BPiBS project members recently had the privilege of attending the BeaCon Annual Conference 2025, held August 19–21 in Edmonton. The program was rich with community-driven innovation, breakout sessions and hands-on activities centered on startups, entrepreneurship and relational leadership. It was both inspiring and strategically valuable as an opportunity to introduce our BPiBS work on the KIND and CIV database development approach, especially at the current state of the project implementation.

A key focus for our team was connecting with technical and startup initiatives that resonate with our tech development of the graph database and CIV tool…

We are happy to network with:

• Code for Canada / CivicTech Edmonton (CivicTechYEG)
  Local civic technology groups, which are advancing inclusive digital tools and participatory platforms. Their community-rooted, open-tech approach offers valuable schema for our own way to accessible database design.
• Fundica
  An AI-powered funding-match platform for startups illustrates how algorithm-driven search tools can improve equitable access to capital. It aligns with our CIV tool vision for building discovery pathways within knowledge systems.
• Edmonton Startup Ecosystem
  With strengths in AI, big data, and cleantech, supported by innovation agencies like Edmonton Unlimited and Alberta Innovates, the local ecosystem offers a great example for us to learn from, particularly around scalable and responsive knowledge infrastructures.

These BeaCon conference topics echoed many times how the human and digital elements need to go hand in hand in order to situate and implement innovation efforts within a wider ecosystem, even beyond just the housing sector.