Welcome to Upstream: Your questions answered by industry experts

In May, we debuted our first-ever EDU Week series which will be an ongoing section on Chrome Unboxed dedicated to the education space. It is our goal to do this series twice a year around the time that teachers, admins, students, and parents are looking for timely information as it pertains to Google in the classroom. During that series, we teased another upcoming project that will feature industry experts answering questions from you, the Chrome OS/Google product users. So, after much planning and preparation, we are very excited to announce our new Q&A series called “Upstream.”

Welcome to Upstream

So, what is Upstream? As it pertains to open source platforms such as the Chromium repository, “upstreaming” is when a contributor downstreams a specific set of data from the source and does some work with it by changing, fixing, or adding to the code. This newly modified code is then “upstreamed” back to the source for access by the entire project. The upstreaming from contributors is what keeps a project evolving and moving forward. We thought this would be a fitting nomenclature for our new series as it is the goal to pull information from experts across the tech industry in order to answer some of the most common and not so common questions we frequently get from our readers. Chrome Unboxed is, for our purpose, the source, and your questions are the ever-changing project. The experts are the contributors and they will upstream the answers to your inquiries in the form of ongoing content here on the website.

As this is an ongoing series, there are no limits to the questions that you could send. We are amassing some of the brightest minds from the enterprise sector, education, hardware, software, and more to answer whatever questions you may have. This could be things such as using virtualization platforms with Chrome OS or how to manage specific users in the Google Admin Console. Perhaps you’re interested in Google’s onboarding process of a new Chromebook manufacturer or you just want to know how an IPS display is made. Whatever your question, we want to bring you answers and this is the battle cry of Upstream. Ask questions, get answers.

How it works

Here’s how this will work. We are already prepping our first Upstream post and it will feature answers to EDU questions that we didn’t get to in our special EDU version of The Chrome Cast with John Sowash. At the end of that post, we will announce the special guest contributor for the next Upstream article and you will be able to submit your questions for said guest via a Google Form. We’ve already lined up some awesome guests from VMWare as well as a Chrome OS hardware manufacturer. We will sift through answer as many as we feasibly can with the help of our special guest and that post will then highlight the next Upstream article. So forth and so on. We field hundreds of questions every week and as much as we’d love to answer each of them, we’re still learning ourselves. This gives us the opportunity to connect you with the very people that have the answers you’re looking for but didn’t know where to ask.

So, that’s about it. We are extremely excited to get this new series started and are looking forward to hearing from our readers and building some new relationships along the way. Below you will find a form where you can pose your questions and help us begin looking for new experts to join the conversation. If you fancy yourself an expert in any field related to Chrome OS, Android, Google products, or any tech-related products, drop us an email. We’d love to bring you into the fold and feature your expertise on the Upstream. Stay tuned for the inaugural Upstream post on EDU that will launch at the beginning of next week. See you soon.

Submit your question for Upstream