A home for building AI in the open.

The Nano Collective is a community led group of developers, designers, and maintainers building open source AI tools for the people who use them. We build not for profit, but for the community. Everything we produce is open, transparent, and shaped by the people who rely on it.

We are also a home for the people doing the building. The collective gives contributors the resources, the structure, and the latitude to build AI in the open, and to keep what they build in the hands of the people who use it.

AI is quickly becoming the most personal piece of infrastructure most people have ever used. It is where they think out loud, work through problems, and hand off real parts of their workflow. Yet the systems people depend on are largely owned by a small number of companies whose incentives are not aligned with the people using them.

We think the alternative needs to be built deliberately, in the open, by people who care about getting it right.

• Privacy respecting. Your data stays on your machine. Our tools keep you in control of your own workflows.
• Local first. We favour tools that run on your own hardware wherever possible, with privacy preserving bridges to external capability only when the task genuinely requires it.
• Open for all. Built by the community, for the community. Open source and transparent from day one. No closed features, no paid tiers gating the useful bits.

These are not marketing. They are the filter we apply when deciding what to build, how to build it, and who gets to shape it.

• Nanocoder — a coding agent in your terminal that runs on any model you choose.
• Nanotune — tooling for fine tuning and improving small, local models for practical use.
• get-md — a fast, lightweight HTML to Markdown converter optimised for LLM consumption.
• json-up — a type safe JSON migration tool with Zod schema validation.

Each project runs independently, with its own maintainers, roadmap, and release cadence. They share a consistent approach to how they are structured, tested, released, and presented, so the collective stays legible from the outside and contributors can move easily between projects.

Today we ship developer tools and utilities. The longer arc is broader: a coherent stack of open, sovereign AI infrastructure. Local first models and tooling at the core, privacy preserving paths to external capability where it is genuinely needed, and an open ecosystem of specialist tools and sub-agents that any contributor can build, deploy, and have used across the projects we ship.

The aim is not a fixed catalogue of tools we maintain, but a place where contributors can build the next piece of it and know it has somewhere to live.

There is no application process. Find a project that interests you, read its CONTRIBUTING.md, and open an issue or PR. And if the thing you want to build does not exist yet, the collective is a place to start it rather than carry it alone.

We value code, documentation, design, community support, and advocacy in equal measure. The contributors who show up now are the ones shaping what this becomes.

• GitHub: github.com/Nano-Collective
• Discord: join here
• Docs: the collective's operational reference lives in the docs repository

The collective is fiscally hosted by the Open Source Collective, so all incoming and outgoing funds are published transparently in real time.

The collective is still early. If any of this sounds interesting, this is a good moment to get involved.