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Day 2 Opening Remarks!
Great Hall South
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14 min
Mar 28, 9:00 AM
Opening Remarks Day 3
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Speaker A
0:01
Come on in, everyone.
0:02
Grab pokes from the hall.
0:04
We're gonna get started.
0:06
Come on in.
1:02
Ladies and gentlemen in the front row, if you could please take your seats.
1:09
This already feels like, for me anyway, this already feels like just a continuous reunion of so many people now embodied in real life.
1:24
Erin was telling me that she was going to be here in her person form rather than her vomiting cat form.
1:30
So it was confusing for me because that's not her avatar.
1:35
So, but it was great to get a hug.
1:37
Thanks for joining us, Erin.
1:40
Welcome to AtmosphereConf.
1:43
In Vancouver 2026.
1:49
Uh, we're, uh, officially sold out, uh, in person, uh, with, uh, 363 people.
2:01
Uh, Seattle last year, uh, we were at 179.
2:05
Uh, so we doubled.
2:07
Um, online we have 486 people.
2:12
It's probably gone up since I checked.
2:14
We had 186 last year.
2:18
That's a tripling of people joining us remotely, which is amazing.
2:22
So hello to everyone watching online.
2:28
It's not about the numbers, but it is actually about the people, which is what each one of those things represents.
2:33
So I really appreciate everyone that took the time took time out of their work and daily lives to come join us and share a little bit about what we're doing.
2:44
So your global @proto community conference.
2:51
My name is Boris Mann, your conference lead producer, joined by Nick and Ted as co-organizers and AT community fund leads.
3:01
You're supported by conference producers Luca, Rachel, Iva and their volunteer team.
3:07
We've got over 40 volunteers.
3:08
Thank you very much for helping out.
3:12
Uh, Miss Boba is our webmistress, plus many of you adding code and 14 themes including custom cursors.
3:21
Amazing, thank you.
3:24
Um, Patrick and Erland and the Rumi team are supporting us on the remote and hybrid track also.
3:31
Native @proto.
3:32
I— 4 weeks ago, somehow we ended up building everything on @proto because of course that's what we do.
3:39
So thanks for everyone who helped out with that.
3:42
Heather from Rogue Wave Design did all of the amazing graphic design, plus Al Woodward doing the original— this year's goose mascot, Good Stuff Gustifer.
3:57
You'll see them everywhere.
4:00
We've also got MCs Chad Kolak and Jim Ray helping us out, so you'll see them around as well at the front of the stage here.
4:07
Finally, supported by Nathan at the RAAF Foundation, which is the 501(c)(3) fiscal host for the AT Community Fund.
4:16
So thank you very much for everyone who has supported to put this conference on.
4:27
I know a lot of you are traveling from lots of other places to this amazing campus.
4:32
We're going to do what we do here in Canada, and I'm going to bring up Eva to do a land acknowledgment.
4:38
Thank you, Eva.
Speaker B
4:47
Thank you, Boris, and welcome, everyone.
4:49
Thanks for coming all this way to be here in Vancouver, here at the University of British Columbia, and for coming from all of your different places around the world.
4:59
So throughout the conference, we'll be gathering on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam people upon which UBC campus is situated.
5:08
And when we venture off campus, we may find ourselves on the unceded territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations as well.
5:14
The word unceded means never willingly surrendered.
5:18
Less than 200 years ago, these lands were violently stolen from their Indigenous inhabitants by white settlers to build this city and the university you see today.
5:26
And today Vancouver is a city with many challenges, like the cities and towns that you're probably all from, including an ongoing housing crisis, homelessness, poverty, drug overdose, and these crises disproportionately affect Indigenous people, so we see the ongoing effects of this colonization.
5:44
And you'll surely encounter some of these visible signs if you venture off campus.
5:48
And I don't say this to scare any of you, but just to remind you of the reality of this place, which is so lovely to visit, but can be a pretty hard place to live sometimes.
5:58
So here it is customary to acknowledge history so that we can work towards decolonizing the future, decolonizing our physical, virtual, cultural, professional, community, and knowledge spaces, as well as our relationships with each other and with the land.
6:12
As people united by a vision for just virtual spaces, we too are fighting against hegemonic structures that are colonial in nature and intrinsically linked to the injustice and violence that we see in the physical world today.
6:25
So as we convene this weekend, let us remember to root into the shared struggle that is happening both online and offline.
6:31
Thank you for being here.
Speaker A
6:42
So this is our home for the next 2 days and already has been for many for the past 2 days.
6:48
I still can't believe that we did a pre-conference, but by all accounts, at SCIENCE that happened yesterday was pretty amazing.
6:57
Yeah?
6:59
Awesome.
7:02
So we're here in the Great Hall, so this will be We've got 3 full simultaneous tracks, so you have hard choices to make at each point.
7:18
This is Great Hall South.
7:19
Behind this wall will be a dining area.
7:22
There's a merch table over there.
7:24
Is Business Goose here yet?
7:26
Business Goose at the back.
7:28
If anyone has other things that they would like to buy, sell, trade, we'll also have goodies from many of the folks brought, from stickers to t-shirts that you can help yourself to, and just generally use that space to hang out and chill out.
7:42
And then down the hall we've got the unconference.
7:45
We're all on one level here, and then the larger classroom at the end of the hall with the performance theater in the middle.
7:51
So all on this level, bathrooms just outside, catering and other things will be out there, and then duck into the hangout when we're doing that.
8:02
The website has all of this information.
8:05
The schedules are there.
8:07
The /remote for streams.
8:10
Roomie chat is a good place to do— look at whatever recommendation Juliette is making for dinner and then go with her.
8:20
We do have a code of conduct.
8:22
We've used this as the AT Community Fund since the conference last year.
8:28
It covers all of our physical spaces and virtual spaces.
8:32
Few TL;DR points on that.
8:35
This is a professional conference.
8:37
We're dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone of all backgrounds and abilities.
8:42
Read and respect pronouns badges, pins, or stickers.
8:45
No sexual language or imagery.
8:48
Thank you, Fane, for putting a modesty patch over Sensual Elf.
8:56
And masks at the registration desk.
8:58
There are hand sanitizers at most entrances and exits.
9:03
Eva and I have been racing each other to see who can be first to sanitize.
9:08
Have fun, make friends, share experiences, learn new things.
9:12
Obviously skeet about it and assemble about it and leaflet about it and standard set about it and all of those other things as well.
9:18
I am so looking forward to the absolutely magical graph of stuff that's going to come out at the end of this.
9:27
Fun fact: I actually ran the first conference with hashtags.
9:31
In the year 2005, so there we go.
9:35
The kids tell me that hashtags are cringe today, so yeah.
9:41
Here is your day.
9:43
So thank you to Blue Sky and Streamplace for being our title sponsors.
9:57
Paul and the team approached me after the Seattle conference and kind of said, you know, can you just, like, do that again?
10:07
And contracted me as a paid position that let me hire additional conference producers and everything else like that.
10:15
Streamplace came on super early.
10:17
Eli's like, absolutely, yes, I'll do it.
10:20
And as well as Cold Hard Cash is doing all of the in-kind of all of the AV So thank you so much, Streamplace and Eli.
10:36
Gray's Cosmic Network, Cosmic Network coming on board and totally organizing at SCIENCE with over 100 people yesterday.
10:44
Cloudflare is picking up the afterparty.
10:47
New Public said, hey, we really want to make sure, you know, there is something magical about being in person.
10:53
Can we help support European travel?
10:56
And so that let us bring a bunch more people in the room to be here in person.
11:00
And just like last year in Seattle, we'll share some more about the final numbers.
11:04
It's all transparent on our Open Collective, but I think we're up to 30 or even 40% of the conference budget dedicating to bring real live humans to join us here.
11:14
So thank you so much.
11:21
Google, Skyseed, Expo, IPFS Foundation, Protocol Labs, Modal Foundation.
11:27
Returning sponsors, sponsors for the first time, lovely to have everyone's support.
11:32
They're recognizing that we're doing something special here and are just saying, "Hey, we see you and we wanna help out." Fedica, community sponsor.
11:41
I wanna see that tier a lot more fleshed out as you all build businesses of various kinds.
11:47
Samir at Fedica immediately said, Absolutely.
11:50
What he actually emailed me, he said, did I miss it?
11:53
Did I miss the chance to sponsor?
11:54
I didn't see it go.
11:55
I really want to sponsor.
11:56
This was like 6 months ago.
11:57
I'm like, no problem.
11:58
I have room for you.
11:59
Thank you so much.
12:02
So we're going to get started here in just a moment with Aaron Kassane joining us in person.
12:10
It's becoming a tradition to have Aaron speak.
12:13
Year 2.
12:14
Let's keep going.
12:16
As I said before, you're gonna have to make hard choices for the rest of the day.
12:19
There are 3 rooms, and again, because I'm insane, of course, a 4th unconference room that you can fill with content as well.
12:28
So feel free to duck in there.
12:29
We'll have a whiteboard out there.
12:31
I'm gonna be hosting a social media tools session with Samir from Fetica, so come join that if that sounds interesting.
12:39
Lunch, fully catered, will be out there.
12:42
At 3:00 PM, everyone was mad at us for putting any talks up against Paul and Jay, so Ted has done an amazing job of running the schedule to make that work.
12:59
And at the end of the day, we'll have some closing remarks, and Tony Schneider, the new BlueSky CEO, will actually say a few things at that point as well.
13:08
Thank you, Tony.
13:15
As well as being incredible at many other things, Eva has got us a great venue downtown, plus two local DJs, and we'll be there 7:30 to 9:30.
13:29
You can come in and out.
13:30
It's gonna be a little crowded.
13:31
You'll be downtown.
13:32
You can check things out there.
13:34
With that, thank you very much for joining us, and I'd like to bring up Aaron Kassane for our first talk.
13:40
Thank you very much.