Matrix logo

Governing Board Elections 2025

Announcements are posted on our blog, our social channels, as well as in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room, the Office of the Governing Board room, and the Matrix News room.

We encourage you to read our membership page and announcements:

Read on for our election schedule, all of nominees, and more information about the election process.

What is the Governing Board

This page is focused on the 2025 election cycle. We encourage you to learn more about the Governing Board itself here.

Schedule

Announcement (April 28)

We kickstarted the election process in a blog post announcing the schedule, eligibility, and conditions of the vote.

This year, we are running elections for the following constituency groups:

Nominations (May 3)

Nominations for the 2025 elections are complete, and you can find the nominees below.

You must be a member of one of the constituency groups in order to nominate yourself or someone else to be a candidate in the election. If you intend to nominate someone else, you need to get their consent ahead of time.

By far our largest constituency group are Individual Members, who number in the 100’s. If you have donated at least $60 USD to the Foundation since April 20, 2024 on Donorbox, then you are eligible to nominate and vote. You must donate before the election period begins, as we cannot change voter rolls after that.

Eligible members can proceed to nominations using the Cryptpad nomination form or email the filled out pdf form.

All nominations are subject to review in accordance with our bylaws. We will email you to confirm receipt within 2 business days, and we will publish all of the nominees, and other details, here on this page on May 17th.

If you want to be a candidate in the election, there are a few things you should know:

For reference, you can find last year's nominations on our 2024 election center page.

Campaigning (May 17)

The campaign period is an opportunity for candidates to share more about themselves and their priorities. We encourage candidates to engage with the rest of the ecosystem, and in particular those who are part of the same constituency group.

Thanks to a proactive member of the community, we have a dedicated Matrix space with rooms for candidates and constituents to communicate with one another:

Voting (May 31)

The voting period will run from May 31st to June 13th. All eligible voters will receive an email from OpaVote – the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections.

All members of each constituency group are entitled to vote on the candidates within that constituency group. If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us, first check the inbox and spam folders of the email address you have on file with us through Donorbox. Please email us if you have any questions.

We will hold an election for all of the four constituencies even if a given constituency has fewer candidates than there are seats allocated for them on the Governing Board. This is, effectively, as a vote of confidence.

Results (June 16)

Results will be announced on June 16th. All elected representatives will be added to a private mailing list and Matrix room so that they can introduce themselves and communicate in between meetings. The Foundation's Managing Director and the Governing Board's Chair and/or Vice Chair will be reaching out to every elected representative to get new members onboarded as quickly as possible.

The Governing Board will meet as a full board at least twice a year, for at least 90 minutes each time. We'll aim to have a meeting shortly after the election, and you can expect one meeting before the end of the year and another before the next election.

Members of the Governing Board are likely to receive a packet of materials before each meeting which they will be expected to have reviewed. Most meetings will be held online, though we may convene meetings in-person, such as at The Matrix Conference. We will make every effort to make in-person meetings accessible to remote participants, and no official business will ever happen without appropriate notice, quorum, and minutes.

While the Governing Board is an advisory board, members are encouraged to play a role in helping to carry out the activities that support the staff in delivering on the Foundation’s collective remit, such as coalescing priorities to share with the Spec Core Team and connecting with contributors and funders to implement proposals.

The Governing Board has a number of Committees and Working Groups which meet and work in between Governing Board meetings. These are where the bulk of the activity will take place since the board, which may have up to 24 members, is quite large.

Nominees

We are honored to present the nominees for the Governing Board elections, and are grateful to everyone who has raised their hands. We are positively overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and vision expressed by our nominees.

Individual Members (Max. 4 Seats)

–
Andy Balaam (he/him)

Biography

I am a contributor to many Free/Open Source projects, including in Matrix. I am a sustainer of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I am known as a highly collaborative team member. I am an employee of Element, meaning it is in my interest for Element to prosper. I hope my long history outside Element will help me balance that, and I will remove myself from decisions where I see a potential conflict. Element is a critical supporter of Matrix, founded to make Matrix successful, so I expect few conflicts. (If you disagree, you should probably vote against me!)

Platform Statement

I think human thriving requires a conscious focus on nurturing our communities towards being more accepting of difference and more kind to each other. Modern environments often work against this, and we should resist them. We should start with an assumption of good faith, and protect each other from harm. These two principles are often in conflict! I am an enthusiastic supporter of Matrix because I want a world where everyone can communicate privately with their friends and family and others, free of snooping and manipulation by powerful individual companies. My priorities:

  • I want people to thrive. Trustworthy technology is a small but significant part of that, and I have an ambition for Matrix to be safe, inclusive, private, and available to all.
  • I want Matrix to last. When I look at the success of the Linux project, I see years of steady work paying off in the long term. I think Matrix should take the same approach: steadily working on creating an excellent open standard and excellent implementations of it.
  • For Matrix to last, the foundation needs financial independence. I'd like to see the foundation fund development, supporting safety, maintenance and high quality.

Read this candidate's extended platform.

Gnuxie (she/her)

Biography

Gnuxie is a queer hacker and organiser for Matrix's volunteer-contributor community that has been working with room moderators to improve safety on Matrix for the last 6 years. She is best known for her work initiating and leading the Draupnir project and leading Matrix's openly federating communities through a turbulent time in Matrix's recent history.

Platform Statement

We need to continue to make progress towards achieving the foundation's operational independence from Element. The foundation needs to facilitate more organisation and collaboration between projects within Matrix's ecosystem, and celebrate the progress of our community projects. Within the context of building an independent foundation, focus needs to be given to our community. Which is built around autonomous passion projects that can be relied upon regardless of whether money is flowing from vendor contracts.

Greg Sutcliffe (he/him)

Biography

Greg has been active in the Matrix community for years, and in FOSS for 20 years. He's been a sysadmin, a developer, a community architect, and a data scientist. He's lead multiple communities, including Ansible, Foreman, and is also the current Chair of the Matrix Governing Board. He also games, bakes, 3d prints, and volunteers with local charities.

Platform Statement

Hello! My name is Greg (aka Gwmngilfen), and I'm honoured to have served as the Chair of the Board for the past year. I've been part of Matrix for years, and I've seen both the energy of our community and the need for sovereign messaging systems. I am running for re-election because we're not done, and I want to help. During our first year, the Board has:

  • Defined and ratified it's initial processes
  • Set up it's operating structure of Committees and Working Groups
  • Created a number of new Working Groups and started getting results from them
  • Created some initial recommendations to the Foundation

This is exactly what we wanted from the Board - that it could serve as a way to focus the immense talent & passion of our community on the problems in front of us. I'm proud to have had a hand in shaping it. If re-elected, my goal is continue that work. The Board is now operational, but it's only really started delivering any results in the last few months. We need to accelerate that work now, get comfortable with our new processes, get integrated with the Foundation, and start providing the advice & insight we were created for. I'd like to be re-elected so I can help to do that - to finish building what we've started this year. You can make that happen. Thanks! Greg

J. B. Crawford (they/them)

Biography

Best known as the author of “Computers Are Bad,” I’m a writer and DevOps consultant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. More importantly, I am deeply interested in federated communications technology. I have operated a Matrix homeserver since 2016 and have written on the topic of federated social platforms in several venues. I have served on nonprofit and government boards and have an interest in nonprofit governance. I hold a BS in Information Technology and an MS in Information Security and have worked in various sectors of the software industry for the past decade.

Platform Statement

Instant messaging is, to say the least, a challenging field for new entrants. The most pervasive text-based messaging platform, email, has always been federated. XMPP demonstrates that federated instant messaging is far from new. Yet users today find themselves choosing from a long list of closed systems, many of them side projects of advertising networks. The Matrix project has much to learn from its competitors. Key among these lessons: ease of use almost always wins. While no protocol is ever complete, Matrix has achieved a substantial set of features. What is missing is polish. One of the challenges of an open, federated protocol is that no one organization owns the user experience. To develop Matrix into the easy, inviting, and practical option that it should be, the Matrix Project will need to collaborate with client developers, user groups, and homeserver operators. The Foundation should support projects with a meaningful impact on Matrix users while steering effort towards the quality of life features (like ease of use and performance) that currently leave Matrix uncompetitive. As a young nonprofit, the Matrix Foundation should focus on sustainability. The Foundation should maintain a narrow focus and practice a transparent and collaborative approach to governance.

Read this candidate's extended platform.

Parker Seaman (any/all)

Biography

President of BSidesTC, Board member for Streets.mn, community manager for Open Voice OS, PhD candidate in Cyber Defense with a focus in Data Privacy, and frequent volunteer for all things pro transit and biking. Fervent supporter of all things federated and distributed.

Platform Statement

I believe Matrix serves as a critical component to creating a more equitable future. Forging community and understanding between people fuels collaboration and growth. Matrix serves as an excellent technology for fostering these values I hold dearly, and as a board member I would work to further that mission.

Paul Lackner

Platform Statement

None submitted.

Reid Anderson (he/him)

Biography

Reid is a software engineer that has closely followed open-source software for 15 years, Matrix since 2018, and has donated monthly to the Matrix Foundation since 2021. He started as a developer building extensions and making small code contributions to Mozilla products. He unfortunately saw first-hand the danger in depending on a single business for an open-source product as a community contributor to Songbird, a now-defunct open-source music player whose corporate sponsor went out of business. He has managed development teams and currently works as a principal software engineer for a large logistics company.

Platform Statement

The Matrix Foundation must be able to function, grow, and fund itself independently of Element. It's impossible to overstate how much of a debt the Matrix community owes Element for their generosity in creating and shepherding the standard to this point, and the support they continue to provide. But for Matrix to be sustainable in the long term, there needs to be true independence between the Foundation and any individual corporate sponsor. This means strong institutions that are responsive to the community, with members that are independent. The governing board is a strong additional step in this direction and helping to build an effective community body is what motivates me. My focus would be to communicate the work that the Foundation is doing as an independent entity. Specifically highlighting how the Foundation is using current funds, and the exciting things that could be done with additional funding. As just one of many members on the board, I believe a positive and transparent fundraising message will help me contribute beyond just my vote. Let's fund and build some cool stuff together.

Associate Members (Max. 2 Seats)

–
Tobias Fella (he/him) - KDE e.V.

Biography

Tobias is a KDE contributor whose interest in open standards led him to start developing NeoChat, KDE's Matrix client. As part of his involvement in NeoChat, he is also one of the core developers of libQuotient, a C++ library for developing Matrix clients, where he's recently been focusing on implementing the library's encryption capabilities. Tobias has been involved in Open Source development since 2019, by developing applications like an RSS feed reader and a podcast player, and by being a GSoC mentor. He lives in Berlin and works on GnuPG professionally.

Platform Statement

As a representative of the Free Software organizations using Matrix, my focus is on areas vital to ensure that Matrix is the obvious choice for FOSS organizations. This means concentrating on three areas:

  • Ensuring that the specification facilitates implementations that offer a high-quality UX, fulfilling users' expectations for a modern instant messaging platform.
  • Having powerful community management capabilities
  • this involves, for example, evolving spaces to be a way of managing permissions and configuration across all of a community's rooms.
  • Improving trust and safety, for example through improved community management tooling and client-side safety features.

Finally, there's a large non-technical aspect to this: Making Matrix the go-to platform for communities and individual projects requires collaboration, planning, discussions and helping each other. The foundation should facilitate having these discussions and help with onboarding new projects that want to use matrix as their communication platform.

Gold Members (Max. 3 Seats)

–
Brad Murray (he/him) - Automattic

Biography

Co-founder and CTO of Beeper (recently acquired by Automattic), building a chat app that allows you to chat with anyone on any network using Matrix bridges. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Formerly held various engineering leadership positions at Faire, Fitbit, and Pebble.

Platform Statement

I personally believe that a world where everyone uses Matrix to chat to each other is a better place. I’ve frequently pitched to people that Matrix makes chat more like email, except fast and secure. At Beeper, we’re committed to bringing our users into the Matrix world in the long term. I’d like to volunteer to the Matrix.org governing board to support the mission in whatever way possible.

Silver Members (Max. 2 Seats)

–
Christian Kußowski (he/him) - Famedly

Biography

Best known as the creator of FluffyChat and lead app developer at Famedly GmbH, he is dedicated to advancing Matrix in the healthcare sector. Driven by a deep love for open-source technologies and a keen interest in UX design, he thrives on connecting people.

Platform Statement

Famedly has benefited from Matrix for years, gaining extensive experience across various deployments, deploying it in life-critical healthcare environments. As lead app developer at Famedly GmbH, I have worked to integrate Matrix into healthcare, ensuring security, interoperability, and usability. Through maintaining FluffyChat, I’ve engaged with the Matrix community, advocating for user-friendly experiences and long-term sustainability.

Jan Kohnert (he/him) - gematik GmbH

Biography

Hi, I’m Jan. I’m driven by the belief that technology improves lives. My focus lies in innovative software solutions, especially in Health Care, where enhancing patient outcomes and quality of care is at the heart of what we do.

As Product Owner for the TI Messenger at gematik, I’m shaping secure healthcare communication. Last year, I was honored to be elected to the board as a Silver Member representative and would be delighted to continue this role.

Great software connects people, simplifies processes, and enhances patient outcomes and quality of care—this inspires me every day.

Platform Statement

The German National Health Agency, gematik, leads the charge in transforming healthcare through digital solutions. At the heart of gematik's efforts lies the TI-Messenger, a platform designed to streamline communication and information exchange within the healthcare sector.

The TI-Messenger serves as a secure and efficient channel for sharing medical data, test results, and treatment plans among healthcare providers, institutions, and patients. It ensures that sensitive information remains protected through robust end-to-end encryption and a decentralized architecture, built upon the Matrix Protocol. This encryption guarantees privacy, preventing unauthorized access to patient data and instilling trust among users.

Moreover, the TI-Messenger prioritizes compliance with data protection regulations, ensuring that patient data is handled with the utmost care and in accordance with legal requirements. By maintaining strict privacy standards, gematik's TI-Messenger fosters a safe and secure environment for collaboration, ultimately enhancing patient care and outcomes.

In summary, gematik's TI-Messenger represents a significant leap forward in Germany's digital healthcare landscape.

Read this candidate's extended platform.

Thor Arne Johansen - Verji Tech AS

Biography

Thor Arne is an Architect/Developer/Manager with 25+ years of experience in the industry. Co-founder of Verji Tech AS, a Norwegian company building Verji, a communications solution based on Matrix.

Passionate about technology, and thrive where people, technology, and business meet. After graduating from California State University his professional career involve: Developing hardware, recovering data from crashed hard drives, and developing commercial software for school management systems.

Currently Thor Arne is heading up the tech. efforts in Verji Tech

Privately Thor Arne enjoys the great outdoors with his family, sci-fi, series binging, and hanging out with friends.

Platform Statement

While the Matrix Ecosystem at its core embrace FOSS, we truly believe that FOSS is very much "compatible" with for-profit businesses such as Verji Tech AS.

As a commercial for-profit company building on Matrix; we have a very real and profound interest in the success and sustainability of the Matrix community (technology, talent and governance). A key factor will be to work towards achieving a symbiosis where commercial companies can reap very concrete and quantifiable benefits by contributing to Matrix.

Contributions and benefits come in many forms, and an important goal of the foundation and the Governing Board must be to stimulate contributions which benefit Matrix in the long term. "Cash-for-features" type contributions may have undeniable logic for the contributor. But unless parts of the contributions are funneled back into the Foundation it is not sustainable.

So finding models which mutually benefit the contributor, the Foundation, and the Matrix ecosystem, is a very important challenge which the GB should actively address.