This Week in Matrix

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board Elections 2024 - Voting Starts on May 18, 2024

Thomas B says

Only two weeks remain until the first Governing Board Elections.

🔗Who are the nominees?

You can find the names of the nominees on the election page, but who are they, and what are their visions for the future? The nominees' campaigning has been underway since April 27. Members of the ecosystem are already quite active at #ecosystem.forum:matrix.org. Feel free to join and meet the nominees for the ecosystem members group.

Please, other constituencies, also find a place to meet, greet, and chat with members where people can get to know you better.

With Josh Simmons (away, back May 9th)'s permission, I opened the space #governing-board-nominee-campaigning-bonfire:matrix.org with several rooms for the different constituency groups.

Members: Come and join to meet the nominees! Nominees: Come and join to share your ideas with members!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

We’re positively glowing as we see all the people who are being nominated for our first ever Governing Board elections! The nomination period closes April 26 end of day (AOE time) and we’ll be posting all the nominees on our new election information center within 24 hours after the period closes.

Further, we’re pleased to welcome our 12th Ecosystem Member this week: Fractal 🎉

Does your project or community use Matrix? Does your business benefit from Matrix? Join the Matrix.org Foundation as a member to make your voice heard and secure the future of Matrix.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

WOW! What a week. Today I am thrilled to introduce not one or two, but eight new organisational members. We are extremely grateful to Futurewei Technologies for joining as our newest Gold Member – more on that soon – and to Verji Tech AS for joining as our newest Silver Member. Their support represents a big step toward financial sustainability for the Matrix.org Foundation.

Further, today we welcome Community Moderation Effort, Matrix Elm SDK, FluffyChat, Matrix Community Events, Polychat, and Rory&::LibMatrix as Ecosystem Members! If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot going on in the Matrix ecosystem!

Does your community use Matrix? Does your project speak Matrix? Or does your business incorporate Matrix into your work? Show your support and become a member today.

Topping off this week’s excitement, our Governing Board nomination period is just about to start! Learn more about the elections, as well as who can nominate and how in our recent blog post.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

Important deadline: next week, the week of April 15th, is the last week to become a member before the Governing Board nomination period! You must be a member, or have your application in and approved, by the end of day on April 19th (AOE time) in order to be eligible to nominate. Stay tuned for a blog post all about that on Monday ✨

This week we’re proud to welcome GNOME and KDE e.V. as our second and third Associate Members, and there are more applications in the pipeline that we’re reviewing!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

I wrote some thoughts on why governments should explicitly route taxpayer money into funding maintenance of open source infrastructure such as Matrix (rather than only funding feature dev, or not funding at all): https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service/

Josh Simmons says

This week we're thrilled to welcome the Eclipse Foundation as our first Associate Member! We couldn't be happier with the response to our expanded membership program and are delighted that we will have greater community representation when we elect our first ever Governing Board in the coming months.

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🔗Matrix Live

No Matrix Live as your usual host Thib has been unavailable most of the week!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

Our first ever Governing Board elections are approaching, with the nomination period set to begin in late April. If you want your organization or community to be able to nominate a candidate, or to vote in the election, the time to join as a member is now – same for individuals who want to participate!

This week we’re thrilled to announce three new members: two Ecosystem Members, Trixnity and Nheko-Reborn, and our first Platinum Member, Element!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Half-Shot announces

Great news everyone! As of Matrix 1.10, you can now specify more contact information about your homeserver via the new /.well-known/matrix/support endpoint.

This is useful because it allows other citizens of the federation to know who to contact if there is a problem, and it only requires you to fill in a few details to get going. This change has been on the go since 2019, so on a personal note I am thrilled to see this finally land. You can see an example on the foundation's very own server at https://matrix.org/.well-known/matrix/support

TravisR announces

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.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4121: m.role.moderator /.well-known/matrix/support role.
• MSC4120: Allow HEAD on /download

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

We released version 1.10 of the spec today! Read the blog post for the full details. Many thanks to Kévin Comaille for writing many of the spec PRs that landed in today's release!

With the release of Matrix 1.10, we on the Spec Core Team are looking forward to Matrix 1.11 and Matrix 2.0. We are asking the teams working on Matrix 2.0 features to update their MSCs and send them for review in #sct-office:matrix.org soon to help bring them closer to release in the next couple of quarters.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons reports

The wait is over! We are now accepting applications from projects and organizations that want to join the Foundation as Ecosystem and Associate Members.

You may recall that in December we announced two new membership tiers to ensure we have healthy community representation as we introduce more open governance for Matrix. Specifically, we created Ecosystem and Associate Member tiers. Ecosystem Members are open source projects that speak Matrix, and Associate Members are FOSS foundations, nonprofits, and academic institutions.

We’re excited to bring more folks into the fold, and thrilled to welcome Thunderbird, Draupnir, and Conduit as our first Ecosystem Members 🎉 Curious who else has joined as a member recently? Check out our Supporters.

We’d also like to recognize Thunderbird for sponsoring the Foundation, which helps us get a little bit closer to making the Foundation’s activities sustainable 🚀

Thib announces

There is a question we often get asked: why do you operate the Matrix.org homeserver, and why do you keep registrations open? We don't want to become the gmail.com of Matrix after all. We covered those in this post.

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/03/why-matrix-org/

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Digital Markets Act (EU)

Matthew reports

Happy DMA day everyone - here's our analysis of where messaging interoperability is at today, and where it might go in future: https://element.io/blog/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-here/

🔗Online Harms Act (Canada)

Matthew announces

more good crypto news this week from Canada: the Online Harms Act looks to be explicitly protecting end-to-end encryption and private communications - in contrast to the UK Online Safety Bill/Act. Looks like all attempts to educate around the UK OSB might have not been entirely in vain. You can see it direct from Justice Minister Arif Virani here: https://youtu.be/TjDrAlfhNAA?t=1766

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

This week Thib published the second installment in our roadmap blog post series: Opening up the Foundation. This post dives into the work we’re doing this year to increase community participation and open governance, looking even beyond the Governing Board to things like office hours, working groups, and fiscal sponsorship.

If you missed the first post in the series, check it out: A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation.

We’re grateful for the level of support we’ve received as we share more about the Foundation’s financial needs and the work we are doing in service of the ecosystem. Many dozens of individuals have donated and joined as Individual Members, and we’ve more than doubled the number of organizational members! Huge thanks to Beeper, Fairkom, Famedly, Fractal Networks, Gematik, IndieHosters, and XWiki.

We still have a long way to go, and critically we need larger organizations to step up to the plate, but the early results are encouraging. Onwards and upwards! 🚀

Matthew reports

There's a huge number of Matrix projects active in the German public sector, and the team at Element has had a go at mapping them out and providing a guide to what's going on, how they relate to each other, and to generally try to explain why Germany is the leading country for digital sovereignty - including self-sovereign secure communication with Matrix: https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

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