Foundation

After 2 years serving as the first Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation, it’s time to open a new chapter. Amandine already touched on it in the Matrix Conference keynote, but personal matters meant I’ve had to bring this change forward. I’ll be winding down and closing out my time here before the end of November.

Organizations need different skills in leadership as they mature, and the Foundation is ready for the next set of hands. It’s also true that my own circumstances have changed significantly as someone based in the United States.

It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve this ecosystem, to get to know its communities and the wonderful people in them, and to work alongside you all to launch open governance, improve collaboration, and fortify the trajectory of private, decentralized, sovereign, and open source communications for all with Matrix.

I’m deeply grateful to the Foundation staff, the Guardians, the Spec Core Team, the Governing Board, and everyone in the ecosystem. Your talent, passion, integrity, and the depth of humanity – it’s an awe-inspiring thing to take in. I have great confidence in what you will continue to accomplish together!

As I move on, I take with me a deep hope. At a time when we see grand experiments in self-governance straining, I take heart in the laboratories of democracy that we see everywhere. Open source, and the stewardship of any commons, is an inevitably messy and difficult endeavor. It requires an embrace of healthy tension, deliberate efforts to sustain a good nature, active address of power dynamics, and collective vigilance. I see us teaching, learning, and practicing those things in open source ecosystems like Matrix. And each of us takes that with us as we engage as members of the body politic, which so desperately needs our tending.

Looking forward for Matrix, I’m excited to see the ecosystem continue to hit major milestones in performance, ease-of-use, feature parity, and adoption, and the Foundation’s ever improving role in cultivating that. Amandine will step in as acting Managing Director while the Foundation finds the right person to take it to those new heights.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t close with a familiar pitch. Seeing governments, particularly in Europe, expanding their investment in open source development as well as the organizations that steward the projects, is really encouraging. The French government’s support of the Matrix.org Foundation, through DINUM’s new membership, is a major milestone in that direction! But we have a long way to go before we achieve systemic funding at appropriate levels.

If you value privacy, digital autonomy, and data sovereignty, or if you benefit from Matrix, become a member of the Foundation today. Your donations are necessary to sustain and realize our goals!

Keep up the good work, folks. I’ll see you in the wild blue yonder.

Robin Riley

Ad astra per aspera 🚀

🔗DINUM becoming the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation

Today DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, has officially announced that they were joining the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member and becomes the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation!

This is particularly exciting news as it will hopefully set an example for other public sector organisations using Matrix to communicate, and there are many of them.

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It is an honor to unveil the election results and introduce the newest elected representatives of the Governing Board!

Congratulations to the winning candidates, we thank you for your willingness to serve the community. We're also grateful to everyone who threw their hat in the ring, and hope that the candidates who did not get elected consider running again in the future. Thanks also to the outgoing members of the Governing Board for their service in the precedent-setting first cohort!

I'd also like to express our gratitude to all the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learn a lot in each election and we look forward to improving it each successive year.

Read on to see who is on the Governing Board and a brief discussion of next steps.

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🔗TL;DR

As we need to take more concrete steps to improve the financial situation of the Foundation, we will be rolling out a freemium offer for the matrix.org homeserver users. The alternative is to turn off the server, which we want to avoid doing. The goal is for the most active users to support the cost of the service. Free users will have limits on how they can use the service (mostly around media). The change can be supported by any client with limited to no development. Premium plans will be rolled out over the summer, and we will be iterating on the exact scope in the first few weeks. The Homeserver Terms and Privacy Policy will be updated accordingly and deployed in the coming weeks.

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Today we kick off the second Governing Board election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, May 3rd and closes on Friday, May 16th. This year’s deadlines are anchored to the UTC timezone, rather than the AOE approach that we used with mixed results last year.

We’ll be doing our best to reach out to everyone in the Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Member constituent groups to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election.

If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.

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Hi all,

Back at FOSDEM in February we showed off how Matrix could be used for E2EE-preserving messaging interoperability as required by the Digital Markets Act messaging interoperability - and we announced that Element had been working with Meta on integrating with its DMA APIs in order to connect WhatsApp to Matrix. You can see the video here, and we also demoed interop working at the technical level to the European Commission a few days beforehand.

Subsequently WhatsApp launched its DMA portal on March 8th, and the proposed Reference Offer (i.e. the terms you have to accept as a Requesting Party in order to interoperate) was revealed. The Reference Offer for Facebook Messenger was launched on September 6th. At the time of the WhatsApp launch we flagged up some significant unresolved questions - the main points being that:

1. WhatsApp would require their users to manually enable DMA in settings before they can receive any traffic from interconnecting service providers (e.g. Element) - meaning that WhatsApp users would not be reachable by default.

2. WhatsApp would require the client IP of any interconnecting users, in order to apply ‘platform integrity’ anti-abuse / trust & safety controls.

3. WhatsApp would not allow an interconnecting service to buffer messages serverside.

4. WhatsApp would require each Matrix server provider to sign a separate agreement in order to interconnect - i.e. you can’t bridge other server’s users unless those servers have signed a contract with Meta.

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There have been many changes at the Foundation in the last couple of years. We’ve added independent leadership, attracted members, continued working towards sustainability, and expanded our open governance to establish a Governing Board to become better and more capable stewards of the protocol and ecosystem. We’re still in a period of organisational transition, getting into the groove with the Governing Board, focusing on the Spec Core Team, and building the technical and financial foundation for independence.

We’ve also been asking ourselves what it means for a project to be “core” to the Foundation, and how the Foundation should relate to and work with the people who maintain those projects. These are fundamental questions for any open source foundation, and they’ve become even more pressing for us since Element switched developing Synapse and several other projects to AGPLv3, rather than contributing under the Foundation as Apache v2.

This blog post explores our context and sets out to start a discussion on how we should move forward. Already, we’ve been having these discussions in Foundation rooms and on the Governing Board, and we look forward to bringing more people into this discussion so that we can ship a framework that delivers on our mission and meets the needs of the Matrix ecosystem.

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If you have been following the matrix.org blog for some time, you will know that we’ve never been ones to shy away from complex topics like public policy and its impacts on Matrix. With this blog post series, our aim is to introduce a more regular cadence to our regulatory updates and to be more transparent about where we are focusing our efforts in this area.

Each blog post in the series will focus on a given theme or piece of law, as well as its relevant jurisdiction. We will start this series by taking a deep dive into EU regulation, starting with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Future blog posts in the series will cover the digital services package (DMA and DSA), the incoming CRA and the highly controversial CSAM regulation. These will be followed by a series dedicated to the UK, particularly UK applications of European law such as the GDPR and ePrivacy directive, as well as the Online Safety Act and the IPA amendment bill. Finally, we will conclude the series by looking across the pond and diving into the Cloud Act, as well as KOSA and other existing proposals.

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It is an honor and a pleasure to unveil the election results and introduce the first elected Governing Board for the Matrix.org Foundation!

Congratulations to the winning candidates, we thank you for your willingness to serve the community. We’re also grateful to everyone who threw their hat in the ring, and hope that the candidates who did not get elected consider running again in the future – noting that we have an election of Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members scheduled for next year.

Thanks also to all of the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learned a lot in this first election process that we look forward to incorporating into the next one.

The level of engagement with the process was a very encouraging sign for the health of the Matrix ecosystem, and we’re proud to have had 100% voter turnout in all but one constituency.

Read on to see who is on the Governing Board, a brief discussion of next steps, and reflections on some of the work that remains to improve representation.

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Voting has started for the Governing Board elections and runs till May 31! This is our first election and we are very excited. All of the results will be published here on the blog on June 3.

You can learn about all of the candidates on our 2024 election page. All eligible voters should have received an email from OpaVote, the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections.

If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us, first check the inbox and spam folders of the email address you have on file with us (such as through Donorbox or Patreon). Please email us if you have any questions.

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