1   Proposals for Spec Changes to Matrix

If you are interested in submitting a change to the Matrix Specification, please take note of the following guidelines.

All changes to Specification content require a formal proposal process. This involves writing a proposal, having it reviewed by everyone, having the proposal being accepted, then actually having your ideas implemented as committed changes to the Specification repository.

Meet the members of the Core Team, a group of individuals tasked with ensuring the spec process is as smooth and painless as possible. Members of the Core Team will do their best to participate in discussion, summarise when things become long-winded, and generally try to act towards the benefit of everyone. As a majority, team members have the ability to change the state of a proposal, and individually have the final say in proposal discussion.

2   Guiding Principles

Proposals must act to the greater benefit of the entire Matrix ecosystem, rather than benefiting or privileging any single player or subset of players - and must not contain any patent encumbered intellectual property. Members of the Core Team pledge to act as a neutral custodian for Matrix on behalf of the whole ecosystem.

For clarity: the Matrix ecosystem is anyone who uses the Matrix protocol. That includes client users, server admins, client developers, bot developers, bridge and application service developers, users and admins who are indirectly using Matrix via 3rd party networks which happen to be bridged, server developers, room moderators and admins, companies/projects building products or services on Matrix, spec contributors, translators, and those who created it in the first place.

"Greater benefit" could include maximising:

• the number of end-users reachable on the open Matrix network
• the number of regular users on the Matrix network (e.g. 30-day retained federated users)
• the number of online servers in the open federation
• the number of developers building on Matrix
• the number of independent implementations which use Matrix
• the quality and utility of the Matrix spec

In addition, proposal authors are expected to uphold the following values in their proposed changes to the Matrix protocol:

• Supporting the whole long-term ecosystem rather than individual stakeholder gain
• Openness rather than proprietariness
• Collaboration rather than competition
• Accessibility rather than elitism
• Transparency rather than stealth
• Empathy rather than contrariness
• Pragmatism rather than perfection
• Proof rather than conjecture

3   Process

The process for submitting a Matrix Spec Change (MSC) Proposal in detail is as follows:

• Create a first draft of your proposal using GitHub-flavored markdown
  • In the document, clearly state the problem being solved, and the possible solutions being proposed for solving it and their respective trade-offs.
  • Proposal documents are intended to be as lightweight and flexible as the author desires; there is no formal template; the intention is to iterate as quickly as possible to get to a good design.
  • However, a template with suggested headers is available to get you started if necessary.
  • Take care in creating your proposal. Specify your intended changes, and give reasoning to back them up. Changes without justification will likely be poorly received by the community.
• Fork and make a PR to the matrix-doc repository. The ID of your PR will become the MSC ID for the lifetime of your proposal.
  • The proposal must live in the proposals/ directory with a filename that follows the format 1234-my-new-proposal.md where 1234 is the MSC ID.
  • Your PR description must include a link to the rendered markdown document and a summary of the proposal.
  • It is often very helpful to link any related MSCs or matrix-doc issues to give context for the proposal.
  • Additionally, please be sure to sign off your proposal PR as per the guidelines listed on CONTRIBUTING.rst.
• Gather feedback as widely as possible.
  • The aim is to get maximum consensus towards an optimal solution. Sometimes trade-offs are required to meet this goal. Decisions should be made to the benefit of all major use cases.
  • A good place to ask for feedback on a specific proposal is #matrix-spec:matrix.org. If preferred, an alternative room can be created and advertised in #matrix-spec:matrix.org. Please also link to the room in your PR description.
  • For additional discussion areas, know that that #matrix-dev:matrix.org is for developers using existing Matrix APIs, #matrix:matrix.org is for users trying to run Matrix apps (clients & servers) and #matrix-architecture:matrix.org is for cross-cutting discussion of matrix's architectural design.
  • The point of the spec proposal process is to be collaborative rather than competitive, and to try to solve the problem in question with the optimal set of trade-offs. The author should neutrally gather the various viewpoints and get consensus, but this can sometimes be time-consuming (or the author may be biased), in which case an impartial 'shepherd' can be assigned to help guide the proposal through this process instead. A shepherd is typically a neutral party from the Core Team or an experienced member of the community. There is no formal process for assignment. Simply ask for a shepherd to help get your proposal through and one will be assigned based on availability. Having a shepherd is not a requirement for proposal acceptance.
• Members of the Core Team and community will review and discuss the PR in the comments and in relevant rooms on Matrix. Discussion outside of GitHub should be summarised in a comment on the PR.
• When a member of the Core Team believes that no new discussion points are being made, they will propose a motion for a final comment period (FCP), along with a disposition of either merge, close or postpone. This FCP is provided to allow a short period of time for any invested party to provide a final objection before a major decision is made. If sufficient reasoning is given, an FCP can be cancelled. It is often preceded by a comment summarising the current state of the discussion, along with reasoning for its occurrence.
• A concern can be raised by a Core Team member at any time, which will block an FCP from beginning. An FCP will only begin when a majority of core team members agree on its outcome, and all existing concerns have been resolved.
• The FCP will then begin and last for 5 days, giving anyone else some time to speak up before it concludes. On its conclusion, the disposition of the FCP will be carried out. If sufficient reasoning against the disposition is raised, the FCP can be cancelled and the MSC will continue to evolve accordingly.
• Once the proposal has been accepted and merged, it is time to submit the actual change to the Specification that your proposal reasoned about. This is known as a spec PR. However in order for the spec PR to be accepted, an implementation must be shown to prove that it works well in practice. A link to the implementation should be included in the PR description. In addition, any significant unforeseen changes to the original idea found during this process will warrant another MSC. Any minor, non-fundamental changes are allowed but must be documented in the original proposal document. This ensures that someone reading a proposal in the future doesn't assume old information wasn't merged into the spec.
  • Similar to the proposal PR, please sign off the spec PR as per the guidelines on CONTRIBUTING.rst.
• Your PR will then be reviewed and hopefully merged on the grounds it is implemented sufficiently. If so, then give yourself a pat on the back knowing you've contributed to the Matrix protocol for the benefit of users and developers alike :)

The process for handling proposals is shown visually in the following diagram. Note that the lifetime of a proposal is tracked through the corresponding labels for each stage on the matrix-doc issue and pull request trackers.

                          +                          +
        Proposals         |          Spec PRs        |  Additional States
        +-------+         |          +------+        |  +---------------+
                          |                          |
+----------------------+  |         +---------+      |    +-----------+
|                      |  |         |         |      |    |           |
|      Proposal        |  |  +------= Spec PR |      |    | Postponed |
| Drafting and Initial |  |  |      | Missing |      |    |           |
|  Feedback Gathering  |  |  |      |         |      |    +-----------+
|                      |  |  |      +----+----+      |
+----------+-----------+  |  |           |           |    +----------+
           |              |  |           v           |    |          |
           v              |  |  +-----------------+  |    |  Closed  |
 +-------------------+    |  |  |                 |  |    |          |
 |                   |    |  |  | Spec PR Created |  |    +----------+
 |    Proposal PR    |    |  |  |  and In Review  |  |
 |     In Review     |    |  |  |                 |  |
 |                   |    |  |  +--------+--------+  |
 +---------+---------+    |  |           |           |
           |              |  |           v           |
           v              |  |     +-----------+     |
+----------------------+  |  |     |           |     |
|                      |  |  |     |  Spec PR  |     |
|    Proposed Final    |  |  |     |  Merged!  |     |
|    Comment Period    |  |  |     |           |     |
|                      |  |  |     +-----------+     |
+----------+-----------+  |  |                       |
           |              |  |                       |
           v              |  |                       |
+----------------------+  |  |                       |
|                      |  |  |                       |
| Final Comment Period |  |  |                       |
|                      |  |  |                       |
+----------+-----------+  |  |                       |
           |              |  |                       |
           v              |  |                       |
+----------------------+  |  |                       |
|                      |  |  |                       |
| Final Comment Period |  |  |                       |
|       Complete       |  |  |                       |
|                      |  |  |                       |
+----------+-----------+  |  |                       |
           |              |  |                       |
           +-----------------+                       |
                          |                          |
                          +                          +

4   Lifetime States

Note: All labels are to be placed on the proposal PR.

5   Proposal Tracking

This is a living document generated from the list of proposals on the issue and pull request trackers of the matrix-doc repo.

We use labels and some metadata in MSC PR descriptions to generate this page. Labels are assigned by the Core Team whilst triaging the proposals based on those which exist in the matrix-doc repo already.

It is worth mentioning that a previous version of the MSC process used a mixture of GitHub issues and PRs, leading to some MSC numbers deriving from GitHub issue IDs instead. A useful feature of GitHub is that it does automatically resolve to an issue, if an issue ID is placed in a pull URL. This means that https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/$MSCID will correctly resolve to the desired MSC, whether it started as an issue or a PR.

Other metadata:

• The MSC number is taken from the GitHub Pull Request ID. This is carried for the lifetime of the proposal. These IDs do not necessary represent a chronological order.
• The GitHub PR title will act as the MSC's title.
• Please link to the spec PR (if any) by adding a "PRs: #1234" line in the issue description.
• The creation date is taken from the GitHub PR, but can be overridden by adding a "Date: yyyy-mm-dd" line in the PR description.
• Updated Date is taken from GitHub.
• Author is the creator of the MSC PR, but can be overridden by adding a "Author: @username" line in the body of the issue description. Please make sure @username is a GitHub user (include the @!)
• A shepherd can be assigned by adding a "Shepherd: @username" line in the issue description. Again, make sure this is a real GitHub user.

6   Tables of Tracked Proposals