The paper
“Building a Grass Roots AI Community of Practice: A Vancouver-Centered Use Case” was written by Patrick Pennefather, David Gaertner and Kris Krüg and published in BC Studies on April 14, 2025.
The paper asks a deceptively practical question: what makes a local technology community hold together? Its answer is not a platform or a growth hack. It is a balance of regular gatherings, porous participation, continuous documentation, social sharing, and room for both formal and informal learning.
Why this record matters
Vancouver AI grew through repeated contact: artists meeting engineers, researchers meeting organizers, skeptics meeting people who were already building. The paper treats that mixture as situated knowledge. What works here is specific to this place and its history, but the underlying practices can help other communities build their own version without copying Vancouver’s surface style.
That distinction matters. A community of practice is not valuable because everyone agrees about generative AI. It is valuable because people can experiment with it, integrate it, resist it, and learn in public without having to pretend the tensions have been resolved.