Foundation

More than 340 attendees, exciting next-generation features ready to ship, Matrix powering more and more government communications, practical updates from the community, and the occasional shark: dispatches from Malmö 2026!

"Matrix has gone from being an interesting experiment to an existential requirement," said Matthew at the opening to the 2026 edition of The Matrix Conference, a sentiment that could be felt throughout this year's edition.

Civil servants from 15 different nations and intergovernmental organizations shared their decisions and experiences migrating to Matrix in response to an urgent need for digital sovereignty; we also heard from regulated industries like healthcare who cannot compromise on privacy or security and are increasingly looking to Matrix as a solution. Matrix is growing in response to this need: representatives from Matrix's rapidly expanding ecosystem came to present the varied projects built on Matrix specification, and members of both the Spec Core Team and the ecosystem came to demonstrate the expanding features that will make up Matrix 2.0.

A demo of Matrix real-time communication (MatrixRTC), was one of the highlights, as Matthew created a group call with himself using three different applications: Visio, Tammy and Element Call.

This year we introduced the community attendance sponsorship package, which allowed us to fund travel for the maintainers of one of the community-created Matrix homeservers called Continuwuity; their talks and workshop were among the most popular of the event. Thanks to Famedly for supporting this initiative via the community attendance sponsorship option.

Of course, we took advantage of being in the home of IKEA to adopt some Blåhajar:

A lot more happened, so read on for more highlights from The Matrix Conference 2026.

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And that’s a wrap for this 2026 Governing Board election season! 🏁

After 49 days of ramping up, we have reached the end of the process and are now ready to announce the 12 freshly (re)elected Governing Board members.

After one year of setting things up (2024), the last year (2025) has been the first year in which the Governing Board was able to truly deliver concrete value, figuring out the blueprints for highly functioning Working Groups, aligning on expectations of engagement from Governing Board members, feeding back on the Foundation’s decisions and clarifying the processes and frameworks in general. This meant that with greater clarity on expectations we have seen a few board members stepping down, leading to a deeper rework of the Governing Board during these elections than we initially predicted (and would predict in the future). However, with clearer expectations being set and a bigger ecosystem, we are now confident that everyone who has thrown their name in the hat is ready to execute and support the Foundation’s mission.

So without further ado, I would like to congratulate and welcome our newly elected Governing Board members, whether it is their first or second term on the Board!

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🚥 And off we go!

At midnight tonight representatives of the Platinum members, Silver members and Ecosystem members, as well asIndividual members, Spec Core Team members and Guardians will be able to start voting to choose the representatives of their constituency on the Governing Board!

The final list of candidates for the 2026 election of the Foundation's Governing Board and their details are available on the website for reference, and folks have been campaigning in the bonfire rooms during the last two weeks.

This is the penultimate milestone in our election schedule and runs until the 12th of June 11:59pm UTC:

✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
✅ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
✅ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
➡️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June

All voters should keep an eye out for an email from OpaVote, the platform we will be using to run the election.

A big thank you again to all our candidates who have stepped up to drive the growth of Matrix, and good luck to all!

I, for one, am looking forward to announcing the results in two weeks!

Amandine

Drumroll! 🥁

We now have the final list of candidates for the 2026 election of the Foundation's Governing Board! This represents our third milestone in the process and means our candidates can start campaigning as of today!

As a reminder, the full election schedule is as follows:
✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
✅ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
➡️ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
◻️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June

A big thank you to all our candidates who have stepped up to drive the growth of Matrix:

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On Monday we announced the launch of the 2026 election for the Foundation's Governing Board. We have now reached the second milestone and are kicking-off the nomination period!

As a reminder, the full election schedule is as follows:
✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
➡️ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
◻️ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
◻️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June

Key links:

• The election page
• The nomination form

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The Governing Board of the Foundation is a key player in the governance of Matrix: it allows representatives of every stakeholder of the ecosystem to have a stronger involvement in how the project is managed with both an advisory role to the Guardians, Foundation staff, and Spec Core Team, as well as a participatory one, via the Committees and Working Groups. It is a great opportunity for those who wish to be a bit more involved in the project to have more impact, whilst also representing their constituency.

Today we kick off the third Governing Board election round, starting with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, 2nd May and closes on Friday, 15th May.

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Today we are publishing The Matrix.org Foundation’s first trademark policy. As a foundation we believe that everyone should have control over their own communications and that secure communication should be available to everyone as a free and open standard. We exist to act as a neutral custodian for the Matrix protocol and to ensure that it operates as an unfragmented standard, which benefits the whole ecosystem. If the Matrix ecosystem is thriving everyone benefits, from people using Matrix for their daily conversations to companies building products on Matrix.

A big part of our work as custodians is ensuring that there is clarity in sources of information and services, in which trademark protection plays a big role. Our aim with this trademark policy is to help people understand if a product claiming to be compatible with the protocol is actually compatible, and if a specific product or service is officially supported by the Foundation.

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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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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 🚀

🔗DINUM becoming the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation

Today DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, has officially announced that they were joining the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member and becomes the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation!

This is particularly exciting news as it will hopefully set an example for other public sector organisations using Matrix to communicate, and there are many of them.

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