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
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.
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.
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 🚀
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.
Matrix self-defines as the go-to protocol for "open, secure, decentralised communications". The Matrix.org Foundation defines "maximising […] the number of online servers in the open federation" as a key objective in its mission. So why is the Matrix.org homeserver, probably the largest homeserver in the whole federation, still in open registration mode?
Let's dive into the technical, and user experience choices behind it.
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.
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.
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
Since the Foundation got itself a Managing Director at the end of last summer, it has been working on its independence. With lines more clearly defined between its major supporter Element and itself, the Foundation has been able to clarify its role. The Foundation's major goal, alongside stewarding the specification, is to fill in the gaps where there is no direct organisational interest, to make the Matrix ecosystem grow.
There are two levels where the Foundation can have an impact: at the governance level, in the form of the Governing Board; and at the hands-on level, with working groups and projects.
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!
The Matrix.org website is the public face of the Foundation, and the first thing you stumble upon when looking up “matrix chat” on a search engine. It’s a very important step in people’s Matrix journey.
The website is only maintained by community member MTRNord in a volunteer way, and part-time by me, Thib. We could use an extra pair of hands or two, but to make the most of people’s desire to help we need to let them know where they can have the most impact depending on their skill set, and how we can accept their help!
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!
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.
This year again the Matrix.org Foundation was at FOSDEM, and what a huge energy boost it has been for us! Between a Fringe Event for the Matrix community to gather, a booth where the vast majority of people came by to show their support for our work, a devroom with four hours of awesome Matrix content, and last but not least a main track talk where Matthew covered what we had been doing for the past year… It has been a very intense weekend!
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.
For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.
This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.
This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example
The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!
