The STAC ecosystem has grown far beyond a simple "101." Between static catalogs and dynamic APIs, a rich extension ecosystem, cloud-native formats, a deep open-source toolchain, and a new wave of AI-driven workflows, there are now many different ways into STAC, and the right one depends entirely on who you are and what you're trying to solve. A newcomer wiring up their first catalog, an engineer standing up a STAC API, an analyst chasing interoperability across providers, and a developer exploring embeddings all need different first steps.

So this session throws out the fixed script. Instead of a linear introduction, it runs as a live "Choose Your Own Adventure": at each turning point the audience collectively votes on where to go next, and the talk follows that path in real time. Depending on the room, we might dissect the anatomy of a STAC Item, walk the STAC API and its search and filtering model, explore the extension mechanism and how the ecosystem grows by composition, tour cloud-native formats like COG, Zarr, and Parquet and how STAC references them, survey the open-source tooling (pystac, pgSTAC, eoAPI, stac-browser, and friends), or dig into the design philosophy that made STAC stick.

No matter which branches win the vote, every path converges on the same core concepts: Items, Collections, Assets, links, APIs, and metadata extensions, the pieces that make STAC a foundational part of the cloud-native geospatial stack. Rather than presenting STAC as a rigid specification to be memorized, the talk frames it as an evolving, composable ecosystem built on interoperability and community collaboration.

The result is an introduction that adapts to its audience: approachable and hands-on for newcomers, while still offering architectural context and practical insight for experienced practitioners, and a good deal more fun than the usual overview. Come ready to steer.