This Week in Matrix

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) reports

The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join likeminded organisations in endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles, a set of guidelines to promote collaboration and adoption of open source around the globe.

Robin Riley (m.org) says

Please join me in welcoming the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation: SSH Communications Security! We're grateful to SSH for stepping up to support the Foundation's mission and stewardship of the Matrix protocol.

Does your organization rely on Matrix? We're working hard to close our budget gap, and we need your help. Join the Foundation to ensure Matrix has robust stewardship well into the future.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Trust and Safety Research and Documentation Working Group

Nico announces

As part of my work for the Trust and Safety Committee I am trying to establish a working group to help with researching and documenting the state of T&S across the ecosystem. If that sounds interesting to you, please poke your head into #governing-board-office:matrix.org and tell us!

To summarize what the group is about, the current proposal looks like this:

To make appropriate decisions, the T&S committee needs to know about the state of T&S in the wider ecosystem. It needs to have insights into current challenges, solutions and initiatives. On the other hand the community can also benefit from having some of that information documented. The T&S R&D WG is a tool to help with that. It includes a wider set of individuals and reports their research results to the T&S committee. In some cases the WG is also encouraged to enhance the documentation on matrix.org to help communities and users on Matrix moderate their rooms. The T&S committee might sometimes ask the WG for help in researching specific topics in more detail to guide their decisions.

🔗Pledge of Confidentiality

The WG will sometimes have to deal or come in contact with confidential data, possibly because of legal reasons, possibly because of active abuse concerns. While the WG is encouraged to be open, there will be times where the WG should keep certain information confidential and only share it with specific individuals. As the WG we pledge to keep information confidential when necessary while still being transparent and open where possible. The T&S committee may decide to remove members from the WG if it sees a member abusing their access to information or not acting in a trustworthy manner by sharing information the group agreed to keep confidential. This should be a last resort, needs a majority in the T&S committee and should be preceded by appropriate communication and warnings.

🔗Typical Tasks

• Gather information about current moderation challenges on Matrix and keep structured notes about them
• Maintain an overview of available moderation tools and their capabilities
• Create and maintain moderation guides on matrix.org in collaboration with the Website or Documentation WGs
• Reach out to moderators to gather feedback or offer advice
• Reports insights and opinions to the T&S committee and possibly other T&S working groups
• Potentially collaborate on proposals with the T&S committee or other WGs
• Turn some of their research into MSCs and collaboratively push them to completion as well as advise on other MSCs from a T&S perspective

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Gwmngilfen reports

A few weeks ago the Governing Board brought you news of a Working Group process, and the first ones had been proposed using it. I'm happy to report that we now have our first two active Working Groups!

🔗New Groups

Firstly, we have the Website Working Group, which (from their charter) has "responsibility for editorial and technical oversight of the main Matrix websites and social media channels. This includes the main matrix.org website, conference website, and the various social media channels". They've already had their first meetings, and you can find them in #matrix.org-website:matrix.org

Secondly, we have the Events Working Group, which (again from the charter) is "the main organising team of the official events hosted by the Foundation, such as the Matrix Conference or co-hosting FOSDEM Fringe". They are just spinning up their processes, and you can find them in #events-wg:matrix.org

🔗More Groups Wanted

We want to see many more groups! We have a couple of new groups under consideration by the Board which I hope to bring you news of soon, but in the meantime, discussion and/or volunteering for potential new groups is very welcome in #governing-board-office:matrix.org ! (And yes, I still want to get the Docs and UX groups running, speak to me in that room if you wish to volunteer 😛)

Thanks for your efforts & work, on behalf of your Governing Board!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

The Matrix.org Foundation is now registered with Benevity in order to receive corporate donations as part of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. If your employer supports donations via Benevity please encourage them to route some of their donations to supporting Matrix!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Very interesting news reported today

You find there the document "Cyber Blueprint - Proposal Council Recommendation" for download that contains on page 17 a recommendation to use the matrix call for inter-gov communication on cyber topics.

In the next step, The European Council must discuss and then possibly adopt this proposal.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-blueprint-draft-council-recommendation

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) reports

The Foundation is at a crossroads. We need to raise an additional $610K to break-even, and more immediately to raise $100K to keep our bridges running.

As a neutral custodian for the specification and much more, the Foundation is key to the success of Matrix. It is time to step up for it.

Read the full post on our blog

🔗Dept of Governance ⚖️

Gwmngilfen reports

🔗Announcing the Governing Board Working Groups process

The Governing Board has news! If you have been itching to know how to get involved, we are now ready to get you ... on-Board! 🥁 😀

The Working Groups are the beating heart of the GB - they get the work done. So naturally people have been asking "how do we make one?" and "what is expected of a Working Group?"

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🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Trust & Safety

Jim announces

If you are wondering what the Foundation Safety team get up to, and what we have planned, we have an update for you. Check out the post: Building a Safer Matrix

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

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:

• MSC4264: Tokens for Contacting Accounts
• MSC4265: Data Protection Officer contact in /.well-known/matrix/support
• MSC4266: Policies in /.well-known/matrix/support

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 Update

Lots of MSC implementation and iteration is happening behind the scenes at the moment, leading to not very exciting Spec Core Team (SCT) updates :) As this implementation work progresses, the Matrix 2.0 MSCs in particular will continue to push forwards towards acceptance.

In the meantime, early versions of Extensible Profiles is up for review and today's blog post "Building a Safer Matrix" hints at some T&S spec changes expected soon.

The next spec release is expected in early March 2025 - if there's MSCs you think should be included there, let the team know in the SCT Office!

🔗Informal TI-Messenger Spec Discussion

Johannes reports

@this-week-in:matrix.org for people interested in informally discussing the Matrix-based TI-Messenger (TI-M) spec, as of today we have a public room: https://matrix.to/#/#tim-spec:matrix.org

If you haven't heard of TI-M before, in a nutshell it's a chat standard for the German healthcare system.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Quentin Gliech reports

This week we released Matrix Authentication Service 0.13.0!

This is a big release, as we haven't done one since September.

It is fixing a lot of small issues, but here are a few of the big highlights:

• The email verification has been completely reworked, meaning that accounts don't require a valid email address on them anymore! They are still required for open password registrations, but MAS won't nag you anymore to add an email to your account.
• No more spurious logouts when consuming a refresh token! That was a recurring annoyance for people using Element X in poor network conditions.
• It now reliably provisions users to Synapse! Sometimes, MAS would just stop provisioning new sessions if, for some reason, it lost connections to Postgres. This is a thing of the past, as now MAS has a reliable job queue.
• New translations! MAS is now available in Czech, Dutch, Estonian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, and Ukrainian. If you'd like to help MAS get translated to your language, head out to our Localazy project
• Better support for non-OIDC upstream OAuth 2.0 providers. Support for 'social login' options like Google or Sign-in with Apple went from 'good' to 'great', with many UI improvements.

Upgrading should be as easy as grabbing the latest Docker image or the pre-built binaries, restarting the service and voilà!

Feel free to stop by #matrix-auth:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

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🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) announces

FOSDEM was a huge success for the Matrix.org Foundation and community this year again!

• 🍕60 pizzas and an uncountable amount of drinks at the Fringe event
• 👕 100 t-shirts sold at the booth on the first day!!
• 🧑‍🏫 A completely packed devroom
• 🤝 Many great conversations at the booth

Shout out to Workadventure, Nordeck and Famedly who sponsored the Fringe Event and kept us refreshed and fed. And a huge thanks to everybody who showed up at the booth either to staff it or to say a kind word, bring constructive criticism, or have a casual conversation.

A more detailed wrap up post will be published this week. In the meantime, I’m leaving FOSDEM with a sense that we are doing the right thing, going in the right direction, and that people notice. I'm looking forward to meeting you all again, as well as those who couldn't make it to FOSDEM!

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This week we tried publishing TWIM on a Monday, but people seem to enjoy reading their Matrix news during the weekend. We will get back to publishing TWIM on Fridays!

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

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:

• MSC4256: RFC 9420 MLS mode Matrix
• MSC4255: Bulk Profile Updates

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3765: Rich text in room topics
• MSC3266: Room summary API
• MSC3757: Restricting who can overwrite a state event
• MSC4183: Additional Error Codes for submitToken endpoint
• MSC2965: OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata discovery

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4239: Room version 11 as the default room version (merge)
• MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs (merge)
  • FCP currently blocked due to an ongoing discussion.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4213: Remove server_name parameter from join and knock endpoints

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3975: rel_type for Replies
  • Closed by the MSC author.

🔗Spec Updates

Quite a flurry of activity in spec-land this week, as you can see from the above! MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs moved into final comment period. While it still has one outstanding concern as of today, hopefully that can be worked out in the near future.

We also had a newly accepted MSC; MSC4213: Remove server_name parameter from join and knock endpoints. A small change, but a nice clean up to the spec.

Once again, thanks to everyone who's involved, and those that are only just getting started! The more the merrier.

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