Bookended by remarks from AI godfather Yoshua Bengio and a builders’ day at Shopify offices, Montréal’s first iteration of a grassroots tech week brought together more than 6,000 attendees across 100 events exploring tech’s social impact and the challenges of building a startup in Québec.

“There’s a vibrant ecosystem, but we don’t see these people all the time.”

The weeklong Open House Montréal event was organized by non-profit organization ElanTech as an expansion of its previous initiative, Startup Open House . The decentralized format modelled tech weeks in New York City and Toronto, where organizers set up flagship events and community members hosted their own associated gatherings.

Startup Open House debuted in 2013 as an initiative to help the startup community open its doors to t

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