We Need to Talk About AI: Why a Vancouver Meetup Became a National Invitation

From the back of the room that night, it was mostly silhouettes: rows of heads facing a lit stage and a screen that read Vancouver: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT AI. Salmon and city skyline behind the type. Two hundred-some people in the room, most of them regulars, a few of them there for the first time because someone had dragged them along.

Nobody in that room needed convincing that AI was worth talking about. They'd been showing up to do exactly that, once a month, for thirty-one months running. What that slide was actually announcing is that the conversation was outgrowing the room. Three days at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre from October 28 to 30, built by the same community, for a country that hasn't had a room quite like this one yet.

The room is already talking

Futureproof Festival didn't start as a festival. It started as Vancouver AI, a meetup that began in the community's own accounting somewhere around the end of 2023, and has run monthly ever since without missing a beat. By its thirty-first night, the same room had also grown twelve subgroups covering film, education, life sciences, applied and industrial work, and questions about mind and consciousness, spread across three BC regions.

That's the part a festival landing page can't easily carry: the audience for Futureproof isn't a ticket-buying public discovering AI for the first time in October. It's a community that has spent two and a half years in the same room, arguing, building, and occasionally disagreeing with itself, in public, on a stage, on a school night.

Kris Krüg, who's hosted most of those nights, put the throughline to the room itself in July:

"Critical folks in the streets about data centres. Builders in the lobby. Three hundred BC + AI members. Twelve subgroups. And out of that drumbeat: Futureproof Festival... The conference isn't a side quest anymore. It's the annual expression of the monthly."

That's the case for the festival, made from the room that built it, not from a marketing brief.

From recurring rooms to a three-day platform

Vancouver AI is the room with the longest streak, but it's not the only one. BC + AI's other communities, meetups, hackathons, and screenings have been accumulating their own trust and their own hard questions for the same stretch of time: the AI Film Club running its own screening nights and building a festival component inside Futureproof; Data for Good Vancouver, DAMA-Vancouver, SFU's Metacreation Lab, Multimodal Media Lab, CreativeMornings Vancouver, Ethọ́s Lab, and the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre now listed as festival partners. None of this got planned in a boardroom first. It accumulated, the way a community accumulates anything: by people returning to the same room often enough that the room started needing a bigger one.

By mid-2026, that accumulation was public and countable: 300 members, more than ninety events since the community started in 2023, three BC regions represented. Futureproof is what that math turns into once a year. Everyone who's been in one of those rooms already gets 25% off a festival pass, which is less a discount than a receipt: the festival exists because the rooms did, so the rooms get first claim on it.

Why British Columbia, why now

British Columbia didn't need to invent an AI conversation from scratch. It already had the pieces: a research lab (SFU's Metacreation Lab) doing publicly documented work on artist-trained models and consent; a creative sector that had, in Kris's words from the same May 2026 open letter to federal ministers, "both hands full," building with the technology and holding its ethics at the same time; an unusually direct relationship between a grassroots community and the province's clean-power grid, since BC Hydro's supply is part of the actual argument for building AI infrastructure here rather than somewhere dirtier. None of that is a claim that BC leads the country, or the world, in AI. It's a claim that BC has spent several years building the specific, unglamorous infrastructure, meetings, subgroups, partnerships, and public arguments, that a conversation like this needs before it can happen honestly.

That's also why the festival is not framed as one person's platform. Kris hosts and directs it, but the July stage moment that opens this story happened after Anthony Joseph of the Squamish Nation opened the room, with Kevin Friel directing the AI Film Club's festival work and a runway of community members reporting back on their own projects. The public speaker roster now reaches from Amber Case, Ana Serrano, Lynda Brown-Ganzert, Zaro, and Brewster Kahle to community builders already in these rooms. Futureproof inherits that structure. It's built by the ecosystem, not staged for it.

Transparency is a practice

Futureproof's own language calls itself "the most honest AI conversation happening this year," with "critique in one hand, curiosity in the other, with no hype and no panic." That's a high bar, and the honest way to meet it is to say plainly what transparency means for this festival and what it doesn't.

It doesn't mean the festival can make any AI system transparent, or that three days in Vancouver resolves how any company handles data, labour, or consent. What it does mean is a practice BC + AI already has receipts for: a public changelog that tracks its own build decisions in plain English instead of a press release; an open letter, published under Kris's name in May 2026, that named specific unanswered questions to two sitting federal ministers about a live data-centre deal, rather than waiting for the deal to be finished before commenting.

The questions that belong in public, on that model, are specific ones: who is shaping the systems being discussed on stage, whose data and labour they depend on, which claims can actually be checked against a source, and where the organizers themselves are still uncertain. Futureproof is a room built to ask those questions out loud, including of BC + AI itself. It is not a guarantee that every answer will be a comfortable one.

Sovereign AI means agency, not isolation

"Sovereign AI" gets used two ways in Canada right now: as a protectionist slogan, or as a genuine question about who gets to decide. Futureproof, and BC + AI, mean the second one.

In the same May 2026 letter, addressed to Ottawa, Kris put it directly: "We can have clean, green, sovereign compute. We just need to know who it's for." That's the frame this festival works from. Sovereignty isn't a claim that BC or Canada can build AI in isolation from global models, capital, or chips, because it can't, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. It's a claim that a handful of specific decisions, who controls the data and compute, who governs the institutions involved, whose culture and labour trains the systems, whether public money and public grids serve public-interest uses, and whether the whole conversation includes the rest of the country rather than just one province, are still open, still contestable, and still worth fighting over in public.

That letter was addressed to the federal government, not written as a BC-only position. Futureproof follows the same logic: a regional room, making a national argument, on the explicit premise that BC has to make its case as part of Canada's AI conversation, not instead of it.

An invitation to the country

None of this is finished business, and Futureproof isn't presenting it as finished. It's an invitation to the people who'd otherwise be arguing about this same set of questions in separate rooms across the country: builders shipping the tools, artists and educators whose work and labour are already implicated, researchers doing the underlying work, policy people who have to write the rules, communities living next to the infrastructure decisions, and the skeptics who think the whole framing is wrong. Bring evidence. Bring disagreement. Bring the lived experience that a Vancouver meetup, on its own, can't have.

The room has been having this conversation monthly for two and a half years. October is the version of it built to hold more of the country at once.

Current ways in

• BC + AI's Futureproof Festival page: the canonical program and ticket link
• futureproof.website: the festival's own site, including tickets, the current (still-growing) speaker roster, and sponsor/exhibit information
• Tickets: current pricing, deadlines, and the BC + AI member discount
• Call for Talks: submit a talk, demo, performance, experiment, or unusual format
• Become a BC + AI member to join one of the rooms this festival came from, and get the member ticket rate
• Sovereign AI for Whom?: the open letter this story draws its sovereignty framing from
• From One Room to Province-Wide Infrastructure: how the meetups became an ecosystem