"Where every push returns to the source, and every source renews the world."
Upstream unites partners to build a sustainable open-source ecosystem, rooted in the spirit of open collaboration and focused on public goods.
Upstream is a learning-and-doing platform devoted to sustainable open-source ecosystems. Participants deepen their understanding of community governance, civic value, and ecosystem storytelling while co-creating real projects that activate public impact.
Upstream is rooted in open-source spirit and centered on public goods. Commercial momentum is never the destination—it is the sustaining force that preserves trust, vitality, and shared stewardship across the ecosystem. Upstream believes open source is more than a technical pathway—it is a collaborative civic culture that cultivates trust, shared value, and long-term sustainability so collective innovation can power a shared future.
A two-stage journey that equips teams to steward open ecosystems across governance, sustainability, and storytelling.
Build shared understanding of open-source principles, governance models, and public goods.
Equip community organizers and storytellers with the skills to sustain open ecosystems.
Bridge government, industry, and community resources to support long-term public goods.
Comprehensive online training in open-source ecosystems and business skills with remote mentorship
Upstream Ecosystem Development Grant (100K RMB) and mentorship services
Immersive partner collaboration and mentored co-creation camp
Participants move from online foundations to hands-on co-creation, building momentum that carries through launch, mentorship, and long-term implementation.
Four-week remote program featuring weekly live sessions, peer studios, and guided assignments that culminate in a sustainable ecosystem action plan.
Three-day residency in Beijing combining project pairing, governance design sprints, storytelling labs, and final showcases.
Top-performing teams receive funding and are paired with open-source project teams for a 6-month collaborative development program. Projects will be showcased at the next Upstream event.
Course: Trace open-source history and values, unpack major license compliance, architect contributor journeys and governance frameworks, and practice Git/GitHub collaboration with CI/CD pipelines to anchor technical workflows.
Goal: Grasp the underlying logic of open ecosystems and confidently run an end-to-end technical collaboration process for an open-source project.
Course: Blend product management mindset with multi-platform community strategies; learn AI coding tools (including Vibe Coding) for rapid site builds, and deploy AIGC workflows to ship full-funnel marketing assets.
Goal: Launch a project microsite quickly and orchestrate a complete marketing and community operation stack powered by AI.
Course: Reimagine public-service business models through SaaS case studies, AARRR metrics, and growth hacks; design conversion funnels and partner communication, while building AI-driven content matrices from copy to video for long-term traction.
Goal: Map a clear, sustainable commercialization pathway and produce high-quality multimedia storytelling with AI.
Course: Select a live open-source project, architect product, growth, and business strategies, and culminate in an online demo to project partners to earn residency spots.
Goal: Deliver a comprehensive solution covering product design, ecosystem growth, and business pathways tailored to a real project.
Kick off onsite, meet mentors, align on shared purpose, and match teams with open-source projects.
Prototype communication assets, run AIGC storytelling sprints, and polish demos for public launch.
Present ecosystem roadmaps, gather cross-sector feedback, and celebrate outstanding collaborations.
An ecosystem of mentors ensures every team receives strategic, operational, and creative guidance from multiple vantage points.
Professors and researchers guiding theoretical framing and cultural grounding.
Maintainers and community builders sharing operational best practices.
OSPO leads and open-source strategists contributing enterprise experience.
Policy partners offering pilot spaces, regulatory insights, and local resources.
Impact funds and sustainable capital linking long-term financial and ecosystem support.
Upstream 2025 Winter Camp Projects
From intelligent agent protocols and sovereign comms stacks to robotics operating systems, these collaborators will co-design governance, storytelling, and sustainable growth paths throughout the Upstream residency.
ChenLongOS extends Tsinghua University's uCore->rCore lineage into a fully open, componentized operating system tailored for embodied intelligence. The project is shipping an affordable "robotics Raspberry Pi" kit that pairs Rockchip NPUs with Rust-first firmware, so labs and vocational schools can prototype localization, perception, and fleet control without proprietary firmware. Community priorities include modularizing StarryOS services, upstreaming Rust NPU drivers, and publishing open courseware that lowers robotics education costs. By tying curriculum, hardware, and ChenLongOS distributions together, the team wants young engineers to build autonomous machines that are as hackable as microcontrollers yet ready for industrial field deployment across China now.
Agent Network Protocol (ANP) imagines the agentic internet as a peer-to-peer fabric where identities, conversations, and transactions travel through open specifications instead of siloed platforms. The project already defined DID-based authentication, encrypted transport, and a semantic discovery registry so personal copilots, commerce bots, and civic services can handshake without extra accounts. With weekly community calls and 280+ contributors from major Chinese clouds, ANP is iterating SDKs, credential flows, and domain-specific application protocols. The Upstream camp helps pressure-test interoperability demos, align with W3C and IETF partners, and recruit fellows who can turn ANP into the HTTP moment for intelligent agents globally.
dora-rs is a Rust-native, dataflow-oriented robotics framework engineered for the AI era, modeling every perception, planning, and control block as graph nodes that can be recomposed across edge, cloud, and humanoid deployments. Zero-copy shared memory, Apache Arrow buffers, and Zenoh transport push 50 MB payloads in sub-100 microseconds, while YAML-driven deployment keeps multi-machine topologies declarative. Compared with ROS2 it cuts latency by two orders of magnitude, boosts MCU viability, and bakes in hot-reload Python APIs plus prebuilt Dora Node Hub packages. Upstream support accelerates community workshops, hardware adapters, and bilingual documentation so any lab can ship trustworthy embodied intelligence globally.
FlagOS unites China's AI chipmakers, cloud vendors, and universities behind a single open system software stack that mirrors CUDA's completeness while staying vendor-neutral. Through FlagTree compilers, FlagGEMs kernels, FlagCX communication, and FlagScale orchestration, the community lets large models train or infer across domestic NPUs without rewriting operators. The roadmap pairs ITU standardization with campus curricula, global hackathons, and developer bounties so thousands of engineers can port Triton kernels, benchmark heterogenous clusters, and harden reference deployments. Winning Upstream unlocks more co-creation with public clouds and SDG coalitions that want affordable, sovereign compute for embodied intelligence and civic-scale AI labs throughout Asia.
KTransformers attacked the cost wall of large-model inference by splitting workloads intelligently across GPUs, CPUs, and oversized RAM, letting DeepSeek-V3 and similar giants run from a single consumer workstation. The open-source engine layers CPUInfer scheduling, Marlin kernels, quantized caches, and attention-aware offloading so prefills shrink thirtyfold and generation speeds triple versus baseline llama.cpp stacks. With 15k+ GitHub stars and partnerships spanning Huawei Ascend to Intel, the team is hardening heterogenous fine-tuning, 1M-token context, and on-device privacy guarantees. Community pilots span media labs worldwide. Upstream mentorship supports roadmap governance, reproducible benchmarks, and venture-ready offerings that democratize high-quality copilots for regulated industries.
MoFA rallies indie builders to create "killer applications" atop the Modular AI Framework, blending Pieter Levels' one-person-company ethic with pragmatic go-to-market support. The project recruits product managers who can own ideation, prototyping, promotion, and monetization, then backs them with a co-creation guild covering storytelling, social media, offline meetups, and shared revenue playbooks. By pushing for minimalist yet soulful AI tools, MoFA hopes to prove that small, values-aligned teams can ship sustainable software faster than venture-heavy incumbents. Upstream coaching will sharpen program design, funnel mentors, and legitimize MoFA as the community where new AI hits are incubated for creators across Asia.
Moxin AI targets the edge-computing future of speech intelligence, delivering open-source TTS, ASR, and voice-cloning engines that run entirely on personal devices or private servers. By optimizing models for "AI all-in-one" hardware, the team sidesteps latency, privacy, and cost pitfalls associated with cloud APIs, while still supporting bilingual prosody, high-fidelity cloning, and rapid fine-tuning with only a few samples. The Upstream journey focuses on wrapping the stack into reproducible toolkits, partnering with civic organizations that need secure voice agents, and expanding documentation so makers can remix models into education, accessibility, and creative storytelling experiences without shipping data off-device. For everyone.
Matrix Suite brings Palpo's high-performance homeserver, Robrix's multi-platform client, and the OpenWallet-based TSP SDK together so civic orgs can run sovereign messaging, identity, and verifiable credential workflows. It targets cities and cooperatives that need Matrix federation plus DID/VC handshakes, ensuring contributors can authenticate once and collaborate anywhere without centralized dependencies. Upstream mentorship will help the suite document deployment playbooks, align governance with governments and enterprises, and recruit operators who want public digital infrastructure they fully control.
Makepad's GPU-accelerated UI engine, the Robius application framework, and the Moly SDK form a vertically integrated toolkit for building AI-native clients entirely in Rust. Developers can ship desktop, mobile, and Web UIs, talk to remote or local LLMs through Moly Server, and hot reload business logic without Electron or Python glue. The trio demonstrates how a single codebase can orchestrate interface, networking, and inference for agents, copilots, and creative workstations. Upstream support focuses on documentation, template apps, and partner showcases that prove Rust can be the expressive, productive base of the AI era.
Outcomes & Support
Upstream Ecosystem Development Grant
Teams that complete the innovation camp and deliver their showcase become eligible for a RMB 100,000 grant dedicated to growing sustainable open collaboration.
一切创新，皆由溯本而生；一切变革，皆因回归而新。
Where every push returns to the source, and every source renews the world.
Tell us about your community, public service project, or civic innovation idea. We welcome teams eager to build sustainable open-source impact across sectors.
