Cross-AI Sphere

A conference ends. The conversations it started do not. Sphere is the question of what a persistent venue for those conversations would have to be in order to be worth existing — and that question is genuinely open.

The gap between editions

Everything the platform runs is an occasion. A conference happens, a workshop happens, a Live session happens — and then the room is gone and what remains is a PDF and a recording. The work that follows an occasion happens in private mail threads, on platforms owned by someone else, and in group chats that are unfindable six months later.

Sphere is the name for the part of the ecosystem that would still be there on a Tuesday in March.

What it might be

Candidate shapes, none of them committed: a persistent home for each crossing, where its sessions, papers, open questions, and people accumulate between editions. An archive that is navigable rather than merely stored. A place where a workshop’s discussion continues under the workshop’s own name. Possibly something spatial — possibly not, and the burden of proof is on the spatial version.

What it will not be is a metaverse campus. A rendered lecture hall solves a problem nobody in this community has.

Why there is nothing to show

Sphere is the least defined of the six programmes. We could commission renders of an environment and put them on this page tomorrow, and it would be the fastest way to make the other five programmes look invented too. So this page carries an abstract image, a description, and an admission — which is the accurate representation of where it stands.

The open question

If you have run a community that stayed alive between its events, you know something we need. The question we are actually asking is narrow: what would a persistent venue have to do for you to open it on a day when nothing was happening?