Only 2 weeks later we are back with a quick wrapup of recent activities on the website before the holidays.
Jack S. has been supporting us greatly in shipping a million updates to all kinds of ecosystem projects as well as finding and fixing some smaller issues and contributions.
We cleaned up the blog categories a bit, slowly working towards clearer definition of what goes where.
salixh5 checked the status of and contributed an update to the LINE bridge during a Matrix Stammtisch.
anoa updated our footer social media icons to include the Foundation's Bluesky profile.
The effort to tag issues we are looking for help for continues. You can already find 30 to get involved with using the help wanted tag!
The website office hour is on holidays and will return in its regular slot on 8th January! In the meantime, you can still find us in the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room and of course keep sending PRs! See you again at TWIM next year.
As we've previously announced, we are organising a Matrix Hackathon before FOSDEM and co-organising the Decentralised Communication Devroom, and we will have a Booth. We have updates for you!
At this year’s Matrix Conference we said we were aiming for this very spec release to be 2.0 proper. It looks like the MSCs still need a little bit more time to get over the line though, but they’re extremely close — one of the next few releases is expected to be Matrix 2.0.
Today we’re releasing Matrix 1.17 while the 2.0 MSCs continue to make forward progress. This release is smaller than some, with four MSCs merged, but as normal also includes a number of clarifications.
Improvements to the spec website include a dropdown to get at old spec versions more easily, and an index of HTTP endpoints at the top of each page.
This release of the spec also sees the incorporation of the specifications for the Olm and Megolm cryptographic ratchets. Olm and Megolm themselves haven’t changed, but we did want them to be on the spec site :)
Thanks especially to Johannes and Kévin for continuing to improve the quality of the spec with features, clarifications, and MSC text!
In April, we introduced policy servers to help tackle the spread of harmful content on Matrix. Today, we’re announcing that our implementation is available as open source. Say hello to policyserv v1!
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.
The Spec Core Team expects to release Matrix v1.17 next week with a few MSCs, along with some improvements to the spec website. Stay tuned for those!
Otherwise we're still working away at Matrix 2.0 MSCs - trying to keep them at the forefront while occasionally dipping into other MSCs. MSC4143: MatrixRTC, MSC4354: Sticky Events and MSC4186: Simplified Sliding Sync are the three currently being most actively worked on. The team appreciates your patience while the details are being hammered out.
We continue to explore how to best and most effectively collaborate with the Foundation on publishing news, with the FOSDEM announcement by the Events WG following the newest suggested process with success!
We have suggested to adopt an AI policy to the Foundation, and it was decided to adopt it on the website for now.
In collaboration with the Room Directory WG, you can now find the form as well as further information about the room directory of the matrix.org homeserver on a dedicated page
weeman has added TWIM to the website navbar, so you don't have to remember the shortlink anymore to get your news!
vedant-vijay fixed an issue with the filters on the SDKs page
Jack S. has spotted some bugs and opportunities to polish which we were glad to merge!
We are maintaining the information about the Foundation, including it's members and are working with the Governing Board to keep its documentation up to date, as well as the Working Groups
We have introduced a bunch of labels to the website issue tracker to help us sort tasks, and especially to point out some tasks that would be easy to implement even by external contributors
We keep developing guidelines for ourselves to improve the consistency and professionality of the website step by step and of publications in general step by step, while also trying to keep an eye on making it as simple as possible to start contributing
The #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room was upgraded and as part of that not only receives GitHub webhooks about activities on the matrix.org repo, but also the other repos required for the WG's daily work, including twim-config and the conference website repo
Of course, we continue to publish TWIM every Friday 😉
As you can see, there is a lot going on! If you're interested in getting involved, you can find us in the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room, or of course grab an issue and send a PR! We also try to meet in a call regularly on Thursday afternoons, which we announce at #matrix.org-website:matrix.org.
You might have seen our earlier post about the Decentralised Communication Devroom we are coordinating. This is one of the exciting ways to come talk to us, but it's not the only one!
This year we're organising a hackathon before FOSDEM, we'll have a booth during FOSDEM itself, and we're coordinating the Decentralised Communication devroom!
Bridges are one of the reasons Matrix is called Matrix: let’s matrix all the networks together! They are key to onboard new users into the network. However, maintaining and operating bridges, in particular to closed, proprietary platforms, is expensive: they need to be kept up to date with any change made by the platform on a regular basis and they’re fiddly to keep up and running.
We're happy to announce that LU-CIX is joining the Foundation as a Silver Member!
LU-CIX is the organisation delivering the Matrix-based Luxchat in collaboration with the Ministry of Digitalisation of Luxembourg and the Chamber of Commerce. Luxchat comes in three (interoperable) flavours:
Luxchat4Gov for the public sector
Luxchat4Pro for companies and organisations
Luxchat, as a free messaging system for the general public and businesses, without advertising and without use of personal data, and respects the privacy of its users.
Earlier this week the three organisations also hosted a successful Matrix meets Luxchat Hackathon in presence of Madame Obertin, Minister of Digitalisation for Luxembourg!
