Robin Riley (m.org) says
Meet the nominees for the Governing Board and swing by the election rooms to ask questions and get to know them better. Huge thanks to all of the nominees for stepping up to serve the community! Voting begins on May 31st.
The Matrix.org Foundation is happy to announce that the Matrix Conference 2025 will be held at Kaleidoscoop in Strasbourg, France, from October 15 to 18!
Last year the Conference was completely sold out, with more than 200 decision makers, experts and enthusiasts joining us for this very first edition! The rooms were so full, and we had such a long waiting list that we've decided to extend our capacity this year to 300 attendees, with flexibility for more.
We would like to thank our Anchor Sponsor Element for their dedication to the Matrix ecosystem and to the success of the Conference! Thank you, Element, for enabling us to make the Conference happen!
Thib (m.org) reports
We are excited to announce that The Matrix Conference will happen in Strasbourg from October 15 to 18! Following last year's success, we bumped our capacity to accept more than 300 attendees this year.
- 🗣️ The Call for Proposals is now open until June 6
- 🤝 We have sponsorship packages ready for organizations interested in getting the right eyes on their products
- 🎟️ We expect to open registrations in the coming weeks
- 🌐 You can find all the information about the conference on https://2025.matrix.org
The Events Working Group and the Foundation at large are looking forward to meeting you in the flesh this year again!
HarHarLinks announces
The nomination period for this years's governing board elections ends tonight (UTC)! If you're an Individual, Silver, Gold, or Associate member, submit your nomination here!
Tomorrow (UTC), the 2 week campaigning period begins officially, but you are already allowed to campaign, for example in the official Governing Board campaigning rooms.
Migrating millions of matrixers to MAS
Quentin Gliech says
🔗Matrix.org now uses MAS!
On Monday this week, the backend team at Element successfully migrated Matrix.org to use matrix-authentication-service (MAS).
This happened right after the core MSCs for next-generation auth got merged into the Matrix spec!After a full week of running MAS on Matrix.org, we're happy to call the migration a great success! 🕺
This means Matrix.org users now have a new home to manage their accounts: account.matrix.org
You can read more about the migration on the Matrix.org blog:
👉 Matrix.org is now running MAS!
...and what it means for Element users on the Element blog:
👉 MAS migration unleashes Element X on Matrix.orgWe're still ironing out a few bugs, so if you’ve experienced any issues related to the migration, let us know in #matrix-auth:matrix.org!
Robin Riley (m.org) reports
The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join likeminded organisations in endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles, a set of guidelines to promote collaboration and adoption of open source around the globe.
Robin Riley (m.org) says
Please join me in welcoming the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation: SSH Communications Security! We're grateful to SSH for stepping up to support the Foundation's mission and stewardship of the Matrix protocol.
Does your organization rely on Matrix? We're working hard to close our budget gap, and we need your help. Join the Foundation to ensure Matrix has robust stewardship well into the future.
Nico announces
As part of my work for the Trust and Safety Committee I am trying to establish a working group to help with researching and documenting the state of T&S across the ecosystem. If that sounds interesting to you, please poke your head into #governing-board-office:matrix.org and tell us!
To summarize what the group is about, the current proposal looks like this:
To make appropriate decisions, the T&S committee needs to know about the state of T&S in the wider ecosystem. It needs to have insights into current challenges, solutions and initiatives. On the other hand the community can also benefit from having some of that information documented. The T&S R&D WG is a tool to help with that. It includes a wider set of individuals and reports their research results to the T&S committee. In some cases the WG is also encouraged to enhance the documentation on matrix.org to help communities and users on Matrix moderate their rooms. The T&S committee might sometimes ask the WG for help in researching specific topics in more detail to guide their decisions.
🔗Pledge of Confidentiality
The WG will sometimes have to deal or come in contact with confidential data, possibly because of legal reasons, possibly because of active abuse concerns. While the WG is encouraged to be open, there will be times where the WG should keep certain information confidential and only share it with specific individuals. As the WG we pledge to keep information confidential when necessary while still being transparent and open where possible. The T&S committee may decide to remove members from the WG if it sees a member abusing their access to information or not acting in a trustworthy manner by sharing information the group agreed to keep confidential. This should be a last resort, needs a majority in the T&S committee and should be preceded by appropriate communication and warnings.
🔗Typical Tasks
- Gather information about current moderation challenges on Matrix and keep structured notes about them
- Maintain an overview of available moderation tools and their capabilities
- Create and maintain moderation guides on matrix.org in collaboration with the Website or Documentation WGs
- Reach out to moderators to gather feedback or offer advice
- Reports insights and opinions to the T&S committee and possibly other T&S working groups
- Potentially collaborate on proposals with the T&S committee or other WGs
- Turn some of their research into MSCs and collaboratively push them to completion as well as advise on other MSCs from a T&S perspective
Matthew says
The Matrix.org Foundation is now registered with Benevity in order to receive corporate donations as part of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. If your employer supports donations via Benevity please encourage them to route some of their donations to supporting Matrix!
Very interesting news reported today
You find there the document "Cyber Blueprint - Proposal Council Recommendation" for download that contains on page 17 a recommendation to use the matrix call for inter-gov communication on cyber topics.
In the next step, The European Council must discuss and then possibly adopt this proposal.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-blueprint-draft-council-recommendation
Thib (m.org) reports
The Foundation is at a crossroads. We need to raise an additional $610K to break-even, and more immediately to raise $100K to keep our bridges running.
As a neutral custodian for the specification and much more, the Foundation is key to the success of Matrix. It is time to step up for it.
Gwmngilfen reports
🔗Announcing the Governing Board Working Groups process
The Governing Board has news! If you have been itching to know how to get involved, we are now ready to get you ... on-Board! 🥁 😀
The Working Groups are the beating heart of the GB - they get the work done. So naturally people have been asking "how do we make one?" and "what is expected of a Working Group?"
After a successful 2024 with a lot to be proud of, and a Matrix Conference that brought our community together to celebrate 10 years of Matrix, we step into 2025 with a light budget and a mighty team poised to make the most of it!
Our priorities remain to make Matrix a safer network, keep growing the ecosystem, make the most of our Governing Board, and drive a fruitful and friendly collaboration across all actors.
However, whether we will manage to get there is not fully a given.