Hello lovely Matrix people,

Another 6 months have passed, and November is once again here - and that means another Governing Board meeting, and another report. What's been happening in the Governing Board?

🔗Structure, process, and engagement

Since the last report in May, we've had elections! This was important, since it's the first time we've added new folk to the existing Governing Board - last year we were all new. So, it took a little time to figure out how we do onboarding (and offboarding!) and getting the new folk up to speed.

In the meantime, the processes we've put in place around Committees and Working Groups appear to be functioning. Remember, if you have an idea for something to get done, you can propose a WG yourself! There are reports from these in the minutes below. On a side note, Nico and Kim from the Governing Board also shared an overview of these structures and processes surrounding the Governing Board and Working Groups at The Matrix Conference, which can be viewed on YouTube and media.ccc.de.

The work those groups do can range from the very-visible (Events, I'm looking at you 😛) to invisible work going on behind the scenes - but it's all needed. Since the last report, we've onboarded 2 more WGs, and have discussions in play about several more. This is exciting to me, because this is what we're for - giving the passion in our community a way to gain momentum.

As usual, I'm posting a lightly-edited version of the minutes from the meeting below for your reading pleasure... or you can skip to my conclusions at the end.

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The Spec Core Team would like to remind everyone that, now that MSC4153 has been accepted, the Matrix spec recommends that “Encrypted to-device messages SHOULD NOT be sent to non-cross-signed devices”.

In short: if, as a user, you have client devices which haven’t been correctly cross-signed with your identity key, then you’re going to start finding yourself unable to read encrypted messages from other users on those devices.

If you missed Andy’s talk on this at the Matrix Conference, we strongly recommend watching it as he explains the hows and whys of this change, but to summarise: this is an important improvement to the security of end-to-end encryption in Matrix.

As Andy also mentions in his talk, Element is planning to change the defaults in its clients to follow MSC4153’s recommendations to exclude non-cross-signed devices in April 2026. In preparation, the Element clients will very soon start to force users to verify their own devices so that those users are not shut out come April.

If you are a client developer, we encourage you to take a similar approach of encouraging users to verify their devices, so that they are not excluded from the conversation as the ecosystem moves towards MSC4153 compliance. And if you are a user, make sure your devices are verified!

🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix.org Foundation Updates

You can find the same video mirrored on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-81434-the-matrix-org-foundation-updates. All Conference content is available via the Conference website.

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

Sky reports

Cutting the ribbon on the reopened matrix.org room directory!

Back in early September, the room directory working group started an initial beta test run. For the first time in months, it was possible again to get new rooms into the directory.

Since then, we’ve reworked the multiple forms into one universal one to make things easier for users. We also identified several pain points in the process and validated that our imagined workflow actually works in practice. There are still improvements we’re actively working on, but we’re already happy with the current stage.

There is now a dedicated subpage for the room directory on the matrix.org homepage —you can find it here— where users can easily access all relevant info. Please share it around!

If you’d like to give feedback or get involved, feel free to walk by in our #room-dir-wg-office:neko.dev.

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🔗Matrix Live S11E15 – Figma but based on Matrix?

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board to the Matrix.org Foundation and with elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Gwmngilfen announces

Howdy folks, your friendly GB here - I've been a bit quiet recently, but we wanted to let you all know that the latest 6-monthly Board meeting happened this week! Lots to cover, Working Group updates, challenges, plans for upcoming work, and so on - so you can expect a report out in the near future on that! Stay tuned 🙂

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The Matrix.org Foundation will coordinate the FOSDEM 2026 Decentralised Communication Devroom, and is requesting submissions for talks!

One of the most important roles for Free & Open Source Software right now is liberating users from being trapped and exploited by Big Tech. This is especially true of the fundamental need for humanity to communicate safely and securely, without being dependent on gatekeepers who pose a single point of control and failure.

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🔗Matrix Live S11E14 – MSC Crafter, MAS Personal Tokens

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Amandine reports

Robin is sadly moving on at the end of November, see A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley. I will be covering as acting MD while we recruit someone else. A job description is incoming, but please get in touch at [email protected] if you're interested.

Amandine announces

This week we're welcoming Liberbyte as a Silver member of the Foundation! Liberbyte uses Matrix as data exchange layer between organisations to provide transparent and controlled access to global data exchanges and markets. Welcome and thank you for your support! 👏

Does your community or organisation use Matrix? Do you maintain an open source project that builds on Matrix? Join these organisations in demonstrating their support and apply to become a member today.

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The Matrix Conference 2025 is over, and it was a significant success for Matrix, its Foundation, and its ecosystem! If you couldn't make it to the Conference, here is what you missed and how you can catch up.

The first success was of course in attendance. With more than 250 attendees on-site and hundreds of attendees online, the Conference was attractive to many. This is particularly remarkable because the majority of our audience is in Germany, and this year's Conference was held in France. We want to thank our community for being so dedicated to Matrix and for following us here!

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On 2nd September 2025 the matrix.org homeserver suffered a ~24h outage.

During routine maintenance to increase disk capacity, the primary database failed, and we fell back to the secondary. In attempting to restore the original primary, we lost the secondary-turned-primary rendering matrix.org unavailable.

To recover, it was necessary to restore from S3 storage, however the restore process was lengthy due to the size of the dataset (51TB).

The matrix.org homeserver was unavailable from 2025-09-02 17:45 UTC and full service resumed at 2025-09-03 18:00 UTC. No data was lost as a result of the incident.

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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 🚀

🔗Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix State of the Union

Alternatively you can find it on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-74977-the-matrix-state-of-the-union.

🔗Matrix Conference Recordings

Beyond the Matrix State of The Union you can also find all of the Matrix Conference recordings at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl5dnxRMP1hUgnYEbpEsEEhIqY_KlO3NG.

They are also available on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/c/matrix-conf-2025.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗DINUM joins The Matrix.org Foundation

Amandine says

🇫🇷 Very excited to announce that DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, is joining The Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member and becomes the first government to join the Foundation! 🚀

Matrix is the backbone of Tchap, the secure messaging app for the French government, and it is great to see a State stepping up to concretely support and collaborate with an open source project so critical to their functioning.

💡 We hope this will show the way to all the other public sector organisations using Matrix, especially after we kicked off a Matrix for Public Sector group at the Matrix Conference last week, hopefully soon approved by the Governing Board as an official Working Group 🤞!

➡️ check out the announcement blog!

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