I’m pleased to report I've been busily onboarding the elected Governing Board members, and we've already started having important conversations about how we continue to move the Foundation forward to support the Matrix ecosystem.
This week Matthew and I published a blog post, significantly informed by community conversations and work with the Governing Board, on a process to define a governance framework for the projects we steward. Of note, in this post we are also drawing a line in the sand and making it clear: some projects, like the spec, test suites, SDKs, and shared cryptographic libraries, are so important that they require ongoing stewardship, under a permissive open source licence, by an organisation that is accountable to the ecosystem. To put a point on it: the Foundation will seek to fund and coordinate maintenance and development of core projects even if faced with a competing fork.
Learn more in our blog post. We’d love to hear from you as we work together to update our project governance, and encourage you to reach out to your representatives on the Governing Board along the way.
There have been many changes at the Foundation in the last couple of years. We’ve added independent leadership, attracted members, continued working towards sustainability, and expanded our open governance to establish a Governing Board to become better and more capable stewards of the protocol and ecosystem. We’re still in a period of organisational transition, getting into the groove with the Governing Board, focusing on the Spec Core Team, and building the technical and financial foundation for independence.
We’ve also been asking ourselves what it means for a project to be “core” to the Foundation, and how the Foundation should relate to and work with the people who maintain those projects. These are fundamental questions for any open source foundation, and they’ve become even more pressing for us since Element switched developing Synapse and several other projects to AGPLv3, rather than contributing under the Foundation as Apache v2.
This blog post explores our context and sets out to start a discussion on how we should move forward. Already, we’ve been having these discussions in Foundation rooms and on the Governing Board, and we look forward to bringing more people into this discussion so that we can ship a framework that delivers on our mission and meets the needs of the Matrix ecosystem.
Progress on authenticated media continues! As of today, beta.matrix.org has now frozen its media to allow client and server developers, as well as homeserver owners, to test how their stuff responds when a media freeze is in place. This milestone brings us one step closer to matrix.org itself freezing unauthenticated media, described in more detail on the blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticated-media/
The happy path for interacting with beta.matrix.org should be:
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Note that media from before today (August 7th) loaded fine
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.
If you are a client or homeserver developer, make sure you read up on the upcoming authenticated media!
Apart from that the spec team has been busy combing through the general spec backlog. Identifying MSCs which appear stuck waiting for SCT input is particularly helpful - drop some links in Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team with a description of how it appears stuck.
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.
It's another week, and there's been steady progress on a few MSCs. Other than those listed above, there was a partial implementation of MSC4133: Support for custom profile fields for Synapse. Personally I find the prospect of finally being able to attach arbitrary profile information to users. Very exciting!
We imagined The Matrix Conference as a gathering place for hackers, project managers, digital sovereignty leaders, and innovators. I’m proud to announce that we definitely succeeded in building a schedule covering that range of topics!
We received more than 60 high-quality proposals and ended up building 5 tracks over the course of 2 “core” conference days. The tracks cover everything from sovereignty and collaboration in the public sector to digital rights, Matrix internals, the social impact of Matrix, and Matrix as the foundation for products.
With more than 60 very high quality proposals, it's been difficult to select talks that would make it to the conference.
We are thrilled to announce the schedule of the conference, and we're looking forward to listen to that fantastic line up tell us about the future of Matrix, Matrix in the public sector, Matrix in the wild, or the social impact of Matrix!
If you're an organisation and want to get some visibility in the Matrix ecosystem, we have a few sponsorship packages left at https://2024.matrix.org/sponsor/.
Don't forget to book your ticket to attend. Head to https://2024.matrix.org/register/ and tell us whether you want merch or not in addition to your ticket!
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
There is one outstanding concern on this MSC for improved clarity, however the author appears to have already addressed this point. Looks like it's only a matter of time before FCP beigns on this one.
Requires 1 more tick from the SCT (Started the week needing 6)
Once again, thank you to everyone who is writing PRs against matrix-spec, especially Johennes and Kladki who combined have had lots of PRs (and MSCs!) created and merged recently. Cheers!
The Matrix.org Foundation is joining other organisations in calling on the European Commission to sustain its funding for the Next Generation Internet.
We thank the petites singularités association for their leadership in starting this open letter, and are grateful to OW2 for the English translation.
Join us by publishing the letter on your own website and add yourself to this table.
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
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.
Since this MSC was written, it has been shown that having (unstable) prefixes in the unsigned field of events is useful. Hence the general consensus from the SCT has been to close this MSC as it stands.
Needs 1 checkmark from the SCT (started the week needing 2).
The enthusiasm around The Matrix Conference is simply mind-boggling! In less than 2 weeks, the project leads of state-sponsored deployments, key digital rights activists and the Matrix community at large sent us more than 60 high-quality proposals 🤯
We're really excited to help the key players in the ecosystem meet in Berlin, and I can't wait to see the fantastic talks people are working on. While the team works on producing a proper schedule for it, organisations that want to increase their brand awareness in the Matrix Ecosystem can still sponsor the conference. Let your marketing department know, pass them our sponsorship brochure!
