Introducing our first elected Governing Board

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.

The Governing Board

Representing Individual Members, we have:

• Andy Balaam (he/him)
• Greg Sutcliffe (he/him)
• J.B. Crawford (they/them)
• Sumner Evans

Representing Ecosystem Members, we have:

• Bram van den Heuvel (he/they), Elm SDK
• Kim Brose (he/him), Matrix Community Events
• Nicolas Werner (he/him), Nheko-Reborn

Representing Associate Members, we have

• Cleo Menenez Jr. (he/him), GNOME Foundation
• Tobias Fella (he/him), KDE e.V.

Representing Platinum Members, we have:

• Neil Johnson (he/him), Element

Representing Gold Members, we have:

• Brad Murray (he/him), Beeper
• Kevin Boos (he/him), Futurewei Technologies

Representing Silver Members, we have:

• Jan Kohnert (he/him), Gematik GmbH
• Thor Arne Johansen, Verji Tech AS

Representing Guardians, we have:

• Amandine Le Pape (she/her)
• Matthew Hodgson (he/him)
• Ross Schulman

Representing Spec Core Team members, we have:

• Richard van der Hoff (he/him)
• Travis Ralston (he/him)

And, lastly, representing Foundation staff in an ex officio capacity, we have:

• Josh Simmons (he/they)

Next steps

All of the elected representatives will soon receive a welcome email and details about onboarding which will take place over the next two months, with our first official meeting being in August or September. That first meeting will include chartering committees, establishing initial committee assignments, and other agenda items within the Governing Board’s remit.

All Governing Board members will soon be added to a private Matrix room and mailing list. We also hope to hold informal gatherings before that first meeting, so that Governing Board members can get to know each other before we dig into business.

We will continue to use the 2024 elections page as a place to aggregate information about the current Governing Board, and our About page will soon be updated. Before next year’s election we will establish a more general landing page for the Governing Board that is not specific to any one year.

Reflecting on representation

Our mission is to bring secure, private, free and open, unencumbered communication to everyone. In order to succeed in that, we need to bring a representative cross-section of perspectives to bear on our governance and development.

And while we haven’t yet conducted formal surveys of demographics, such that we can be confident about the baseline we’re working from, it’s plain to see that our contributor communities are not yet as representative as we need them to be. This isn’t news to anyone, but the election results make it all the more obvious.

The issue of representation is something we must tackle across the whole of the Matrix ecosystem, and we intend for the Foundation to play a leading role in addressing this internally and externally. We can learn from other successful initiatives, and I myself have been successful in tackling these challenges in partnership with other communities, so I know we can get to where we need to be.

In electing our first Governing Board, we have dramatically expanded the number of perspectives and lived experiences that are directly engaged in the evolution and direction of Matrix. Coming from a place where the majority of decisions were being made by people associated with one company, this is a huge improvement. This is something we should be proud of!

But to be extremely clear: we need to drastically increase the representation of women and people outside of Europe and North America. There may be other lived experiences we are short on, but these two stand out.

I’m eager to dig into this work with everyone here around Matrix. Please stay tuned for a follow up blog post specifically on this subject.

Onwards and upwards 🚀