A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley

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 🚀