Two Cities Down: Vana Vibes Is Picking Up Steam
Vana Vibes is Vana's exclusive signature event series connecting AI and data to real people solving real problems. Ep. 01 filled Sydney last month. Ep. 02 filled Brisbane in a day and ran last night. Ep. 03 lands in August, and it could be coming to you.
Vana Vibes is an evening for a handpicked group from the Vana network. Each edition, the Vana and Open Data Labs teams take a small room of interesting people to the frontier of practical AI: the tools, techniques and workflows that are actually working right now, taught hands-on, pointed at a social problem that matters. Then the series moves to the next city.
Why people want in
The access is the draw. You spend the evening working directly with the teams building the network, including exclusive one-on-one time with the Vana founders, in a room small enough to ask anything. What you get is the intel that never makes it into a webinar: which tools the people building this stuff actually use, how they prompt, what they have stopped using and why.
You leave with more than notes. Every guest takes home the field kit: the prompt techniques, tool lists and resource guides from the night, written down and ready to use at work on Monday.
And you leave with people. Editions deliberately mix industries and skill levels, and the tables rotate all night, so you work with most of the room before it ends.
"I have been to plenty of events where you sit and listen for two hours. Here I spent the night actually making things with a lawyer and a marketer I had never met. I left with new skills and three new contacts I have already messaged."
— Sophia Harris, Accountant
Inside Ep. 02
Brisbane happened last night at Newstead Studios, an exclusive venue in the city's inner north. The room was nurses, lawyers, accountants, marketers and publishers, from daily AI users to people who had never opened a chatbot. The problem was the city's housing crisis, and the night ran as four escalating challenges: drafting, research, creative production, and finally app building, where teams described an idea to an AI tool until a first rough version appeared. Several got far enough to demo, all before dessert.
"I walked in convinced AI was for technical people. By the last challenge our table had a rough app on the screen and I had built half of it. Nobody was more surprised than me."
— Christal Mylvaganam, Registered Nurse
Between challenges, conversation kept circling back to Vana itself. Vana is open data infrastructure for human-grounded AI: the context these tools run on belongs to the people it came from, who decide what it serves.
Where does Ep. 03 land
Two exclusives down, and the series is picking up steam. Vana Vibes Ep. 03 arrives in August. We know the format, we know the problem, and we know the city. Your city, maybe.
Brisbane filled in a day, claimed by the people watching the right channel at the right hour. Everyone else is reading about it now.
If you want in, be following before the announcement, because that is where the seats go first: vana.org/participate, the Vana Discord, and Instagram at @vanahq.
Vana Vibes Brisbane was hosted by Vana in collaboration with Open Data Labs.