On July 3, 2026, the BC + AI public site quietly crossed a threshold.
The public website stopped being the old WordPress front door and became the new Next.js site. The switch was technical on paper: DNS records, Vercel environment variables, smoke tests, redirects, webhook checks, rollback notes. But the real story is simpler.
The community got big enough that it needed infrastructure.
BC + AI began as rooms: meetups, demos, screenings, late questions, hallway introductions, and people trying to understand what AI was doing to their work and what they could do back. Those rooms are still the point. The new website exists because the rooms started producing more than a calendar could hold.
They produced recaps. Videos. Photos. Reading lists. Policy notes. Certification paths. Public resources. Regional chapters. Working groups. Member accounts. A directory. A festival. A growing archive of people thinking in public together.
At a certain scale, a website stops being a brochure. It becomes public memory.
The room grew
The current BC + AI homepage says it plainly: this is a grassroots British Columbia community building practical, responsible AI capacity from Vancouver to Surrey to the Comox Valley.
The public numbers are intentionally conservative: 250+ community members, 94+ events since 2023, and 4 BC regions. The deeper signal is not the size. It is the shape.
What started as one Vancouver AI room has become a network of regional chapters and focused circles: Vancouver AI, Surrey AI, Comox Valley AI, AI Film Club, Mind, AI, and Consciousness, Ed + AI, AI Ethical Futures Lab, Life Sciences & AI, Applied & Industrial AI, and more forming around the questions people keep bringing back.
Community members in conversation at a Vancouver AI gathering. Photo: Michelle Diamond / ContentCo.
That growth has been documented from the inside and the outside. A BC Studies case study framed the Vancouver AI community as a place-based community of practice built through regular engagement, inclusivity, documentation, social sharing, and informal learning. We wrote about that moment in Documenting the BC + AI Ecosystem Movement.
The new site is the operational version of that insight.
Not a pitch deck. Not a landing page. A living record of what happens when people keep showing up.
Why the rebuild mattered
WordPress carried the early years. It held pages, posts, forms, uploads, and enough duct tape to keep the public surface alive while the community kept moving.
WordPress is not gone. It still matters behind the scenes for uploads and admin workflows. But it is no longer the public-domain surface for the association.
The new job is bigger.
BC + AI now needs:
- event pages that preserve what happened, not just what is coming next
- recaps, photos, videos, and quotes from the room in one public archive
- member signup, account, and profile flows that can grow with the association
- community pages that make the regional and topical rooms legible
- program hubs for work like the Animation Accelerator Field Guide, Responsible AI Professional certification, AI Upgrade, and the Wild Salmon Program
- a public changelog so members and partners can see the work, not just the announcement
- search, metadata, social cards, RSS, redirects, and accessibility checks that make the work easier to find and harder to lose
That is why this rebuild was not just a redesign. It was an infrastructure project for a community that had already outgrown the old frame.
How we moved without breaking the room
The migration followed a simple rule: move the low-risk public memory first, keep the money and identity systems gated until the proof was good, and write down the rollback path before touching the live surface.
News moved into the Next.js content system. Images were decoupled from WordPress. Redirects and canonicals were mapped. The changelog became a native operator log with public receipts. Events, videos, program pages, and social cards moved into the same repo-shaped system.
Membership came later because membership is not just a page. It is money, identity, receipts, email, certificates, and trust all touching the same rail.
Before the domain flip, the launch checklist required live proof: a real member purchase through the native pipeline, webhook processing, member and subscription projection, welcome and admin email markers, Search Console verification, launch smoke checks, Cloudflare rollback records, Stripe customer email settings, and a clear path back to WordPress if routing failed.
That is not glamorous work. It is the work that lets a public community move without asking members to absorb the chaos.
What is now live
The new BC + AI public site is a Next.js public site with the community's operating surface built in.
The launch window brought together:
- a native Communities section for regional chapters and focused groups
- Membership, join, account, and profile-completion flows
- an events archive with recaps, media, galleries, and structured data
- native News with RSS, metadata, social cards, and migration receipts
- the video archive, with talks and recordings from the community
- Futureproof Festival as a real public route instead of a loose note
- the Wild Salmon Program as an interactive white paper
- the Animation Accelerator Field Guide, including public resources and production tools
- a native public changelog that tracks the rebuild in plain English
Programs like the Animation Accelerator now have a clearer public path from story to resources to registration.
The current baseline shows 356 guarded app routes/pages, 271 app tests, 54 agentic tests, and 171 videos. Next's build report for this branch still notes 1,824 prerendered routes. Those numbers will keep moving because the point is not to freeze the site. The point is to keep the public record close to the work.
The quotes that kept coming back
The best launch language did not come from the migration docs. It came from the rooms.
At the AI Ethical Futures Lab, people kept returning to the same practical ethics: bring "the 95%" along, treat education as kindness, build a bigger boat, and make sure community voices reach decision-makers before the decisions are already made.
That is the real website brief.
The site should help people catch up before they walk into the next room. It should make the work legible to partners without flattening the culture. It should give members a place to belong, organizers a place to point, and future collaborators a way to find the thread.
The phrase on the homepage is the sharpest summary we have:
Ecosystem, Not Empire.
That is what launched.
Not a replacement for the rooms. A way to keep faith with them.
Take a seat, pick a room, bring your question
If you are new here, start small.
Become a member. Pick a community. Come to an event. Read the changelog if you want the operator story. Watch a talk if you need to catch up. Bring the question that will not leave you alone.
BC + AI is still built the same way it started: people in rooms, sharing what they know, testing what is possible, arguing honestly about what should happen next.
The new site just gives that work a stronger place to live.