Skill Studio — Canberra
Stakeholder brief · 2026 · 11 slides

From pop-up
to permanent.

Australia's physical commons for applied AI & emerging tech — seeking $1.0M over 24 months.

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Cover: Skill Studio, Australia's physical commons for applied AI and emerging tech. Seeking $1.0M over 24 months to grow a proven pop-up into a permanent, open-access tech library for the capital and the regions.
Skill Studio01 / 11
Frontier tech has no front door. Learning is stuck online and paywalled; transition is abstract for small businesses, workers and councils; there is no neutral, community-facing lab with real hardware.
The gap02 / 11
The modern tech library: a street-level public space where anyone can walk in and use real tools — test frontier models, run AI locally on Mac Studios and GPU rigs, and explore sovereign data, agents and payment rails.
The solution03 / 11
The pop-up in numbers, 1 October to 20 December 2025 in Civic Square: 32 sessions in 12 weeks, 336 attendances (twice the prior five months), participants aged 10 to 80.
The pilot04 / 11
Come as you are, and maybe walk out with a startup: walk in, learn, build, pitch, scale. Skill Studio at street level feeds founders into CBRIN on level 5 — a feeder, not a competitor.
The on-ramp05 / 11
Four pillars, one door: AI literacy and walk-ins, local hardware sandboxes, enterprise and SME transition workshops, and decentralised tech and agents.
Operating model06 / 11
Built with the ecosystem: target enterprise and foundation AI partners, active Canberra ecosystem partners including Trellis Data, ANU, the Linux group and Evernode, and aligned civic and government partners.
Partnerships07 / 11
High-street visibility: a ground-floor CBD vacancy with heavy foot traffic, live demos visible from the street, and renewal of empty city real estate.
Location strategy08 / 11
The regional blueprint: a low-overhead modular pop-up for council libraries and town halls, starting with Orange, Albury, Wollongong and Batemans Bay.
Beyond Canberra09 / 11
The ask: $1.0M AUD over 24 months, about $700k cash and the rest as hardware, space and compute. Core personnel $300k, facility and lease $200k, hardware and fit-out $150k, API and sovereign compute $150k, regional deployments $200k.
The ask10 / 11
Four ways in: community partner, founding corporate partner, civic and government partner, and academic and research partner. skillstudio.com.au, info@skillstudio.com.au.
Join us11 / 11

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