Strengthening local connections for a global Open Source dialogue in Asia

True technological progress rarely happens in isolation. It thrives where engineers, researchers, and enterprise practitioners meet across borders to debate system architectures, exchange open code, and build shared standards. Bosch has been deeply rooted in China for more than a century – building lasting partnerships and investing in local engineering capabilities. In an interconnected digital era, this century-long commitment extends into the Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystem.
Between August and early September, colleagues from Bosch's corporate Open Source Program Office (OSPO) traveled to China, joining the company's local representatives and OpenChain community delegates at a diverse range of Open Source events – commencing with the long-standing "Community over Code" conference in Beijing and culminating in the intensive Shanghai Open Source Conference Week.

The journey kicked off in Beijing with two cornerstone events: OpenChain Community Day, hosted at ByteDance’s headquarters, followed by Community over Code Asia, the premier regional conference organized by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Representing the Bosch OSPO and serving as an official OpenChain Ambassador, Nikola Babadzhanov delivered a keynote presentation on "Supply Chain Management Based on Open Source." In highly regulated sectors such as automotive engineering and industrial IoT, software supply chain security and automated compliance are critical prerequisites for innovation.

The presentation sparked energetic discussions with local compliance officers, legal practitioners, and developers eager to exchange how Bosch manages automated compliance-as-code across thousands of internal repositories.

"In China, professional networking runs on WeChat. Immediately after my talk, I connected with dozens of compliance managers and joined the local OpenChain WeChat group – a vibrant forum of more than 300 active practitioners sharing real-time guidance every day."
— Nikola Babadzhanov, Bosch OSPO & OpenChain Ambassador

At Community over Code Asia, Nikola took the stage in the Community Track to explore the cultural and organizational factors that make global collaboration work. While code is inherently borderless, sustainable community building requires localized empathy, shared governance, and proactive outreach. Two key insights from the Beijing hallways stood out:

• Despite the explosion of automated AI tooling, community leaders agreed that AI must remain an accelerator rather than a replacement for human judgment – especially in governance and code reviews.
• As the Open Source ecosystem in China evolves with immense energy, Bosch is eager to share its decade-long experience in governance and system integration, fostering a mutual exchange that drives innovation for both global and local environments.

At the LF OSPOlogy + OSPO Summit China, Bosch took center stage to address one of the most critical challenges facing established industrial enterprises: modernizing governance without grinding engineering to a halt.
Marcel Kurzmann (Open Source and Software Management Consultant at Robert Bosch GmbH, Bosch OSPO, and OpenChain Board Member) and Jane Cao (Open Source and InnerSource Consultant at Bosch Digital) delivered a joint talk titled: "Living with legacy: How Bosch built an OSPO and how you can do it, too".

The session resonated strongly with the audience, prompting in-depth discussions with Chinese engineering managers on how to successfully enhance corporate systems through the power of open collaboration.
Expanding on the conferences attended by Bosch colleagues, the broader lineup – including LF AGNTCon & MCPCon, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference – offered a wealth of exciting insights. Collectively, these events provided a perfect vantage point on the convergence of Open Source Software, agentic AI, software governance, and cloud-native infrastructure.

A central topic of conversation across Beijing and Shanghai was the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Chinese enterprises and Open Source developers are following European regulatory developments closely, recognizing that secure supply chain practices will soon define international market access.
The OpenChain community - mainly driven by Devashri Datta and Ummo Schwarting - has released a, phased CRA Checklist for public review. Rather than treating compliance as a top-down mandate, Bosch actively invites suppliers and partners across the globe to join these working groups and co-create transparent, future-proof supply chain standards together.

The journey through Beijing and Shanghai reaffirmed a core principle: strong local relationships are what turn Open Source into a truly global dialogue. Technological resilience cannot be achieved in isolation. By showing up in person, contributing to local community working groups, and sharing hard-earned lessons in Open Source governance, Bosch values the opportunity to engage with the Open Source ecosystem across China. This means engaging directly with regional meetups, working groups, and developer forums, while championing international open standards like OpenChain to guarantee seamless, secure collaboration across borders. Crucially, it means co-creating the future hand-in-hand with developers, suppliers, and academic institutions to build safe, scalable, and resilient technological foundations.

Looking ahead, we are excited to nurture these relationships and deepen dialogue across regional ecosystems – fostering mutual exchange and continuous co-creation.