Wednesday, May 6, 2026 · 6:30 PM doors / 7:00 PM start
Parker Street Studios · Vancouver
The third AEFL gathering brought 30+ people to Parker Street Studios for a working session. Four pods, laptops open, real notes in real time. This page captures what we built together.
February 4. First gathering. 25 people in a room. No agenda beyond "let's see who shows up." A lot of people had been waiting for this conversation.
March 4. Jesi Carson ran a People's AI Consultation workshop. Context: 160+ civil society organizations had signed an open letter calling out Canada's federal AI consultation as a "mad rush to a largely predetermined conclusion." The task force was industry weighted, survey questions were biased, and the government used four LLMs to analyze 11,000+ submissions with zero transparency. We did BC's part that night with small groups, clipboards, and sharpies.
April 1. Open space session using prompts from the People's AI Consultation and ongoing community discussions. Threads that stood out: skepticism that global AI values are achievable, more interest in plural and locally grounded approaches, concern about power and disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities, and a strong pull toward local action.
May 6. This session. The first time AEFL operated as a working group rather than a discussion circle.
Three blocks, in order.
Got everyone connected to the WhatsApp group, the Notion workspace, and the broader BC + AI ecosystem. Folks already plugged in helped onboard those who weren't.
Four pods, laptops out, real time docs. Jesi and I framed the session around a question that kept surfacing in our planning:
Wouldn't it be neat to have our scanners on collectively for places where we should show up to make our voices heard?
The pods worked in parallel on policy spaces, scoping and definitions, the resource library, and partnerships.