There have been many changes at the Foundation in the last couple of years. We’ve added independent leadership, attracted members, continued working towards sustainability, and expanded our open governance to establish a Governing Board to become better and more capable stewards of the protocol and ecosystem. We’re still in a period of organisational transition, getting into the groove with the Governing Board, focusing on the Spec Core Team, and building the technical and financial foundation for independence.
We’ve also been asking ourselves what it means for a project to be “core” to the Foundation, and how the Foundation should relate to and work with the people who maintain those projects. These are fundamental questions for any open source foundation, and they’ve become even more pressing for us since Element switched developing Synapse and several other projects to AGPLv3, rather than contributing under the Foundation as Apache v2.
This blog post explores our context and sets out to start a discussion on how we should move forward. Already, we’ve been having these discussions in Foundation rooms and on the Governing Board, and we look forward to bringing more people into this discussion so that we can ship a framework that delivers on our mission and meets the needs of the Matrix ecosystem.
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The Matrix.org Foundation is joining other organisations in calling on the European Commission to sustain its funding for the Next Generation Internet.
We thank the petites singularités association for their leadership in starting this open letter, and are grateful to OW2 for the English translation.
Join us by publishing the letter on your own website and add yourself to this table.
Open letter to the European Commission
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
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It is an honor and a pleasure to unveil the election results and introduce the first elected Governing Board for the Matrix.org Foundation!
Congratulations to the winning candidates, we thank you for your willingness to serve the community. We’re also grateful to everyone who threw their hat in the ring, and hope that the candidates who did not get elected consider running again in the future – noting that we have an election of Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members scheduled for next year.
Thanks also to all of the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learned a lot in this first election process that we look forward to incorporating into the next one.
The level of engagement with the process was a very encouraging sign for the health of the Matrix ecosystem, and we’re proud to have had 100% voter turnout in all but one constituency.
Read on to see who is on the Governing Board, a brief discussion of next steps, and reflections on some of the work that remains to improve representation.
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Voting has started for the Governing Board elections and runs till May 31! This is our first election and we are very excited. All of the results will be published here on the blog on June 3.
You can learn about all of the candidates on our 2024 election page. All eligible voters should have received an email from OpaVote, the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections.
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 (such as through Donorbox or Patreon). Please email us if you have any questions.
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Update: the terms of the board have been updated with the follow changes:
- Allow for filling vacancies by appointment or by-election at the discretion of the Managing Director and the Guardians, in consultation with a Governance Committee. (2.7.1)
- Allow for the Governing Board to adopt voting mechanisms other than simple majority on a case-by-case basis. (5.5)
- Disallow nominees from running for election in more than one constituency at a time. (2.4.1)
- Change UTC to AOE in timeline. (2.3)
Welcome to the first ever Governing Board election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a one week nomination period that opens on Saturday, April 20th and closes on Friday, April 26th AOE time.
We’ll be doing our best to reach out to every constituent group to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election. That said, this is our first election and we don’t yet have contact information for everybody who is eligible, so we want your help getting the word out.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.
To learn about what the Governing Board is, what it does, and the context it operates in, read this blog post from last December. You are also welcome to read the Governing Board’s current bylaws.
Go here for instructions on submitting a nomination!
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A new fundraising drive
Today we launch a new fundraising drive, talk about the scope of the Foundation's work, and begin to unpack our emerging roadmap for the future. There is a lot going on and we need your help to keep it going!
At the end of 2022 Matthew and Amandine sounded the alarm: the Foundation needed more support. To deliver that, they launched the Foundation's membership program. They also introduced open governance, and committed to hiring a Managing Director to act as a robust, neutral steward.
You can help: If you are already sold on Matrix, become a member today. To find out how the last year has gone, and how your support helps us to serve the Matrix ecosystem, read on.
Over the last year, there are lots of positive, healthy signs for Matrix. New members like Beeper and gematik — and hundreds of individuals — boosted our annual revenues from £82K to £364K. The open network has grown from 80.3M to 115M addressable users. We've invested in long-term interoperability efforts at the IETF. And we've shifted focus from experiments to polish, usability, and advocacy.
We've supported development of core libraries, and subsidize hosting for FOSS communities like GNOME and KDE. The Foundation runs the Matrix.org homeserver, with over 250K daily active users, and operates several public bots and bridges. And indeed, the Foundation hired a Managing Director 👋.
You'll find a full accounting of our 2023 activity and finances in our first Annual Report, slated to come out around April 2024.
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Running my own Matrix homeserver
I confess I'm awfully chuffed with myself as we return from the holiday break. I just completed a successful migration of my main Matrix account from managed hosting to a homeserver that I run for myself on a virtual private server (VPS).
The whole experience has been illuminating, and there are some specific details that are timely for people like me who needed to migrate off of Element Matrix Services (EMS) as they pivot to focus on enterprise.
Thus, this blog post. I'm going to share my experience in hopes that it'll help some folks with that migration!
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Forging our future with Matrix
As 2023 winds down and I find myself in the thick of planning for 2024, I’d like to start preparing all of us in the Matrix ecosystem for what is to come.
Next year will mark a number of important milestones in the history and evolution of Matrix: the protocol will mark its 10th birthday, we’ll see key initiatives in the spec cross the finish line, and we’ll seat the first ever community-elected Governing Board.
The election of our first Governing Board is what I’d like to focus on today, because it is a huge milestone on the path to an independent, self-sustaining, and self-governing ecosystem. When we celebrate Matrix’s 20th birthday, we’ll look back and our history will be divided much the same way it is in other ecosystems: before and after incorporating a foundation, and before and after introducing community governance.
Let’s talk about what the Governing Board is, why it matters, and how to get involved!
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Today we are sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.
People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.
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Last week, Element informed the Foundation that it will be forking Synapse and Dendrite. We’re sharing this news with you, along with some background, and our thoughts about this development.
We’ll do our best to answer your questions, address concerns, and find a path forward together.
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