the next little while.

Also things that you can kind of like contribute to or might get your wheels turning about stuff. So if you go to resources.

Sounds good.

Because I ain’t gonna spam you all up with everybody else’s offers or something like that. There might be an extended section at the bottom where it’s like, and everything else.

I just got mine filled out yesterday, but you know, it’s a chance to see our faces and click each other’s links.

Much appreciated, nice to meet you all. KK over and out from Chilliwack. So soon all. Bye. Bye.