Events

🔗TADHack Global 2017

At the end of September, TADHack Global was held where almost 150 teams spent their weekends hacking towards the $45k total prize money up for grabs. Luke spent the final day of the hack talking to teams hacking at IDEALondon in Shoreditch, meeting a few Matrix enthusiasts and long-time collaborators.

Out of 10 hacks, 2 of 4 local winners won prizes locally and went on to be global winners alongside 6 other teams using Matrix as part of their hacks. Checkout the TADHack London Wrap-up for details on all of the awesome hacks, especially Aviral Dasgupta's Pushtime and Polite.ai.

https://twitter.com/TADHack/status/915284069046419456

Well done to everyone who took part, and a special thanks to those flying Matrix :)

🔗THE Port 2017

The following weekend was THE Port 2017, a humanitarian-themed hackathon held at CERN, Geneva in Switzerland. Among the 7 teams participating, the Matrix team consisted of a few software developers from Bity including Matrix enthusiast Alejandro Avilés (who very kindly helped us get a team into the hackathon). Luke and Dave from the Matrix London office also flew out to help the cause and by the end had a very stable, working prototype by the end of the competition.

The hack we made was a communications system backed by Matrix for use in refugee camps, an idea that hatched at the start of the hackathon (whereas the other projects were well established ideas up to 6 weeks before the event). Check out the code on GitHub if you're interested in the client-side apps we made over the weekend.

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/916672581473890304

It was another fun weekend for the Matrix team and we look forward to the next one. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming Matrix events!

Hi all,

FOSDEM this year was even more crazy and incredible than ever - with attendance up from 6,000 to 9,000 folks, it's almost impossible to describe the atmosphere. Matt Jordan from Asterisk describes it as DisneyWorld for OSS Geeks, but it's even more than that: it's basically a corporeal representation of the whole FOSS movement.  There is no entrance fee; there is no intrusive sponsorship; there is no corporate presence: it's just a venue for huge numbers of FOSS projects and their users and communities to come together in one place (the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and talk and learn.  Imagine if someone built a virtual world with storefronts for every open source project imaginable, where you could chat to the core team, geek out with other users, or gather in auditoriums to hear updates on the latest projects & ideas.  Well, this is FOSDEM... except even better, it's in real life.  With copious amounts of Belgian beer.

Anyway: this year we had our normal stand on the 2nd floor of K building, sharing the Realtime Lounge chill-out space with the XMPP Standards Foundation.  This year we had a larger representation than ever before with Matthew, Erik and Luke from the London team as well as Manu & Yannick from Rennes - which is just as well given all 5 of us ended up speaking literally non-stop from 10am to 6pm on both Saturday & Sunday (and then into the night as proceedings deteriorated/evolved into an impromptu Matrix meetup with Coffee, uhoreg, tadzik, realitygaps and others!).  The level of interest at the Matrix booth was frankly phenomenal: a major change from the last two FOSDEMs in that this year pretty much everyone had already heard of Matrix, and were most likely to want to enthuse about features and bugs in Synapse or Riot, or geek out about writing new bridges/bots/clients, or trying to work out a way to incorporate Matrix into their own projects or companies.

#RTCLounge with @ara4n from @matrixdotorg busy demoing cool stuff pic.twitter.com/Vc0uLEceQP

— miconda (@miconda) February 4, 2017

Synapse 0.19 and Riot 0.9.7 were also released on Saturday to try to ensure that anyone joining Matrix for the best time at FOSDEM were on the latest & greatest code - especially given the performance and E2E fixes present in both.  Amazingly the last-minute release didn't backfire: if you haven't upgraded to Synapse 0.19 we recommend going so asap.  And if you're a Riot user, make sure you're on the latest version :)

We were very lucky to have two talks accepted this year: the main one in the Security Track on the Jansen main stage telling the tale of how we added end-to-end encryption to Matrix via Olm & Megolm - and the other in the Decentralised Internet room (AW1.125), focusing on the unsolved future problems of decentralised accounts, identity, reputation in Matrix.  Both talks were well attended, with huge queues for the Decentralised Internet room: we can only apologise to everyone who queued for 20+ minutes only to still not be able to get in.  Hopefully next year FOSDEM will allocate a larger room for decentralisation!  On the plus side, this year FOSDEM did an amazing job of videoing the sessions - livestreaming every talk, and automatically publishing the recordings (via a fantastic 'publish your own talk' web interface) - so many of the people who couldn't get into the room (as well as the rest of the world) were able to watch it live anyway by the stream.

This is how popular decentralised communication with @matrixdotorg is at #fosdem2017. pic.twitter.com/6T5PK6RRJE

— Jan Weisensee (@ilumium) February 5, 2017

Security track at #FOSDEM: @matrixdotorg project & @ara4n pic.twitter.com/QwroHSNh8Z

— miconda (@miconda) February 5, 2017

https://t.co/x0x7xuzlH2 presentation at the Decentralized Internet Devroom @fosdem pic.twitter.com/J2Wxo9SZ8H

— Tristan Nitot (@nitot) February 5, 2017

You can watch the video of the talks from the FOSDEM website here and here.  Both talks necessarily include the similar exposition for folks unfamiliar with Matrix, so apologies for the duplication - also, the "future of decentralised communication" talk ended up a bit rushed; 20 minutes is not a lot of time to both explain Matrix and give an overview of the challenges we face in fixing spam, identity, moderation etc.  But if you like hearing overenthusiastic people talking too fast about how amazing Matrix is, you may wish to check out the videos :)  You can also get at the slides as PDF here (E2E Encryption) and here (Future of Decentralisation).

Huge thanks to evevryone who came to the talks or came and spoke to us at the stand or around the campus.  We had an amazing time, and are already looking forward to next year!

Matthew & the team

The original promise of the Internet was to be an interoperable platform for distributing data. However, we have since increasingly seen our data fragmented and trapped in a number of proprietary silos. Matrix hopes to fix this by being a federated, open standard for data exchange that any service can use.

The Decentralized Web Summit is a meetup for anyone interested in building the Decentralized Web, which aims to make the Web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control. It takes place at the Internet Archive, San Francisco, CA on Wednesday June 8 and Thursday June 9, 2016.

Matrix will be represented at the event, and we hope to also host a workshop or a talk about Matrix.

The meetup has a Slack room set up for pre-meetup conversations - you can also access this room via Matrix: #decentralizedweb-general:matrix.org

We are looking forward to interesting people and interesting conversations at the first Decentralized Web Summit!

TADHack-mini took place in east London over the weekend with 88 people in attendance. There were $8k in prizes, and five different services to hack on. This time, we didn't have too many people using Matrix in their hack, but we did have an excellent idea and implementation called Babelonio, who won our prize: a Phantom X Hexapod Mk3!

Babelonio adds speech-to-text and translation via Google translate to Matrix, via the Vector client and a Chrome extension. This is quite nice, because it means you don't have to run a custom client. And by using Google translate, you immediately get access to a lot of languages (although sometimes the translation doesn't quite work, as you can see in the presentation video). The project was done by Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen. You can see the presentation and demo of the hack here.

A good write-up of all the hacks and winners can be found on the TADHack blog.

Thanks to the TADHack organisers for another fine event, and also to everyone who came over to chat about Matrix - and again congratulations to the Babelonio team:

The Matrix team had a very successful trip to FOSDEM '16 last weekend. Many, many words were exchanged, and at times there was a queue of people just waiting to have a chat! We spoke to a whole lot of interested and interesting people, some of which had heard of Matrix already, and some who hadn't. The nice thing with the crowd at FOSDEM is that they very quickly "get" what we're trying to do with Matrix - and then start thinking aloud about how they might want to use it or extend it - which means we have many great conversations!

At the beginning of FOSDEM, I think we had around 2000 people "currently" in the Matrix HQ room - the next day, that number had increased by a hundred (and now it's even bigger due to a hackernews post where we mentioned Matrix)!

Our talk in the IoT dev room was very popular; unfortunately a lot of people that were queueing to get in never made it due to the limited space. However, the talk was recorded, and it's already been made available:

You can also look at the slides from the talk. Note that due to technical problems, the first half of the talk was not recorded.

We also did a talk in the Real Time dev room, which was equally popular. Hopefully the video from this talk will also be available shortly (you can keep an eye on the video repository for this dev room) - once it is, I will add it to this post.

For now, you can look at the slides from the talk.

Another interesting talk where Matrix ended up being represented, was Daniel Pocock's Improving Telepathy talk. I'll add the video from that too, once it's available.

Finally, thanks to everyone who came to say hello and have a chat - and to everyone who has since set up their own homeserver. Please do join the Matrix HQ room (using any of these clients) and let us know how your Matrix experience is going!

Matrix will again be represented at FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium, January 30th and 31st. This year, we have two talks scheduled: one in the IoT devroom on Saturday at noon, and one in the Real Time devroom at 3.10pm the same day.

We also have a stand on the 2nd floor of the K building - next to the Real Time lounge (potentially same spot as last year). If you're going to FOSDEM, please come and say hi to us at the stand or at the talks!

Our trip to FOSDEM '15 was very enjoyable; we met a lot of smart people and learnt about a lot of interesting technologies and projects. Hopefully we made a few people enthusiastic about Matrix as well!

As always, for any questions or comments, please come talk to us in the official Matrix HQ room - you can join via any of these clients (or write your own!).

Matrix will again be represented at the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Paris. Daniel and myself are catching the Eurostar tomorrow afternoon, and the conference will start early Wednesday morning with a panel about WebRTC for Mobile, where Daniel is one of the participants.

I'm sure we will have three days full of interesting talks and discussions (see the full schedule here). There will be demos as well, and Matrix is (of course!) also joining the demo competition. We hope to see many familiar faces - and hopefully meet some new ones as well!

If you are going to the conference, please come and say hello – we will have a stand at the expo (we're table #6 - see map here). And don't miss Daniel's Matrix One-year Status Report at 11.10am on Friday!

See you there!

Matrix is sponsoring another TADHack, this time TADHack mini in Chicago on October 3-4. Come hack something cool together using Matrix, either in Chicago or remotely! At past TADHacks we've seen a robot controlled with Matrix, collaborative web page viewing with Matrix as the underlying protocol, and more.

As well as being lots of fun, we've teamed up with Trossen Robotics to offer a HR-OS1 Humanoid Endoskeleton for the best hack using the Matrix standard. The HR-OS1 is a hackable, modular, humanoid robot development platform designed from the ground up with customization and modification in mind. With a Raspberry Pi 2, webcam, wifi, bluetooth, and all of the limbs you expect for a human, there's a lot of scope for exciting projects to be had with it!

I for one would love to ask an open source robot to bring me snacks over chat. (Wow that's a sentence I never thought I would be able to say) I'll be on site, (and also hanging out in on Matrix in #matrix:matrix.org) to help out with whatever creative things y'all come up with - I hope to see you there!

Also in Chicago the following week I'll be giving a tutorial on Federated Identity as well as attending and speaking about the problem of fragmented communication at the IIT Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo.

If you're going to be around, please do say hi - I only recently joined the Matrix team, and there's a lot of people I've yet to meet - I look forward to seeing you at one (or all) of these events!

The Matrix bandwagon goes on, and we have several conferences and events lined up in the next few weeks.

First up is TADHack mini in Chicago, October 3-4, where Matrix is sponsoring and handing out prizes to the best two hacks using Matrix in some way or another. The previous TADHack mini and the Global TADHack were both excellent events where we saw some really cool hacks - we are looking forward to see what people will put together this time!

Also in Chicago, a couple of days later, is the IIT Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo - October 6-8 - where we will be exhibiting and speaking about the problem of fragmented communication.

At the same time, we will also be represented at Elastix World, in Bogotá, Columbia, October 7-8, where Matthew is one of the keynote speakers! Matrix is also sponsoring this event.

Finally, we will be in Orlando, Florida for AstriCon, October 13-15. Matrix is sponsoring this conference as well, and we also have a speaking slot.

If you are going to any of these events, please do say hi - we are looking forward to talking to both old and new acquaintances! See you there!

After a successful visit to OSCON in Oregon last month, Matrix is this week represented at Clue Con in Chicago. We have a speaking slot later today - see the full schedule here. However, this time, we will be calling in remotely from London, but what better way to demonstrate video calling than by using it?

More upcoming events include Fosscon in Pennsylvania (August 22nd), where we have two talks scheduled, and ElastixWorld in Columbia (Oct 7 & 8), where we are participating as a keynote speaker. We hope to see you there!

As always, for questions or comments - or just to say hi - please join #matrix:matrix.org using your favourite Matrix-client!