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Matrix.org is a team of around 10 developers working together on the Matrix project, defining the Matrix open standard and developing the opensource reference client and server implementations. Most of the team has day jobs at Amdocs or OpenMarket (who kindly sponsor us to work on Matrix), and we gladly welcome contributors from the wider open source community.

Matrix was started by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape whilst building Amdocs Unified Communications, on realising that traditional VoIP and IM standards were insufficient to power featureful apps which can openly federate with one another. Matrix is designed to support open federation for the current and future state-of-the-art in communication apps using a simple web-friendly HTTP API standard. Our dream is to break down the walls between today's communication silos, and make VoIP and IM as ubiquitous and open as email.

Matthew

Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of matrix.org, responsible for defining Matrix's vision with Amandine and moving obstacles out of the way of the team in order to build it. Matthew has spent the last 15 years mainly designing and building various communication solutions on top of an alarming array of different technologies (IRC, IM, NNTP, IMAP, IAX, SIP/RTP, RTMP, XMPP... and now Matrix).

Matthew's day job is running the Unified Communications team at Amdocs, creating communication apps for large mobile network operators (e.g. Blah for TIM Brasil). Previously he ran "The Next Generation" telephony/media team at MX Telecom (acquired by Amdocs in 2010), building a highly distributed SIP softswitch and mobile-optimised WebRTC-compatible graph-based media framework and VoIP stack to power MX's voice and video services. Matthew has also been known to dabble in sysadmin (running MX Telecom's sysadmin team), dubious graphic design and CGI, and wishes he had more time to play piano. He has a degree in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has previously worked at Accenture, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, TheOneRing.net as well as misguidedly co-founding a digital marketing startup in Bahrain. [LinkedIn]

Amandine

Amandine Le Pape is business co-founder of matrix.org, responsible for defining the Matrix vision with Matthew and then organising the non-technical activities required to support and promote it and make it successful.

Amandine has spent the last 2 years setting up and leading the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs as a Product Manager, and has more than 10 years of experience in mobile services and telecommunications. She has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon and an EMBA from ESC Rennes. [LinkedIn]

Today is a big day for us as we are launching Matrix.org, an open initiative which has the goal of making real-time communication over IP as seamless and interoperable as email.

How do we want to achieve this? Very simply by creating a new federated, open-source ecosystem for VoIP and instant messaging on the internet! Ambitious right? :)

Actually not that much! In practice it's fairly simple: we are publishing the specification of a pragmatic and lightweight open standard, some opensource reference implementations of the servers and clients, and pragmatic RESTful HTTP JSON APIs, all of which are available right now on Github!

What does this mean for the world?

For techies, it gives developers a new way of building and running their own communications functionality, or integrating existing services into the Matrix ecosystem.

For consumers, it means that eventually they may be able to choose to use their favourite app from their trusted app provider, whilst reaching anyone they like given the entire Matrix ecosystem is interoperable.

So this is the very high level description of Matrix, but it misses the reasons why we've started this. We thought that rather than summarizing the main reasons for launching this project in a faceless post it would be interesting to present it from different perspectives, so we've asked some of the core team to give their take on it:

- Read Matthew's post and get an insight of Matrix' technical history and rationale.

- Check out Amandine's view on why the users need Matrix.

The Matrix Team

PS: Matrix is hoping to talk about the future of communication in general at SXSW Interactive  - if you like the idea of Matrix, please vote for us by clicking here before September 5th!