Futureproof Festival 2026 has a sharper shape.
The year-one festival is now a focused Halloween weekend in Vancouver: Friday Oct 30 through Sunday Nov 1, 2026. One stage. One room. A hard cap of 300 attendees. No parallel tracks, no wandering between rooms, no conference-brochure sprawl. Everyone who comes sits inside the same narrative arc together.
The Friday night opening party sets the tone. Saturday Oct 31 asks where we are: what AI is already doing to people, to culture, to institutions, and to the way we understand ourselves. Sunday Nov 1 turns toward what we build next: craft, demos, community judgment, the Squatchies, and the 2027 reveal.
The format is intentionally small. The planning docs put it plainly: "one coherent room." Futureproof is not trying to be the biggest AI event in the region this year. It is trying to be the room people remember because the whole room heard the same ideas, argued with the same questions, and carried the same weekend home.
The confirmed BC + AI community roster is already strong. Anthonia Ogundele, Loki Jorgenson, Suzanne Gildert, Tanya Slingsby, Simon Haworth, Jesi Carson, Sarah Downey, Philippe Pasquier, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Arshia Sobhan Sarbandi, Kate Armstrong, Michael Tippett, Kevin Friel, Luke Minaker, Andrew Reid, Gordon Hamilton, Maya Bruck, Udbhav Kansal, Sev Geraskin, Kris, and others in the speaker registry all have real roles in the weekend program.
The dream bookends are also clear, but we are going to be precise about status. The festival is being built around invitations for Dr. Joy Buolamwini to open Saturday and Tristan Harris to close Sunday. In the current repo data, both are still marked tbd, not confirmed. That means their names are part of the outreach frame and the program ambition, not a promise until their status changes. If one or both confirm, we will say so plainly. Until then, the launch claim is the format, the dates, the cap, and the confirmed community spine.
That is not small print. It is the standard Futureproof has to hold if the festival is going to be worthy of the public-interest language around it. Confirmed means confirmed. Invited means invited. Planned means planned. The audience should never have to guess which is which, especially when the whole weekend is asking people to take trust, governance, and accountability seriously.
That spine is the real point. Saturday morning moves from the keynote slot into "What we already feel" with Loki, Suzanne, and Tanya. Saturday afternoon asks the room to work, not just listen, with Jesi and Sarah leading "Ethics in motion." Halloween night belongs to the 2nd Annual BC + AI Film Festival. Sunday begins with the new craft of AI filmmaking, moves into hackathon demo day, and ends with a closing keynote slot, Squatchies, and the public handoff to year two.
This is still Futureproof Festival. It is just distilled.
The full-week plan is not gone. It becomes the 2027 blueprint. Year one is the proof of demand, the founding-attendee class, the asset engine, and the cultural argument that Vancouver can host a serious public-interest AI festival without flattening it into a trade show.
Tickets are the next step. The 2026 weekend is capped at 300, with Weekend Pass, Saturday Pass, Sunday Pass, Film Festival, VIP Weekend, student, education/nonprofit, and pay-it-forward options in the pricing plan.
If you want to be in the room where year one becomes real, start at /tickets.