This Week in Matrix

🔗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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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

This week MTRNord and myself have launched the Matrix.org Website Office Hours. We hope to turn that into an accessible way to onboard new contributors. Come join the fun with us, and help us making the world a better place!

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🔗Dept of communities

🔗Ubuntu Matrix homeserver just went live 🎉

Nils announces

Even if we are formally still in testing phase until the end of the Ubuntu 24.04 cycle, the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver reached a state in which we can consider it live.

Although Ubuntu used to be IRC-only, we are now adopting Matrix to cater to a wider, diverse audience, including less technical users and younger generations. Matrix allows us to do so while staying true to the values that brought us Ubuntu, Linux and FOSS. When selecting the tools we use, we are always focused on open-source, privacy and freedom respecting software. We believe that Matrix offers all the modern features we need without compromising our values. Moreover, Matrix will make it easier for us to interact with neighboring communities such as Fedora and KDE.

There is still a lot of work to do, but we want to take a moment to thank the Ubuntu and Matrix communities for their great effort and dedication to this project.

You can read more about it on this Discourse thread and of course, you can now join our Ubuntu community from any Matrix federated server. A good start is the Ubuntu Community Space

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

Very happy to announce that the Spec Core Team has been reviewing how to make more progress on MSCs and get more organisational diversity into the SCT, and we've decided to expand the team - unanimously voting to add both tulir and clokep to the team effective today. Huge thanks to both tulir and clokep for being up for joining and donating their time... and looking forwards to their contributions in helping get MSCs to and through their Final Comment Period and merged into the spec!

Josh Simmons says

We’re excited to be forging stronger ties with other open source foundations, so that we can work together and lean on one another’s areas of expertise. Last week we announced that the Matrix.org Foundation joined OpenForum Europe as a supporter alongside Mozilla and many others.

Adding to that, we’re pleased to share that we have become an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative and joined their Open Policy Alliance, and we’ve also joined the Eclipse Foundation as an associate member.

We look forward to going further, faster, together! 🚀

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🔗Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but there will be plenty of Matrix talks (live!) on Sunday at FOSDEM in the Matrix devroom, and at Matthew's main track talk. The talks are livestreamed, so you can follow even if you aren't at FOSDEM (or if you are in FOSDEM but the room is full). If you are at FOSDEM, you can also find live Matrix people at the matrix.org stand in Building K, level 2.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Announced today during the EU Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels, the Matrix.org Foundation and Mozilla have joined OpenForum Europe as supporters. OpenForum Europe has proven an effective convener and advocate for open source and open standards in Europe, and we’re glad to help further that work.

Josh Simmons announces

This week the Matrix.org Foundation launched a new fundraiser, shared some high level budget figures, and kicked off a series diving into our emerging roadmap!

We’ve made huge strides over the last year, with the Foundation more robust and independent than ever before, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the future. Critically, we still need more organizations to step up to fund our work before January 2025.

Huge thanks to Beeper, Gematik, Fractal Networks, Fairkom, Thunderbird, and the hundreds of individuals who have already stepped up! Learn more in our blog post and become a member today 🚀

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