Constituency group</th>	Name</th>	Organisation / Project</th></tr></thead>
Ecosystem Members</strong> (in cycle, 3 seats)</td>	Ajay Bura</td>	Cinny</td></tr>
</td>	Jade Ellis</td>	Continuwuity</td></tr>
</td>	Kim Brose (HarHarLinks)</td>	Matrix Community Events</td></tr>
</td>	Nico (Nicolas Werner)</td>	Nheko</td></tr>
Guardians</strong> (in cycle, 3 seats)</td>	Matthew Hodgson</td>	</td></tr>
</td>	Ross Schulman</td>	</td></tr>
Platinum Members</strong> (in cycle, 1 seat)</td>	Neil Johnson</td>	Element</td></tr>
Spec Core Team</strong> (in cycle, 2 seats)</td>	Alexey “Kitsune” Rusakov</td>	</td></tr>
</td>	Richard van der Hoff</td>	</td></tr>
Individual Members</strong> (out of cycle, 1 seat)</td>	Mathieu Velten</td>	</td></tr>
</td>	Max</td>	</td></tr>
</td>	Reid Anderson</td>	</td></tr>
Silver Members</strong> (out of cycle, 2 seats)</td>	Niklas Zender</td>	Famedly</td></tr>
</td>	Runi Hammer</td>	Meedio</td></tr>
</td>	Yoan Pintas</td>	DINUM</td></tr> </tbody></table> You can find more details about them, including their bios and statements on the election page</a>.</p> They will also be hanging out ~~in the campaigning rooms</del> around the campaigning bonfires for each constituency group to answer questions from the voters:</p>~~ General campaigning room</a></li> Ecosystem Member campaigning room</a></li> Guardians campaigning room</a></li> Platinum Member campaigning room</a></li> Spec Core Team campaigning room</a></li> Individual Member campaigning room</a></li> Silver Member campaigning room</a></li> </ul> If you are eligible to vote in one of these groups, now is the time to make up your mind and decide who you think is best to represent yours and Matrix’ interests in the Governing Board!</p> Good luck to all, and see you in two weeks for the kick-off of the voting process!</p> Amandine</p> Kicking off the nomination period for the 2026 Governing Board elections 2026-05-02T00:00:00+00:00 On Monday we announced the launch of the 2026 election for the Foundation's Governing Board</a>. We have now reached the second milestone and are kicking-off the nomination period!</p> As a reminder, the full election schedule is as follows: ✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April ➡️ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May ◻️ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May ◻️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June ◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June</p> Key links:</p> The election page</a></li> The nomination form</a></li> </ul> </span> The nomination period is when each member of a constituency group can nominate themselves, a representative or someone else to be a candidate for the election. Each nomination will be approved, announced on 16th May and displayed on the election page</a>.</p> The constituency groups up for election this year are:</p> Constituency</th> In or out of cycle</th> Seats for election in 2026</th> Term for the elected member</th> Notes</th></tr></thead> Guardians</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> SCT</td> In-cycle</td> 2</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> Platinum</td> In-cycle</td> 1 (or more)</td> 2 years</td> 4 seats total.</td></tr> Ecosystem</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> Individual</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> 1 GB member stepped down.</td></tr> Silver</td> Out of cycle</td> 2</td> 1 year</td> 2 GB members stepped down.</td></tr> Associate</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> Empty seat.</td></tr> Gold</td> Out of cycle</td> tbc</td> 1 year</td> 3 seats total.</td></tr> </tbody></table> 🔗</a>Who can nominate?</h2> You must be a member of one of the constituency groups listed above in order to nominate yourself or someone else to be a candidate in the election within the same constituency.</p> 🔗</a>How to nominate?</h2> You can nominate someone to be a Governing Board member candidate by filling in this form</a>. Remember that all nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated</em>.</p> We will review all nominations and confirm whether they have been accepted within 2 working days by emailing the nominee and the person who nominated them if relevant.</p> If you encounter any issues with the form, you may fill in this nomination form</a> and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.</p> 🔗</a>Who can be nominated?</h2> All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated</em> and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.</p> We will also check that all nominees are indeed a member of the constituency group. Note that individuals can only be a nominee in one constituency group.</p> In the case of Individual members, the eligibility criteria is whether a member’s recurring donation is active and they donate at least $60/£48/€55 per year. Unfortunately Liberapay doesn’t allow us to access personal information from the donors, so we will need to cross-check nominees’ details with their Liberapay account. So if you are nominating a Liberapay donor, please fill in this form</a> so we can confirm they are indeed an eligible Individual member.</p> Besides these technical considerations, we shared in our announcement blog an overview of the profiles which would fit well as Governing Board members</a>. The overall summary is that we are looking for people of a diversity of backgrounds as we need a variety of view points and skills in our discussions and to support the Foundation. However Governing Board members are expected to spend some time actively participating in the GB’s work</strong>. This includes participating in GB discussions, being part of Committees and active in Working Groups. So nominees need to take this requirement into account before submitting their application.</p> 🔗</a>What’s next?</h2> At the end of the nomination period we will publish the list of nominees on the election page</a> and launch the campaigning period so voters can get to know their candidates.</p> We are looking forward to receiving your application!</p> Announcing the 2026 Governing Board elections 2026-04-27T18:00:00+00:00 The Governing Board</a> of the Foundation is a key player in the governance of Matrix: it allows</a> representatives of every stakeholder of the ecosystem to have a stronger involvement in how the project is managed with both an advisory role to the Guardians, Foundation staff, and Spec Core Team, as well as a participatory one, via the Committees and Working Groups. It is a great opportunity for those who wish to be a bit more involved in the project to have more impact, whilst also representing their constituency.</p> Today we kick off the third Governing Board election round, starting with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, 2nd May and closes on Friday, 15th May</strong>.</p> </span> In order to keep some continuity, we only rotate half of the board every year, and even years see the seats for representatives of the Guardians, Spec Core Team, Platinum members and Ecosystem members to be up for renewal. However there are a few other constituencies with empty seats and a couple of people stepping down which means that we will expand the list of constituencies up for election. So there will be seats coming up for election across the following constituencies this year:</p> Guardians (in cycle)</li> Spec Core Team (in cycle)</li> Platinum (in cycle)</li> Ecosystem (in cycle)</li> Silver (out of cycle, both seats)</li> Individual (out of cycle, one seat)</li> Associate (out of cycle, one seat as the other one is filled)</li> Gold (out of cycle, tbc seats)</li> </ul> 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.</p> If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety. It touches on:</strong></em></p> The logistics of the election</strong></em></a></li> Who we are looking for</strong></em></a></li> How to prepare yourself and our expectations</strong></em></a></li> </ol> 🔗</a>Logistics</h2> 🔗</a>Election schedule</h3> Here is the full schedule for our election season this year:</p> Announcement on Monday, 27th April</li> Nominations from Saturday, 2nd May to Friday, 15th May</li> Campaigning from Saturday, 16th May to Friday, 29th May</li> Voting from Saturday, 30th May to Friday, 12th June</li> Results announced on Monday, 15th June</li> </ul> 🔗</a>How our elections work</h3> Our Governing Board is made up of 9 different constituency groups across 3 categories: Nonprofit and Community representatives, Funder representatives, and Foundation representatives. Each group has been allocated seats on the board, gets to nominate its own slate of candidates, and gets to vote within that slate of candidates.</p> For example, Individual Members get to nominate themselves, and vote on the Individual Members who are qualified candidates. The only exception is with the Managing Director (which is me for now) who automatically gets a seat on the Governing Board, but that’s just one seat of many.</p> Here is the composition of seats on the Governing Board:</p> Community representatives</th> Funder representatives</th> Foundation representatives</th></tr></thead> 4 Individual Members</td> 4 Platinum Members</td> 3 Guardians</td></tr> 3 Ecosystem Members</td> 3 Gold Members</td> 2 Spec Core Team Members</td></tr> 2 Associate Members</td> 2 Silver Members</td> Managing Director</td></tr> </tbody></table> Learn how to become a member</a> and see a list of our current organizational members</a>.</p> As mentioned above, we will be seating candidates for both in-cycle (Guardians, Spec Core Team, Platinum members and Ecosystem members) and out of cycle constituency groups in 2026, as a couple of constituencies have empty seats, namely Individual members, Silver members and Associate members.</p> The Matrix.org Foundations’ Governing Board election schedule</p> </figcaption> </figure> The members elected in cycle this year will be sitting for the normal 2-year term, but those elected out of cycle will see their seats be put up for re-election next year when the cycle repeats for their constituency.</p> In short, the seats up for election this year are as follows:</p> Constituency</th> In or out of cycle</th> Seats for election in 2026</th> Term for the elected member</th> Notes</th></tr></thead> Guardians</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> SCT</td> In-cycle</td> 2</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> Platinum</td> In-cycle</td> 1</td> 2 years</td> 4 seats total.</td></tr> Ecosystem</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr> Individual</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> 1 GB member stepped down.</td></tr> Silver</td> Out of cycle</td> 2</td> 1 year</td> 2 GB members stepped down.</td></tr> Associate</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> Empty seat.</td></tr> Gold</td> Out of cycle</td> tbc</td> 1 year</td> 3 seats total.</td></tr> </tbody></table> Some GB members have decided to step down, making their seat available for election out of cycle. The Associate constituency seat remained empty at the last election, but new members have joined since then.</p> The Platinum and Gold constituencies both have empty seats (respectively 3 and 2 empty seats) because we only have one Platinum and one Gold member. So anyone signing up as a Platinum or Gold member</a> and nominating a representative for election before 15th May is guaranteed a seat on the Governing Board!</strong></p> 🔗</a>Who can nominate</h3> 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 within the same constituency.</p> All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated</em> and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.</p> 🔗</a>Who can vote</h3> All members of each constituency group are entitled to vote on the candidates within that constituency group. We will be reaching out to everyone we have contact information for, to ensure we have our voter rolls together before voting begins at the end of May. Anyone who has signed up to be a member to one of the constituencies</a> before 15th May is eligible to vote for it.</p> We will hold an election in each of the six constituencies that are up for election this year, even if a given constituency has fewer candidates than there are seats allocated for them on the Governing Board. This is, effectively, a vote of confidence.</p> If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us or OpaVote</a> – the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections – by 23rd May, please email us promptly</a>. We cannot change our voter rolls after voting begins on 30th May!!</p> All of the candidates will be listed on our 2026 elections page</a> starting 16th May.</p> 🔗</a>How to nominate</h3> We will share a link to a nomination form and a template document on Friday, 1st May. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who is eligible and whose contact information we have to let them know. We’ll also be announcing it on our social channels.</p> All nominations should be submitted through the form, though anyone who has technical difficulties can fill out the template document and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.</p> 🔗</a>What profiles are good for the Governing Board</h2> One feedback we got in the last election was that it wasn't clear what sort of profiles would be most appropriate for Governing Board members, and people telling us “I can’t apply, I am not technical”.</p> To be clear, the Governing Board supports the Foundation across many different disciplines and the more diversity in the GB the better. As per the paragraph below</a>, GB members have a choice of different Committees and WGs to be involved in, with many others that can be created and with different roles within these.</p> Here are the type of topics you may be able to contribute to:</p> Website implementation (writing, technical implementation, design, deployment…)</li> Conference organisation (project management, procurement, sponsor finding, volunteer management, tooling deployment…)</li> Governance (ecosystem support: how to support projects and users, how to grow the ecosystem, GB/WG/Foundation relations, public directory curation, certification…)</li> Tooling (for Trust & Safety, for the Foundation…)</li> Business (support the Foundation’s (lack of) independent finance function, fundraising, legal & policy, commercial to bring new members, sponsors…)</li> Documentation</li> …</li> </ul> In short any profile will be welcome, because there is so much that can be done and to get different view points in the discussions</strong>. Commitment and availability are the only requirements, and ideally you’re excited by an existing initiative or looking to bring a new one to fruition.</p> 🔗</a>How to prepare yourself</h2> If you want to be a candidate in the election, there are a few things you should know:</p> All candidates will be listed on our website, grouped by the constituency group.</li> We do not require people to use their “legal name.”</li> Candidates who are nominated by an organizational member will have their affiliation listed.</li> We expect candidates to provide a short bio and a short statement, collectively covering qualifications and priorities. Candidates may also provide a link to an extended statement or platform on their personal blog or website.</li> You are encouraged to make yourself available for conversation with members of your constituency group: campaigning rooms</a> will be available for each constituency.</li> The period for campaigning runs from 16th May to 29th May. Please note our community Code of Conduct</a> while campaigning.</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Expectations: what to consider before accepting a nomination</h3> You can familiarise yourself with the Terms of Reference, Bylaws, expectations and other processes on the Governing Board page of the website</a>.</p> Besides, as mentioned above, the Governing Board exists to support the project. The role of the Governing Board is to offer guidance and support to the Guardians, Foundation staff, and Spec Core Team: this can only be achieved if Governing Board members are actively involved.</p> A seat on the Governing Board of the Foundation is not</strong></u> an overseeing one, and there are some expectations</a>: we have tried to spell them out below, so please consider whether you are ready to fulfill them before signing up for a nomination.</p> All in all, we expect a GB member to spend a few hours a week on average in Governing Board activities, including Committee and WG involvement.</strong></p> 🔗</a>1. Governing Board meetings</h4> The Governing Board meets as a full board twice a year, for at least 90 minutes each time, and meetings are facilitated by the duly elected Chair or Vice Chair. Expect one meeting before the end of the year, and another before the next election.</p> You are likely to receive a packet of materials before each meeting which you 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.</p> 🔗</a>2. Committees</h4> The Committees of the Governing Board</a> are subgroups focusing on specific areas of interest to The Matrix Foundation. They are the primary working units of the Board and consist exclusively of Board members.</p> An important function of Committees is to host Working Groups which enable broader community participation in the Foundation.</p> We expect Governing Board members to join and be active in at least one Committee.</p> 🔗</a>3. Working Groups</h4> The Working Groups</a> are a collection of groups that are formed to work on specific tasks or projects that are important to the Matrix ecosystem. The Working Groups are made up of members from the Matrix ecosystem and anyone can participate in them. They are overseen by the Governing Board in that they are attached to a given Committee and require at least one sponsor from the Governing Board to exist.</p> We expect Governing Board members to join and be active in at least one Working Group.</p> 🔗</a>4. Ongoing discussions</h4> With everything going on in the ecosystem and our attempt to continuously improve, there are always ongoing discussions within the Governing Board. We expect every GB member to join our Discourse and participate in these discussions, in particular to relay potential inputs from their constituency.</p> 🔗</a>What to expect if you win the election</h3> Congratulations! All of the winners will be announced on 15th June, but since the elections conclude on 12th June, you may get an email with the results of the election you participated in before 15th June.</p> All elected representatives will be added to a private mailing list, Discourse forum, shared calendar and of course Matrix room so that they can introduce themselves and communicate in between meetings. I will be reaching out to every elected representative to meet one-on-one, get acquainted, and answer questions before we convene for their first Governing Board meeting.</p> We are looking forward to seeing who will be stepping up for nomination and welcoming new Governing Board members!</p> Thank you for your ongoing support, and good luck to all the candidates in the upcoming elections!</p> Amandine</p> Announcing Our First Trademark Policy 2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00 Today we are publishing The Matrix.org Foundation’s first trademark policy</a>. As a foundation we believe that everyone should have control over their own communications and that secure communication should be available to everyone as a free and open standard. We exist to act as a neutral custodian for the Matrix protocol and to ensure that it operates as an unfragmented standard, which benefits the whole ecosystem. If the Matrix ecosystem is thriving everyone benefits, from people using Matrix for their daily conversations to companies building products on Matrix.</p> A big part of our work as custodians is ensuring that there is clarity in sources of information and services, in which trademark protection plays a big role. Our aim with this trademark policy is to help people understand if a product claiming to be compatible with the protocol is actually compatible, and if a specific product or service is officially supported by the Foundation.</p> </span> The aim of this policy is to ensure that there is clarity on which projects are endorsed by or affiliated to the Foundation. However, it is not meant to stop projects from announcing their compatibility with the Matrix specification or even using the word “matrix” in their naming. For example, projects like matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (MDAD</a>) or matrix-authentication-service (MAS</a>) are not official Foundation projects, nor do they claim to be. On the other hand, if a project were to name itself matrix-official-authentication-service that would be in clear violation of this policy.</p> Our assumptions are always from a place of good faith and assuming everyone is working towards the improvement of Matrix. This is why the policy is as relaxed and permissive as it is – we encourage everyone to build on Matrix and contribute in any way they can. To ensure our trademark protects projects that genuinely contribute to the Matrix ecosystem, we will monitor more closely those abusing it. To be clear and summarise, you will still be able to use the Foundation’s trademarks to:</p> Refer to the Foundation and/or to explain how your software is compatible with the official Matrix specification</a>;</li> Promote social and small non-profit events, as long as you make it clear they are not officially endorsed or run by the Foundation;</li> Describe social media accounts, pages, or communities, provided there is no form of misleading users about affiliation with the Foundation.</li> </ul> There are certain circumstances where we expect you to seek explicit approval from the Foundation before using our trademarks, which we detail in section 3 of the policy. Additionally, we are launching a brand guidelines</a> area on our website to help you navigate this new policy and continue to use the Foundation’s trademarks in an appropriate way.</p> We also need to make it clear that this policy is exclusively about the Matrix.org Foundation’s trademarks, registered in the UK</a> and the US</a>, with further protection in Canada and the EU. It is not about open source licenses or any other form of licensing. You need to ensure your projects comply with this policy and also with any relevant licensing terms – this is not something we can offer legal advice on.</p> Finally, like we with all of our policy documents, we are always open to feedback and ways to improve. If you think there are ways we can improve this policy feel free to reach out to legal@matrix.org</a>. Whilst we won’t create individual exceptions, if there are suggestions being made that would benefit the entire ecosystem we will consider them and include them in further iterations of the policy.</p> Matrix Conf 2025 was a blast! 2025-10-30T12:00:00+00:00 The Matrix Conference 2025</a> is over, and it was a significant success for Matrix, its Foundation, and its ecosystem! If you couldn't make it to the Conference, here is what you missed and how you can catch up.</p> The first success was of course in attendance. With more than 250 attendees on-site and hundreds of attendees online, the Conference was attractive</em> to many. This is particularly remarkable because the majority of our audience is in Germany, and this year's Conference was held in France. We want to thank our community for being so dedicated to Matrix and for following us here!</p> </figcaption> </figure> </span> The Conference started by a Barcamp/Unconference: it's an informal workshop day where people join and share the topics they want to talk and hear about. In the evening we all gathered for a Welcome Party at bar Le Météor. Rocket.Chat and Element sponsored the evening, so attendees only had to come and grab food and drinks. We're grateful to both Rocket.Chat and Element for offering us this great night of socializing!</p> </figcaption> </figure> The second and third days were the heart of the conference. The global show-up rate was high! Indeed, 96% of people who bought a ticket showed up. We asked people to optionally add their country of origin, and for those who replied 20 countries were represented. Matrix is already crossing seas and continents: the bulk of our audience came from Europe, but we also got representatives from Brazil, Canada, and Japan! We got 68 speakers, including 2 remote sessions and 1 hybrid session. We concluded the conference by a slower day of workshops on Saturday where people remained very engaged.</p> More than a day's worth of video</em> was recorded by the excellent Audio/Video team. The Chaos Computer Club Video Operation Center</a> (VOC) indeed brought their audio and video equipment and expertise, and have set up a professional recording and streaming set up. They trained volunteers to use their equipment and home-developed software. Volunteers found it easy and great fun to operate the camera and audio/video mixers. We're grateful to VOC for their expertise, patience, enthusiasm, and calm all along the conference. They have been excellent people to work with.</p> Amazingly, talks were not only live-streamed, they were then available on our YouTube Channel</a> and on the Chaos Computer Club's own streaming platform</a> within minutes</em> after the speaker stopped talking. Even more impressive? The VOC team members are volunteers.</p> </figcaption> </figure> We owe this conference to volunteers. More than 30 of them signed up to give their time and enthusiasm to the Conference. They took shifts to welcome people at the check-in booth, operated cameras, controlled the video mixers, helped during build-up and tear down, and generally happily asked for more things to do</em>. We are sincerely grateful to everyone who showed up to lend a hand. It is heartwarming to be part of such an engaged community! If you want to join this welcoming community, drop us a line in the Events Working Group room</a>.</p> </figcaption> </figure> But all the goodwill in the world won't go anywhere without the finances to rent a venue, get catering, and cover the general expenses to organize a conference. We also owe this conference to the sponsors who showed up en masse to support the event! Our gratitude goes particularly to:</p> Our Anchor and Video sponsor Element</a>. You can find their Keynote, The Element Update: Shininess, Scalability and Sustainability</em> on our YouTube channel</a>.</li> Our Champion sponsors Rocket.Chat</a>, Automattic</a>, Connect2x</a>, Famedly</a></li> Our Sustaining sponsors ERCOM</a>, Futurewei</a> and RISE</a></li> </ul> </figcaption> </figure> If you missed the Conference, you will be able watch the videos on demand and find the talks slides on the Conference website</a> right after we finish adding the photos. In the meantime you can find them on our YouTube Channel</a> and on the Chaos Computer Club's streaming platform</a>.</p> If you wanted to get some Conference gear but couldn't get one of those fantastic Black & White T-shirts or hoodies, you have until Monday 3 November to order yours</a>.</p> Your next opportunity to catch up with us is at FOSDEM in Brussels, on January 31 and February 1, where we will be coordinating the Decentralized Communications Devroom. We also asked for a booth, but booth allocations haven't been announced yet. Heads-up that we will also organize a Fringe Event this year again, so make sure to be there a few days before FOSDEM!</p> You can follow what we're up to on our socials (Fediverse</a>, LinkedIn</a>, Bluesky</a>), you can follow our blog via RSS, or join our Matrix Space</a>.</p> A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley 2025-10-28T00:00:00+00:00 After 2 years serving as the first Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation, it’s time to open a new chapter. Amandine already touched on it in the Matrix Conference keynote, but personal matters meant I’ve had to bring this change forward. I’ll be winding down and closing out my time here before the end of November.</p> Organizations need different skills in leadership as they mature, and the Foundation is ready for the next set of hands. It’s also true that my own circumstances have changed significantly as someone based in the United States.</p> It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve this ecosystem, to get to know its communities and the wonderful people in them, and to work alongside you all to launch open governance, improve collaboration, and fortify the trajectory of private, decentralized, sovereign, and open source communications for all with Matrix.</p> I’m deeply grateful to the Foundation staff, the Guardians, the Spec Core Team, the Governing Board, and everyone in the ecosystem. Your talent, passion, integrity, and the depth of humanity – it’s an awe-inspiring thing to take in. I have great confidence in what you will continue to accomplish together!</p> As I move on, I take with me a deep hope. At a time when we see grand experiments in self-governance straining, I take heart in the laboratories of democracy that we see everywhere. Open source, and the stewardship of any commons, is an inevitably messy and difficult endeavor. It requires an embrace of healthy tension, deliberate efforts to sustain a good nature, active address of power dynamics, and collective vigilance. I see us teaching, learning, and practicing those things in open source ecosystems like Matrix. And each of us takes that with us as we engage as members of the body politic, which so desperately needs our tending.</p> Looking forward for Matrix, I’m excited to see the ecosystem continue to hit major milestones in performance, ease-of-use, feature parity, and adoption, and the Foundation’s ever improving role in cultivating that. Amandine will step in as acting Managing Director while the Foundation finds the right person to take it to those new heights.</p> I’d be remiss if I didn’t close with a familiar pitch. Seeing governments, particularly in Europe, expanding their investment in open source development as well as the organizations that steward the projects, is really encouraging. The French government’s support of the Matrix.org Foundation, through DINUM’s new membership, is a major milestone in that direction! But we have a long way to go before we achieve systemic funding at appropriate levels.</p> If you value privacy, digital autonomy, and data sovereignty, or if you benefit from Matrix, become a member of the Foundation today</a>. Your donations are necessary to sustain and realize our goals!</p> Keep up the good work, folks. I’ll see you in the wild blue yonder.</p> Robin Riley</p> Ad astra per aspera 🚀</p> Matrix for Public Sector: DINUM joins the Foundation as we launch a new forum! 2025-10-21T12:30:00+00:00 🔗</a>DINUM becoming the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation</h2> Today DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, has officially announced that they were joining the Matrix.org Foundation</a> as a Silver member</a> and becomes the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation!</p> This is particularly exciting news as it will hopefully set an example for other public sector organisations using Matrix to communicate, and there are many of them.</p> </span> In France, Matrix is the basis for Tchap</a>, the secure messaging system of choice for public officials. It was selected for its security, but also openness, transparency and sovereignty as it limits dependence on proprietary solutions from outside Europe.</p> With this support, DINUM is committed to:</p> participating in the governance of the protocol and enhancing its quality</strong>, in conjunction with other user states (Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany...) and the open source business ecosystem;</li> contributing to the development of the community versions of the various software components of the ecosystem</strong>, used by many public services;</li> ensuring that its actions are part of a framework for sustainable investment in digital commons</strong>.</li> </ul> DINUM has been an active contributor to projects of the Matrix ecosystem for a while, including by providing improvements to the implementation of Sliding Sync, which optimises performance and user experience; as well as the development of a community version of a border gateway, which enhances the security of the communications between distinct organisations.</p> Stéphanie Schaer, the Interministerial Director for Digital Affairs says: “With this partnership, we are choosing to make a long-term investment in a strategic digital commons for the benefit of the European ecosystem. Matrix is an essential building block for secure and sovereign communication services. This sponsorship reflects our conviction that the digital sovereignty of the State requires direct investment in the commons.”</p> 🔗</a>Matrix for Public Sector</h2> This announcement comes a few days after the second edition of The Matrix Conference</a>. The Conference was held in Strasbourg (France), gathering about 300 attendees, amongst which more than a dozen public sector organisations, brought together by their use of Matrix as a sovereign, secure and resilient communication protocol.</p> The Conference saw two full days of public sector track</a>, shedding light on the various exciting deployments of Matrix by these organisations. All the talks are already available for watching here</a>, and will be soon published on the website, but you can find a list of the public sector related ones at the bottom of this post.</p> We also took the opportunity of having many representatives of these public organisations present in person at the Conference to officially launch a Matrix for Public Sector forum</strong>. This is the very first group of its kind that the Foundation sets up and already many other industries are asking for something similar. The group will be proposed to the Governing Board for approval to potentially become an official Working Group</a>.</p> The goal of the Matrix for Public Sector forum is for the Foundation to bring together all public sector players who have already deployed Matrix or are looking to do so, and enable them to share knowledge, learnings and experiences, generally grow the usage of Matrix in the public sector, hopefully ultimately federating all these deployments into a proper Matrix network.</p> Launching the Matrix for Public Sector forum at the Matrix Conference 2025</p> </figcaption> </figure> This seminal meeting gathered a dozen of organisations including representatives from France, the European Commission, Sweden, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Romania. The discussion focused on the type of knowledge and learning could be shared as well as how to structure the group.</p> All this activity, concretising years of growth of Matrix in the public sector is a huge step forward for the ecosystem, and we are very much looking forward to enabling this group of users to grow. It is also great to start implementing new ways for the Foundation to support the ecosystem and we can’t wait to replicate it with other industries!</p> And again: Welcome DINUM!</p> Amandine</p> 🔗</a>Public sector talks at the Conference</h3> Matrix for Public Sector</a>, Amandine Le Pape, The Matrix.org Foundation</p> Trialing Matrix within the European Commission for resilient and sovereign communications</a>, Nicolas Dubois, European Commission</p> Matrix French gov deployment: opening a private federation securely</a>, Mathieu Velten, Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM)</p> Consolidating Germany’s administrative communication: Towards a joint Matrix-based architecture</a>, Dominik Braun, Federal IT-Cooperation (FITKO)</p> Sweden’s Public Sector in Transition</a>, Anna Engström and Kenneth Edwall, Försäkringskassan</p> Luxchat(4gov)</a>, Patrick Weber, the Luxembourg government</p> Secure communication leveraging the Matrix protocol for UNICC and its partners</a>, Tima Soni, United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC)</p> Supporting TF-X with Matrix: best practices and pitfalls</a>, Jeroen Franssen, NATO ACT</p> The German BundesMessenger</a>, Kai A. Hiller, BWI</p> No Desk Is an Island: Enabling Cross-Border Workspace Communication</a>, Alexander Smolianitski, ZenDiS</p> Matrix’s role in the German Healthcare System</a>, Marie Ruddeck, Gematik</p> Nationwide Rollout of Matrix-Based Instant Messaging (TI-M) for 74 Million Statutorily Insured Citizens</a>, Jan Kohnert, Gematik</p> Medical Care over Matrix with Delay during a Simulated Moonwalk</a>, Jan-Lukas Furmanek (FAU Erlangen; University Hospital Erlangen) and Aileen Rabsahl (European Space Agency)</p> An Update on reaching the German Government via Matrix</a>, networkException, Federal IT-Cooperation (FITKO)</p> Introducing your new Governing Board representatives 2025-06-16T17:00:00+00:00 It is an honor to unveil the election results and introduce the newest elected representatives of the Governing Board!</p> 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. Thanks also to the outgoing members of the Governing Board for their service in the precedent-setting first cohort!</p> I'd also like to express our gratitude to all the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learn a lot in each election and we look forward to improving it each successive year.</p> Read on to see who is on the Governing Board and a brief discussion of next steps.</p> </span> Our Governing Board has 8 constituencies that have elected representatives. Last year was our first election, and so we ran an election for all 8 constituencies. Starting this year and moving forward, we run elections in only half of the constituencies. This staggered approach to our elections allows us to strike a balance between experienced representatives and fresh perspectives, and the continuity it affords allows us to build up institutional capacity and knowledge over time.</p> This year we are seating representatives for the following constituencies: Individual Members</a>, Associate Members, Silver Members</a>, and Gold Members. Because we had fewer candidates than seats for Associate and Gold Members, we did not run elections in those categories.</p> 🔗</a>Elected representatives</h2> These are the elected representatives for each of those constituencies:</p> Individual Members</p> Andy Balaam (he/him)</li> Gnuxie (she/her)</li> Greg Sutcliffe (he/him)</li> J.B. Crawford (they/them)</li> </ul> Associate Members</p> Tobias Fella (he/him), KDE e.V.</li> One vacant seat</li> </ul> Silver Members</p> Christian Kußowski (he/him), Famedly</li> Jan Kohnert (he/him), Gematik GmbH</li> </ul> Gold Members</p> Brad Murray (he/him), Automattic (Beeper)</li> Two vacant seats</li> </ul> Learn more about the Governing Board and see the full set of representatives on the Governing Board information page</a>. You can find the entire slate of 2025 candidates on the 2025 election page</a>.</p> 🔗</a>Next steps</h2> All of the elected representatives will soon receive a welcome email and details about onboarding which will take place over the next month. We'll hold a Governing Board meeting soon thereafter, in addition to the twice annual meetings that the Terms of Reference require us to convene.</p> Our next meeting will include updating committee assignments, filling any vacant Chair or Vice Chair positions, and other agenda items within the Governing Board's remit.</p> I'll be coordinating with our Governing Board Chair and Vice Chair in managing the onboarding and offboarding of Governing Board members to the private Matrix rooms, Discourse forums, and mailing list.</p> Onwards and upwards 🚀</p> Introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver 2025-06-13T14:00:00+00:00 🔗</a>TL;DR</h2> As we need to take more concrete steps to improve the financial situation of the Foundation, we will be rolling out a freemium offer for the matrix.org homeserver users. The alternative is to turn off the server, which we want to avoid doing. The goal is for the most active users to support the cost of the service. Free users will have limits on how they can use the service (mostly around media). The change can be supported by any client with limited to no development. Premium plans will be rolled out over the summer, and we will be iterating on the exact scope in the first few weeks. The Homeserver Terms and Privacy Policy will be updated accordingly and deployed in the coming weeks.</p> </span> 🔗</a>The full story</h2> We have been communicating on the lack of funds in the Foundation for a while now, the latest being here</a>. And whilst we’ve been working hard to gather new members and are happy to see the number of logos increasing</a> (thank you all for seeing the need for Matrix to stay independent and safe, and the value in supporting it!), none of the big players in the ecosystem have actually committed to one of the higher membership tiers, so we need to find other ways towards sustainability.</p> The Foundation’s mission</a> can basically be summarised by 4 main goals:</p> Ensure the specification of the protocol stays canonical and unencumbered, to avoid fragmentation and being overridden by a single player.</li> Ensure that all players in the ecosystem are at a level playing field, helping them succeed by giving them visibility and listening to their needs.</li> Promote the Matrix standard, as the value of Matrix is directly proportional to the size of the public network and how much it is used and commercialised.</li> Ensure the public network is safe by building moderation tools that can be used by the server admins, for the sake of our users and making sure the network is attractive.</li> </ol> In practice, it means that we are currently spending money on:</p> A small team of developers and moderators, to develop Trust & Safety tooling, moderate the matrix.org server, and redirect people who do not understand the decentralised nature of Matrix reporting abuse to us towards the appropriate server admins.</li> The infrastructure of the matrix.org homeserver, including the SRE team, who are on call to keep it running, and the support team.</li> Organise and sponsor events to promote and evangelise the protocol.</li> A tiny team to run the Foundation itself, including the support of external contractors for the administrative side (finance, legal, tax). The staff works on governance (organising the governing board elections, running the meetings, liaising between the different teams), raises money and brings members in, manages social media and liaises with the community, keeps the website up and up to date, publishes TWIMs and blogs, organises the events, etc. This team whose day job is to keep the Foundation running is also supported by a lot of volunteer (and sometimes sponsored by employer) time from the Governing Board and its Working Groups, the Spec Core team, the Guardians, and other external staff.</li> </ul> We haven’t gotten to the point of publishing the public financial report (although it should be almost finalised now), because we are frantically trying to focus on closing the financial gap, but here is an overview of the split of expenditures in the last year:</p> </p> As you can see, 20% of the Foundation’s expenditure goes towards hosting the matrix.org free and public homeserver. If we add in the cost of the moderation work done by the Trust and Safety team, the total share of the costs attributable to the matrix.org homeserver account for almost 50% of all expenditure. Meanwhile, today, only 50% of the spending of the Foundation is covered by its revenues (donations and memberships), and we are working hard towards reducing this gap.</p> We’ve kept the matrix.org homeserver around so far, despite its costs, as we consider it essential to seed the network in support of the nurturing part of the Foundation’s mission: despite Matrix being decentralised by design, users need a trusted place to create a free Matrix account to try it out in the first place.</p> However, we can’t continue to bear the cost of the server as is, and before we get to the extreme position of being forced to turn it off leaving its 370k monthly active users in the awkward position of finding a new home for their account, we’ve decided to try to alleviate some of these costs by setting-up a freemium offering and proposing premium plans in addition to the free ones. The goal is to get the server to an at least financially break-even position. If, by any chance, it was ending up profitable, the profit would directly be invested in Trust and Safety</a>, or other new programmes which can support the ecosystem. As a reminder, the Foundation is a Community Interest Company, i.e. a limited company which operates to provide a benefit to the community it serves rather than private profit.</p> 🔗</a>What will the freemium offer look like?</h3> The idea is to set some limits for users on the free plans, which would be lifted for users on the premium plans in exchange for an affordable membership.</p> We are still iterating (and will do for a while) on how it looks,</strong> but users can expect limits around media sizes and/or volumes. The goal is to ensure that the most active users participate in covering the costs of the service, in return for the access to a fully encrypted and decentralised open network.</p> We are limited in scope and design by the fact we need to ship a minimum viable product as soon as possible (we need to reduce costs now) and by not wanting to impose too much development (if any) to Matrix client developers.</p> Obviously we would have preferred to keep everything free of charge. We will never sell our users’ data or cripple our services with ads, so we need to find ethical sources of revenue.</p> 🔗</a>When will the new plans take effect?</h3> The roll-out will happen progressively, starting in the coming weeks and hopefully completing in the summer of 2025. We will start by opening up premium plans to new users only, before progressively migrating all existing accounts to a free plan which will give them the option to upgrade to a premium plan. Users will of course be notified ahead of their account being migrated.</p> 🔗</a>Will this work with whatever Matrix client I use?</h3> Yes. The plan management will be handled via the My Account</a> screens provided by the Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), and notifications to users will be sent in a dedicated room using the Server Notices</a> feature built into the Matrix protocol – already used by the homeserver to send automatic messages to the user – so should be seamless for every client.</p> 🔗</a>I am a Matrix client developer, do I need to do anything?</h3> There are two considerations from a Matrix client point of view:</p> support for the Server Notices</a> feature</li> if the client is distributed via the Apple App Store, then support for MSC4286</a></li> </ul> If the client doesn't show server notices at all then, whilst the client will remain usable with the matrix.org homeserver, your users will have a degraded UX as they won't receive notifications when encountering usage limits.</p> Apple places restrictions</a> on how payments are implemented by iOS (et al) apps that are distributed via the App Store.</p> We expect that most, if not all, apps that fall within scope would be classified as what Apple calls “Free Stand-alone Apps</a>”. Such apps do not need to use in-app purchases so long as “there is no purchasing inside the app, or calls to action for purchase outside of the app”.</p> In order to meet these requirements we have proposed MSC4286</a> which provides a way for a homeserver (such as the matrix.org homeserver) to flag parts of messages as containing a call to action and for affected clients to be able to hide that content. Example implementations are linked in the MSC.</p> 🔗</a>I am already supporting the Foundation by paying an individual membership, will I have to pay for a premium plan too?</h3> No, individual members</a> of the Foundation will get access to the premium features at no extra cost. This benefit will be implemented as part of the process of migrating existing accounts to the free plan.</p> 🔗</a>What else will be changing?</h3> In order to support these changes we will be releasing updates to the Homeserver Terms and the Privacy Policy in the coming weeks. Users of the matrix.org homeserver will be notified and will need to accept the new terms. The scope of change will be clearly highlighted in the release note, but essentially you can expect new terms around payment and additional information on the types of information we will collect about your account, as well as the processors we will use to enable payments.</p> We realise this is quite a big change, but our position is that a slightly limited service is better than no service at all, so we chose to ask for financial contribution rather than turn off the server. Paying a subscription for the matrix.org homeserver is basically a way to support Matrix, ensuring the Foundation can continue to play its role of neutral custodian, enabler and safeguardian of the protocol and the network. We will be publishing more details and a proper FAQ as the roll-out happens, so watch this space for more details.</p> Announcing the 2025 Governing Board elections 2025-04-28T00:00:00+00:00 Today we kick off the second Governing Board</a> election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, May 3rd and closes on Friday, May 16th. This year’s deadlines are anchored to the UTC timezone, rather than the AOE</a> approach that we used with mixed results last year.</p> We’ll be doing our best to reach out to everyone in the Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Member constituent groups to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election.</p> *If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.</em></strong></p> </span>* 🔗</a>Election schedule</h2> Here is the timeline for this election season, which will happen in the second quarter of every year:</p> Announcement on Monday, April 28</li> Nominations from Saturday, May 3 to Friday, May 16</li> Campaigning from Saturday, May 17 to Friday, May 30</li> Voting from Saturday, May 31 to Friday, June 13</li> Results announced on Monday, June 16</li> </ul> 🔗</a>How our elections work</h2> Our Governing Board is made up of 9 different constituency groups across 3 categories: nonprofit and community representatives, funder representatives, and foundation representatives. Each group has been allocated seats on the board, gets to nominate its own slate of candidates, and gets to vote within that slate of candidates.</p> For example, Individual Members get to nominate themselves, and vote on the Individual Members who are qualified candidates. The only exception is with the Managing Director (hi, that’s me) who automatically gets a seat on the Governing Board, but that’s just one seat of many.</p> Here is the composition of seats on the Governing Board:</p> Community representatives</th> Funder representatives</th> Foundation representatives</th></tr></thead> 4 Individual Members</td> 4 Platinum Members</td> 3 Guardians</td></tr> 3 Ecosystem Members</td> 3 Gold Members</td> 2 Spec Core Team Members</td></tr> 2 Associate Members</td> 2 Silver Members</td> Managing Director</td></tr> </tbody></table> Learn how to become a member</a> and see a list of our current organizational members</a>.</p> We will be seating candidates for half of the constituency groups in 2025, namely: Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members.</p> </p> There are currently no term limits, but term limits are a best practice in open governance so we intend to introduce them as we find our collective footing.</p> 🔗</a>Who can nominate</h2> 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. 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</a>, then you are eligible to nominate and vote. You must donate before the election period begins, as we cannot change voter rolls after that.</p> All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated</em> and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.</p> 🔗</a>Who can vote</h2> All members of each constituency group are entitled to vote on the candidates within that constituency group. We will be reaching out to everyone we have contact information for, to ensure we have our voter rolls together before voting begins at the end of May.</p> We will hold an election in each of the four constituencies that are up for election this year, even if a given constituency has fewer candidates than there are seats allocated for them on the Governing Board. This is, effectively, a vote of confidence.</p> If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us or OpaVote</a> – the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections – by May 24th, please email us promptly</a>. We build our voter rolls on May 31st and can't change them after that!</p> All of the candidates will be listed on an elections page here on our website which we’ll publish on May 17th.</p> 🔗</a>How to prepare yourself</h2> If you want to be a candidate in the election, there are a few things you should know:</p> All candidates will be listed on our website, grouped by the constituency group. (See last year's election center here.</a>)</li> We do not require people to use their “legal name.”</li> Candidates who are nominated by an organizational member will have their affiliation listed.</li> We expect candidates to provide a short bio and a short statement, collectively covering qualifications and priorities. Candidates may also provide a link to an extended statement or platform on their personal blog or website.</li> You are encouraged to make yourself available for conversation with members of your constituency group.</li> The period for campaigning runs from May 17th to May 30th. Please note our community Code of Conduct</a> while campaigning.</li> </ul> 🔗</a>What to expect if you win</h2> Congratulations! All of the winners will be announced on June 16th, but since the elections conclude on June 13th, you may get an email with the results of the election you participated in before June 16th.</p> 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. I will be reaching out to every elected representative to meet one-on-one, get acquainted, and answer questions before we convene for their first Governing Board meeting.</p> The Governing Board meets as a full board at least twice a year, for at least 90 minutes each time, and meetings are facilitated by the duly elected Chair or Vice Chair. Expect one meeting before the end of the year, and another before the next election.</p> You are likely to receive a packet of materials before each meeting which you 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.</p> 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.</p> Most of the work of the Governing Board happens in its Committees and their Working Groups, who meet in between Governing Board meetings and present their assessments and recommendations to the Governing Board.</p> 🔗</a>How to nominate</h2> We will update this blog post with a link to a nomination form and a template document on Friday, May 2nd. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who is eligible and whose contact information we have to let them know. We’ll also be announcing it on our social channels.</p> All nominations should be submitted through the form</a>, though anyone who has technical difficulties can fill out the template document</a> and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.</p> For discussion related to the Governing Board and the elections, we encourage people to drop by the Office of the Governing Board (#governing-board-office:matrix.org)</a>.</p> Thank you for your ongoing support, and good luck to all the candidates in the upcoming elections!</p> Update on Native Matrix interoperability with WhatsApp 2024-09-16T00:00:00+00:00 Hi all,</p> Back at FOSDEM</a> in February we showed off how Matrix could be used for E2EE-preserving messaging interoperability as required by the Digital Markets Act messaging interoperability</a> - and we announced that Element had been working with Meta on integrating with its DMA APIs in order to connect WhatsApp to Matrix. You can see the video here</a>, and we also demoed interop working at the technical level to the European Commission a few days beforehand.</p> Subsequently WhatsApp launched</a> its DMA portal</a> on March 8th, and the proposed Reference Offer (i.e. the terms you have to accept as a Requesting Party in order to interoperate) was revealed. The Reference Offer for Facebook Messenger was launched on September 6th. At the time of the WhatsApp launch we flagged up some significant unresolved questions - the main points being that:</p> WhatsApp would require their users to manually enable DMA in settings before they can receive any traffic from interconnecting service providers (e.g. Element) - meaning that WhatsApp users would not be reachable by default.</p> </li> WhatsApp would require the client IP of any interconnecting users, in order to apply ‘platform integrity’ anti-abuse / trust & safety controls.</p> </li> WhatsApp would not allow an interconnecting service to buffer messages serverside.</p> </li> WhatsApp would require each Matrix server provider to sign a separate agreement in order to interconnect - i.e. you can’t bridge other server’s users unless those servers have signed a contract with Meta.</p> </li> </ol> </span> Now, the good news is that we’ve subsequently been talking with WhatsApp to see if we could progress these points - and we’re happy to say that they’ve listened to us and we’ve made progress on the first 3 items:</p> Meta recently shared an update</a> on the messaging interoperability user experience and will allow all EU users to be reachable by interoperable services by default. It’ll also give people the option of how they want to manage their inbox as well as a range of features like read receipts, typing indicators and reactions.</p> </li> We’ve come up with a plan with WhatsApp to reduce the amount of matrix user data we share with WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s interop solution however, doesn’t yet support multi-device conversations or shared conversation history like normal Matrix, which means that normal Matrix server-side synchronised history won’t work for these conversations.</p> </li> In terms of not allowing open federation: this looks unlikely to change, given Meta needs to know who is responsible for the servers who connect to them, and ensure they agree to the terms of use as required by DMA.</p> </li> </ol> During discussions, another point came up which we’d previously overlooked: section 7.5.1 of the current reference offer states: “Partner User Location.</span> Any Partner Users that Partner Enlists or provides access to the Interoperable Messaging Services must be located and remain in the EEA”</em>. In other words, interop would only be available to Matrix users physically in the EEA, which is obviously against the Matrix Foundation’s manifesto</a> to provide secure communication to everyone</em>. Moreover, to demonstrate compliance the Matrix side would have to geolocate the client’s IP.</p> It turns out that this limitation to EU users ended up being the biggest obstacle for productising the native Matrix<>WhatsApp bridge, as it is unclear whether it’s financially viable for anyone (e.g. Element) to launch such a bridge if it only works for Matrix users physically within the EEA (not to mention the costs and privacy issues of geolocating Matrix users).</p> Now, on one hand, deploying Matrix as a mature standards-based protocol for WhatsApp interop with native E2EE feels like a worthy goal: indeed, it effectively gives DMA interoperators a stable standardised API with pre-existing SDKs to implement against, rather than having to implement against proprietary and potentially shifting vendor APIs. So overall it moves the needle towards the end goal of Matrix’ mission.</p> On the other hand, this all may be moot if the return on investment of building DMA interop with WhatsApp via Matrix is too far away for any company in the Matrix ecosystem to be able to afford the investment, and if there isn’t an appetite for anyone to fund it. Funding constraints</a> on both the Foundation and the ecosystem today are such that this work will only happen if explicitly sponsored by an organisation who is willing to commit to fund it.</p> So:</strong> if you are an organisation with users in the EU who would like them to interoperate with EU WhatsApp users via Matrix, and have the funds to sponsor development of building out an official production-grade Matrix<->WhatsApp bridge, please get in touch with me</a>.</strong></p> Alternatively, if the geographic constraints are a showstopper for you, please let us know.</strong></p> We’re assuming that there may be smaller messaging providers, or domain-specific messaging services who want to connect their end-users through to WA end-users, and may be happy to be constrained to EU geography. However, bridge developers need evidence and financial support to progress this. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the strategic importance of the Digital Markets Act, this is an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.</p> Looking forward to hearing feedback!</p> thanks,</p> Matthew</p> Protecting the projects at the heart of the Matrix ecosystem 2024-08-15T19:00:00+00:00 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.</p> 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.</p> 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.</p> </span> 🔗</a>Where we are and where we’re going</h2> The Foundation’s primary responsibility is to the Matrix specification itself, but the ecosystem has a lot to gain when we provide a neutral home and stewardship for other relevant projects as well.</p> We currently host an array of projects</a> and even proactively fund maintenance and development on a small number of them. Most of those projects were created by the same set of people who first created Matrix, and the folks they trusted with commit access – providing a consistent set of expectations around trust, security, code quality, maintenance, advocacy, and support – almost all of whom still work on the projects today. This group is referred to as the “Core Team” – which is formally defined</a> as those who have direct commit privileges on any of our repositories. But the structure and expectations for this team are due for an update, and the mix of projects under our banner has grown sprawling and a bit chaotic.</p> The time has come for us to design a coherent, modern framework, with the benefit of hindsight and a Governing Board that can channel important perspectives from across the ecosystem. And once we’ve established that framework, then we can get to designing the processes by which projects join or leave the Foundation, and how decisions are made about resourcing.</p> If you’d like to get involved, we encourage you to jump into conversations in the Foundation’s rooms and make your voice heard through your representatives on the Governing Board</a>.</p> 🔗</a>Answering the immediate questions</h2> But three questions remain that we think are worth offering provisional answers to now: what will the Foundation do to protect projects at the heart of Matrix? How do we determine what those “core” projects are? And are there any projects that don’t belong at the Foundation?</p> The first question is easy to answer:</strong></p> The Foundation will seek to fund and coordinate maintenance and development of core projects even if faced with a competing fork. We believe some projects, like the spec, test suites, SDKs, and shared cryptographic libraries, are so important that they require ongoing stewardship, under a permissive open source licence, by an organisation that is accountable to the ecosystem.</em></p> The Foundation may host a variety of other projects for the benefit of the ecosystem, and may also fund and coordinate maintenance and development of some of those projects where we see a meaningful gap in the ecosystem. This broader set of projects is more subject to change over time, and is less likely to receive direct investment from the Foundation.</p> But that second question – what is “core?”</strong> It’s not as easy to pin down exactly, and we look forward to formalising a definition and designation process in collaboration with the Governing Board, Spec Core Team, and Guardians.</p> A non-exhaustive list of projects we think are core includes:</p> The Spec, Spec Proposals, the matrix.org website and homeserver, and matrix.to link redirection service</li> Integration test suites, to confirm that implementations conform to the spec: sytest</li> complement</li> complement-crypto</li> </ul> </li> SDKs and libraries which are used extensively by the wider community: matrix-rust-sdk</li> matrix-js-sdk</li> vodozemac</li> </ul> </li> </ul> As to the third question – are there any projects that don’t belong at the Foundation?</strong> Probably, yes. It’s debatable whether it makes sense to host experimental or speculative projects, and we don’t think it’s appropriate to host projects that don’t have anything to do with Matrix specifically.</p> 🔗</a>Taking the next steps</h2> We hope this helps answer some of the questions that folks have been raising, illuminates where we are on our journey in defining these things, and provides some assurance that the Matrix.org Foundation is ever evolving in partnership with the community and will draw a line to protect and maintain projects that are truly at the heart of Matrix.</p> Next, we’ll be deliberating on these things with the Governing Board, Spec Core Team, Guardians, and the broader ecosystem including you, the reader. We encourage you to reach out to your representatives on the Governing Board</a> along the way.</p> Ultimately, we’ll define a framework and begin aligning our operations with it – including defining a legal and governance framework and setting up the infrastructure to facilitate it.</p> As always, we can’t do this without your support. Some organisations have stepped forward to support our work, but we still don’t have enough to sustain our operations. The more people that come together to fund the Foundation’s work, the more capable we are of investing in core projects, operationalizing more open governance, and nurturing the broader ecosystem.</p> Please join the Foundation today</a>, especially if you depend on Matrix, to ensure the Matrix ecosystem is here for you today and tomorrow.</p> Thanks,</p> Josh Simmons and Matthew Hodgson</p>

Matrix.org - Foundation

The Matrix Conference 2026: Our biggest edition yet

2026-10-30T12:30:00+00:00

More than 340 attendees, exciting next-generation features ready to ship, Matrix powering more and more government communications, practical updates from the community, and the occasional shark: dispatches from Malmö 2026!

"Matrix has gone from being an interesting experiment to an existential requirement," said Matthew at the opening to the 2026 edition of The Matrix Conference</a>, a sentiment that could be felt throughout this year's edition.

Civil servants from 15 different nations and intergovernmental organizations shared their decisions and experiences migrating to Matrix in response to an urgent need for digital sovereignty; we also heard from regulated industries like healthcare who cannot compromise on privacy or security and are increasingly looking to Matrix as a solution. Matrix is growing in response to this need: representatives from Matrix's rapidly expanding ecosystem came to present the varied projects built on Matrix specification, and members of both the Spec Core Team</a> and the ecosystem came to demonstrate the expanding features that will make up Matrix 2.0.

A demo of Matrix real-time communication (MatrixRTC), was one of the highlights, as Matthew created a group call with himself using three different applications: Visio, Tammy and Element Call.

</figcaption> </figure>
This year we introduced the community attendance sponsorship package, which allowed us to fund travel for the maintainers of one of the community-created Matrix homeservers called Continuwuity</a>; their talks and workshop were among the most popular of the event. Thanks to Famedly for supporting this initiative via the community attendance sponsorship option.
Of course, we took advantage of being in the home of IKEA to adopt some Blåhajar:

</figcaption> </figure>
A lot more happened, so read on for more highlights from The Matrix Conference 2026. 
🔗</a>Civil servants in Europe and beyond look to Matrix for their digital sovereignty needs</h2>
"Digital sovereignty is no longer a buzzword, but procurement policy," noted Jens-Uwe Thieme in a talk on Germany's Matrix-based TI-Messenger. And this is true: in June, the European Commission unveiled a European Tech Sovereignty Package</a>, in response to both financial and strategic risks from proprietary software solutions. The EU identified some €264 billion</a> is being spent every year on services. It had earlier recognised the strategic risk of governments not being able to control communications, in 2025 recommending EU governments consider Matrix for their real-time communication. Just before the start of The Matrix Conference, the Starlink satellite internet service throttled</a> Ukrainian access to the internet to try and halt its strikes against Russia, underlining the profound risk governments take by trusting key communications components to private companies.
So, it was not surprising that governments and intergovernmental agencies were out in force at this year's Matrix Conference to talk about Matrix deployments at various stages of development. Representatives from the German Federal IT Cooperation (FITKO), the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan), the French Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM), and the government of Luxembourg came to talk about why governments are increasingly choosing Matrix</a>. The United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) offered insights from their journey</a> to serve 100 UN entities with sovereign, federated communications, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) discussed the challenges</a> of scaling up adoption of Matrix-based NI2CE messenger as an alternative to WhatsApp and Signal. We also had the opportunity to learn from the German experience</a> deploying Matrix in healthcare and security, and to hear about new Matrix deployments in development in Brazil</a> and the Netherlands</a>.
Regulated industries – such as health insurers, financial institutions or legal enterprises – that have strict rules about handling personally identifiable information and a need to comply with privacy and data sovereignty laws, are also a natural match for Matrix-based solutions. At this year's conference we heard in particular from the health sector, including moving Germany's health insurer</a> to TI-Messenger, the adoption of TI-Messenger in Austria</a>, and the challenge</a> of getting time-limited healthcare workers to adopt new messaging applications, even where required.
🔗</a>Sovereign does not mean alone</h2>
"Every organisation that adopts the Matrix federation makes the protocol more valuable," says Renato Becker</a> of Rocket.Chat. But the real value of the interoperability that a federated protocol like Matrix brings is that new users do not need to agree on a platform, or a server, or a client. This year, we heard from the Swedish government's pilot programme</a> using a federated communications solution between two national agencies, which has then grown into a broader government-wide solution.

</figcaption> </figure>
We saw a live demo of Matrix deployments in Sweden, France, the European Commission, and NATO</a> chatting: different countries/organisations, different homeservers, and different clients but using the same Matrix protocol they are able to communicate: sovereign, but connected.
🔗</a>Sovereignty requires sustainability - and that means supporting the Foundation</h2>
An open standard needs a neutral steward. The Matrix Foundation</a> exists to safeguard the independence of the protocol. But while "Matrix is free to use," says Amandine, acting Managing Director of the Foundation, "it is not free to maintain." A lot of available funding aims to support new features, but the particular urgent need is to finance the less noticeable but every-bit-as-essential work that keeps Matrix running: protect and evolve the protocol itself (i.e. the spec work), ensure the whole ecosystem is heard (community management), grow the adoption of Matrix (advocacy and promotion) and keep the network safe (trust and safety).

Governing Board members Amandine, Nico, Rich and Neil on stage for the Foundation keynote </figcaption> </figure>
Sovereignty, notes Amandine, "is only real if it is sustainable." In several talks, the Foundation presented ideas it is exploring to finance its future, and the future of sovereign communications.

</figcaption> </figure>
Perhaps the most important revenue stream is membership</a>. Matrix Foundation members provide an annual contribution to the Foundation and are the backbone of keeping Matrix open, neutral, and free. Among other membership benefits, Members get a free ticket to the annual Matrix Conference, where they have the opportunity to network with the talented and committed Matrix community.

If just 80% of the public sector organisations using Matrix to run their communications, or companies building on Matrix, became Silver tier (the lowest tier) members of the Foundation, it would guarantee the Foundation's independence. </blockquote>
The Foundation is also exploring other potential revenue streams, including certification of Matrix developers or Matrix-backed software, offering training for these certifications, technical consulting, and trust & safety blocklists.
🔗</a>What the community is building on and for Matrix</h2>
Some of the most exciting talks at this year's conference focused on new features of the Matrix spec and its growing ecosystem. We got to learn about improving custom profiles</a> to enable users to temporarily communicate "in a meeting" or "on vacation"; ideas about updating the way Matrix handles timelines</a>; improvements to the protocol's security</a>, and much more</a>.

Ginger and Jade on stage discussing Continuwuity </figcaption> </figure>
We also got to hear about the interesting tools being built around Matrix, such as: Matrix Wrench</a>, a multipurpose tool for community managers; Continuwuity</a>, a homeserver that after just 18 months in existence is already running 1.5K Matrix servers; and Gua</a>, which attempts to mimic the simplicity and ease of use of WhatsApp without sacrificing federation. We also learned more about how incorporating the software language Rust</a> is speeding Element Web, and what's new in Rust Software Development Kits</a> (SDK) to enable more Matrix features.
🔗</a>Where we are and where we are going next</h2>
Overall this year we had more than 340 attendees and 70 talks - our largest Matrix Conference to date. It ended with a hackathon and fully live edition of Matrix Live</a>, where we streamed the ideas and projects that grew out of the creativity that can be unleashed when a hundred of us sit in the same room. Many thanks to our friends in Copenhagen for hosting our hackathon!
Thanks are due to so many people who helped make this event possible. In particular, our sponsors who supported the conference this year: Element</a>, Famedly</a>, Connect2x</a>, Rocket.Chat</a>, ERCOM</a>, DINUM</a>, Nordeck</a>, CGM</a>, Aalborg University</a>, and Futurewei</a>. We also couldn't have done it without the 52 volunteers who helped throughout the event, the Events Working Group</a> themselves for organising it all, and the Website & Content Working Group</a> for making sure everything was up-to-date and online. The conference was streamed through the efforts and support of the CCC Video Operation Center</a>. Thanks to Nadine Minagawa for the design concept for our "Föderation" graphic!
You can revisit the whole conference (over 25 hours of talks) on our watch page</a>. We will also be sharing photos from the event soon, but we're still combing through to ensure that we follow event etiquette. We'd love to hear your feedback about the conference</a>, if you were able to join us in Malmö or watched our streams.

Kim and Andy discussing the event organisation behind a laptop </figcaption> </figure>
So what's next? Firstly, we are pleased to announce that we will be at FOSDEM 2027</a>, in Brussels 30-31 January, co-hosting a Decentralised Messaging devroom</a> with the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) and DeltaChat communities. We're also excited that the next Matrix Conference will be in the Netherlands, with venue details and dates to be shared in the near future. If you have tips for us or are interested in helping the Events Working Group organise it, contact us via our Matrix room</a>.
You'll also continue to hear from us across our socials (Fediverse</a>, LinkedIn</a>, Bluesky</a>), you can join our Matrix room</a>, and of course you can stay in the loop here on the blog: https://matrix.org/category/this-week-in-matrix/</a>.

</figcaption> </figure>

Announcing the results of the Governing Board election

2026-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

And that’s a wrap for this 2026 Governing Board election season! 🏁
After 49 days of ramping up, we have reached the end of the process and are now ready to announce the 12 freshly (re)elected Governing Board members.
After one year of setting things up (2024), the last year (2025) has been the first year in which the Governing Board was able to truly deliver concrete value, figuring out the blueprints for highly functioning Working Groups, aligning on expectations of engagement from Governing Board members, feeding back on the Foundation’s decisions and clarifying the processes and frameworks in general. This meant that with greater clarity on expectations we have seen a few board members stepping down, leading to a deeper rework of the Governing Board during these elections than we initially predicted (and would predict in the future). However, with clearer expectations being set and a bigger ecosystem, we are now confident that everyone who has thrown their name in the hat is ready to execute and support the Foundation’s mission.
So without further ado, I would like to congratulate and welcome our newly elected Governing Board members, whether it is their first or second term on the Board! 
🔗</a>Representatives of the Ecosystem members</a></h2>
All three seats were up for renewal this year: we’re glad to keep Kim and Nico around for another term and happy to welcome Jade!

Kim Brose (Matrix Community Events)</li>
Nicolas Werner (Nheko-Reborn)</li>
Jade Ellis (Continuwuity)</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Representative of the Platinum member</a></h2>
The Platinum seat was up for renewal this year and we are glad Neil is sticking around!

Neil Johnson (Element)</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Representatives of the Spec Core team</a></h2>
Two seats were up for renewal this year, we are happy to welcome Alexey and keep Rich around for another term!

Alexey Rusakov</li>
Richard van der Hoff</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Representatives of the Guardians</a></h2>
Three seats were up for renewal this year, but only two candidates stepped up (as I am sitting on the Governing Board as the Acting Managing Director). We are glad to keep Ross and Matthew around for another term!

Matthew Hodgson</li>
Ross Schulman</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Representatives of the Individual members</a></h2>
Following another member stepping down last week, we now have two out-of-cycle seats to fill rather than the one initially announced, so the first two elected candidates will get a seat. We’re excited to welcome two new members: Max and Mathieu!

Max</li>
Mathieu Velten</li> </ul> 🔗</a>Representatives of the Silver members</a></h2>
Following two members stepping down we had two out-of-cycle seats to fill during this election, and are happy to welcome Yoan and Niklas!

Yoan Pintas (DINUM)</li>
Niklas Zender (Famedly)</li> </ul>
We will also welcome a new Governing Board member who joined as a replacement of his ex-colleague Brad Murray at Automattic, representative of the Gold member: please welcome Nick Mills-Barrett!
Meanwhile, we would also like to extend a huge thanks to all departing Governing Board members who have helped a lot in shaping how we work and ensure the highest impact. It was great to have you around and we are grateful for the time you have put into supporting the Foundation!
The new members will be onboarded during the next few weeks by our current chair Greg and vice-chair Kim, and we are looking forward to getting to work!
Congratulations all and welcome again!
Amandine

Kicking off the voting period for the Governing Board election

2026-05-29T13:00:00+00:00

🚥 And off we go!
At midnight tonight representatives of the Platinum members, Silver members and Ecosystem members, as well asIndividual members, Spec Core Team members and Guardians will be able to start voting to choose the representatives of their constituency on the Governing Board!
The final list of candidates for the 2026 election of the Foundation's Governing Board</a> and their details are available on the website for reference, and folks have been campaigning in the bonfire rooms</a> during the last two weeks.
This is the penultimate milestone in our election schedule and runs until the 12th of June 11:59pm UTC:
✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
✅ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
✅ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
➡️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June
All voters should keep an eye out for an email from OpaVote</a>, the platform we will be using to run the election.
A big thank you again to all our candidates</a> who have stepped up to drive the growth of Matrix, and good luck to all!
I, for one, am looking forward to announcing the results in two weeks!
Amandine

Announcing the candidates for the 2026 Governing Board elections

2026-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Drumroll! 🥁
We now have the final list of candidates for the 2026 election of the Foundation's Governing Board</a>! This represents our third milestone in the process and means our candidates can start campaigning as of today!
As a reminder, the full election schedule is as follows:
✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
✅ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
➡️ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
◻️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June
A big thank you to all our candidates who have stepped up to drive the growth of Matrix: 
Constituency group</th> Name</th> Organisation / Project</th></tr></thead>

Ecosystem Members (in cycle, 3 seats)</td> Ajay Bura</td> Cinny</td></tr>
</td> Jade Ellis</td> Continuwuity</td></tr>
</td> Kim Brose (HarHarLinks)</td> Matrix Community Events</td></tr>
</td> Nico (Nicolas Werner)</td> Nheko</td></tr>
Guardians (in cycle, 3 seats)</td> Matthew Hodgson</td> </td></tr>
</td> Ross Schulman</td> </td></tr>
Platinum Members (in cycle, 1 seat)</td> Neil Johnson</td> Element</td></tr>
Spec Core Team (in cycle, 2 seats)</td> Alexey “Kitsune” Rusakov</td> </td></tr>
</td> Richard van der Hoff</td> </td></tr>
Individual Members (out of cycle, 1 seat)</td> Mathieu Velten</td> </td></tr>
</td> Max</td> </td></tr>
</td> Reid Anderson</td> </td></tr>
Silver Members (out of cycle, 2 seats)</td> Niklas Zender</td> Famedly</td></tr>
</td> Runi Hammer</td> Meedio</td></tr>
</td> Yoan Pintas</td> DINUM</td></tr> </tbody></table>
You can find more details about them, including their bios and statements on the election page</a>.
They will also be hanging out ~~in the campaigning rooms</del> around the campaigning bonfires for each constituency group to answer questions from the voters:~~

General campaigning room</a></li>
Ecosystem Member campaigning room</a></li>
Guardians campaigning room</a></li>
Platinum Member campaigning room</a></li>
Spec Core Team campaigning room</a></li>
Individual Member campaigning room</a></li>
Silver Member campaigning room</a></li> </ul>
If you are eligible to vote in one of these groups, now is the time to make up your mind and decide who you think is best to represent yours and Matrix’ interests in the Governing Board!
Good luck to all, and see you in two weeks for the kick-off of the voting process!
Amandine

Kicking off the nomination period for the 2026 Governing Board elections

2026-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

On Monday we announced the launch of the 2026 election for the Foundation's Governing Board</a>. We have now reached the second milestone and are kicking-off the nomination period!
As a reminder, the full election schedule is as follows:
✅ Announcement on Monday 27th April
➡️ Nominations from Saturday 2nd May to Friday 15th May
◻️ Campaigning from Saturday 16th May to Friday 29th May
◻️ Voting from Saturday 30th May to Friday 12th June
◻️ Results announced on Monday 15th June
Key links:

The election page</a></li>
The nomination form</a></li> </ul> 
The nomination period is when each member of a constituency group can nominate themselves, a representative or someone else to be a candidate for the election. Each nomination will be approved, announced on 16th May and displayed on the election page</a>.
The constituency groups up for election this year are:
Constituency</th> In or out of cycle</th> Seats for election in 2026</th> Term for the elected member</th> Notes</th></tr></thead>

Guardians</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
SCT</td> In-cycle</td> 2</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
Platinum</td> In-cycle</td> 1 (or more)</td> 2 years</td> 4 seats total.</td></tr>
Ecosystem</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
Individual</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> 1 GB member stepped down.</td></tr>
Silver</td> Out of cycle</td> 2</td> 1 year</td> 2 GB members stepped down.</td></tr>
Associate</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> Empty seat.</td></tr>
Gold</td> Out of cycle</td> tbc</td> 1 year</td> 3 seats total.</td></tr> </tbody></table>
🔗</a>Who can nominate?</h2>
You must be a member of one of the constituency groups listed above in order to nominate yourself or someone else to be a candidate in the election within the same constituency.
🔗</a>How to nominate?</h2>
You can nominate someone to be a Governing Board member candidate by filling in this form</a>. Remember that all nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated.
We will review all nominations and confirm whether they have been accepted within 2 working days by emailing the nominee and the person who nominated them if relevant.
If you encounter any issues with the form, you may fill in this nomination form</a> and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.
🔗</a>Who can be nominated?</h2>
All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.
We will also check that all nominees are indeed a member of the constituency group. Note that individuals can only be a nominee in one constituency group.
In the case of Individual members, the eligibility criteria is whether a member’s recurring donation is active and they donate at least $60/£48/€55 per year. Unfortunately Liberapay doesn’t allow us to access personal information from the donors, so we will need to cross-check nominees’ details with their Liberapay account. So if you are nominating a Liberapay donor, please fill in this form</a> so we can confirm they are indeed an eligible Individual member.
Besides these technical considerations, we shared in our announcement blog an overview of the profiles which would fit well as Governing Board members</a>. The overall summary is that we are looking for people of a diversity of backgrounds as we need a variety of view points and skills in our discussions and to support the Foundation. However Governing Board members are expected to spend some time actively participating in the GB’s work. This includes participating in GB discussions, being part of Committees and active in Working Groups. So nominees need to take this requirement into account before submitting their application.
🔗</a>What’s next?</h2>
At the end of the nomination period we will publish the list of nominees on the election page</a> and launch the campaigning period so voters can get to know their candidates.
We are looking forward to receiving your application!

Announcing the 2026 Governing Board elections

2026-04-27T18:00:00+00:00

The Governing Board</a> of the Foundation is a key player in the governance of Matrix: it allows</a> representatives of every stakeholder of the ecosystem to have a stronger involvement in how the project is managed with both an advisory role to the Guardians, Foundation staff, and Spec Core Team, as well as a participatory one, via the Committees and Working Groups. It is a great opportunity for those who wish to be a bit more involved in the project to have more impact, whilst also representing their constituency.
Today we kick off the third Governing Board election round, starting with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, 2nd May and closes on Friday, 15th May. 
In order to keep some continuity, we only rotate half of the board every year, and even years see the seats for representatives of the Guardians, Spec Core Team, Platinum members and Ecosystem members to be up for renewal. However there are a few other constituencies with empty seats and a couple of people stepping down which means that we will expand the list of constituencies up for election. So there will be seats coming up for election across the following constituencies this year:

Guardians (in cycle)</li>
Spec Core Team (in cycle)</li>
Platinum (in cycle)</li>
Ecosystem (in cycle)</li>
Silver (out of cycle, both seats)</li>
Individual (out of cycle, one seat)</li>
Associate (out of cycle, one seat as the other one is filled)</li>
Gold (out of cycle, tbc seats)</li> </ul>
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.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety. It touches on:
The logistics of the election</a></li>
Who we are looking for</a></li>
How to prepare yourself and our expectations</a></li> </ol> 🔗</a>Logistics</h2>
🔗</a>Election schedule</h3>
Here is the full schedule for our election season this year:

Announcement on Monday, 27th April</li>
Nominations from Saturday, 2nd May to Friday, 15th May</li>
Campaigning from Saturday, 16th May to Friday, 29th May</li>
Voting from Saturday, 30th May to Friday, 12th June</li>
Results announced on Monday, 15th June</li> </ul>
🔗</a>How our elections work</h3>
Our Governing Board is made up of 9 different constituency groups across 3 categories: Nonprofit and Community representatives, Funder representatives, and Foundation representatives. Each group has been allocated seats on the board, gets to nominate its own slate of candidates, and gets to vote within that slate of candidates.
For example, Individual Members get to nominate themselves, and vote on the Individual Members who are qualified candidates. The only exception is with the Managing Director (which is me for now) who automatically gets a seat on the Governing Board, but that’s just one seat of many.
Here is the composition of seats on the Governing Board:
Community representatives</th> Funder representatives</th> Foundation representatives</th></tr></thead>

4 Individual Members</td> 4 Platinum Members</td> 3 Guardians</td></tr>
3 Ecosystem Members</td> 3 Gold Members</td> 2 Spec Core Team Members</td></tr>
2 Associate Members</td> 2 Silver Members</td> Managing Director</td></tr> </tbody></table>
Learn how to become a member</a> and see a list of our current organizational members</a>.
As mentioned above, we will be seating candidates for both in-cycle (Guardians, Spec Core Team, Platinum members and Ecosystem members) and out of cycle constituency groups in 2026, as a couple of constituencies have empty seats, namely Individual members, Silver members and Associate members.

The Matrix.org Foundations’ Governing Board election schedule </figcaption> </figure>
The members elected in cycle this year will be sitting for the normal 2-year term, but those elected out of cycle will see their seats be put up for re-election next year when the cycle repeats for their constituency.
In short, the seats up for election this year are as follows:
Constituency</th> In or out of cycle</th> Seats for election in 2026</th> Term for the elected member</th> Notes</th></tr></thead>

Guardians</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
SCT</td> In-cycle</td> 2</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
Platinum</td> In-cycle</td> 1</td> 2 years</td> 4 seats total.</td></tr>
Ecosystem</td> In-cycle</td> 3</td> 2 years</td> </td></tr>
Individual</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> 1 GB member stepped down.</td></tr>
Silver</td> Out of cycle</td> 2</td> 1 year</td> 2 GB members stepped down.</td></tr>
Associate</td> Out of cycle</td> 1</td> 1 year</td> Empty seat.</td></tr>
Gold</td> Out of cycle</td> tbc</td> 1 year</td> 3 seats total.</td></tr> </tbody></table>
Some GB members have decided to step down, making their seat available for election out of cycle. The Associate constituency seat remained empty at the last election, but new members have joined since then.
The Platinum and Gold constituencies both have empty seats (respectively 3 and 2 empty seats) because we only have one Platinum and one Gold member. So anyone signing up as a Platinum or Gold member</a> and nominating a representative for election before 15th May is guaranteed a seat on the Governing Board!
🔗</a>Who can nominate</h3>
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 within the same constituency.
All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.
🔗</a>Who can vote</h3>
All members of each constituency group are entitled to vote on the candidates within that constituency group. We will be reaching out to everyone we have contact information for, to ensure we have our voter rolls together before voting begins at the end of May. Anyone who has signed up to be a member to one of the constituencies</a> before 15th May is eligible to vote for it.
We will hold an election in each of the six constituencies that are up for election this year, even if a given constituency has fewer candidates than there are seats allocated for them on the Governing Board. This is, effectively, a vote of confidence.
If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us or OpaVote</a> – the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections – by 23rd May, please email us promptly</a>. We cannot change our voter rolls after voting begins on 30th May!!
All of the candidates will be listed on our 2026 elections page</a> starting 16th May.
🔗</a>How to nominate</h3>
We will share a link to a nomination form and a template document on Friday, 1st May. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who is eligible and whose contact information we have to let them know. We’ll also be announcing it on our social channels.
All nominations should be submitted through the form, though anyone who has technical difficulties can fill out the template document and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.
🔗</a>What profiles are good for the Governing Board</h2>
One feedback we got in the last election was that it wasn't clear what sort of profiles would be most appropriate for Governing Board members, and people telling us “I can’t apply, I am not technical”.
To be clear, the Governing Board supports the Foundation across many different disciplines and the more diversity in the GB the better. As per the paragraph below</a>, GB members have a choice of different Committees and WGs to be involved in, with many others that can be created and with different roles within these.
Here are the type of topics you may be able to contribute to:

Website implementation (writing, technical implementation, design, deployment…)</li>
Conference organisation (project management, procurement, sponsor finding, volunteer management, tooling deployment…)</li>
Governance (ecosystem support: how to support projects and users, how to grow the ecosystem, GB/WG/Foundation relations, public directory curation, certification…)</li>
Tooling (for Trust & Safety, for the Foundation…)</li>
Business (support the Foundation’s (lack of) independent finance function, fundraising, legal & policy, commercial to bring new members, sponsors…)</li>
Documentation</li>
…</li> </ul>
In short any profile will be welcome, because there is so much that can be done and to get different view points in the discussions. Commitment and availability are the only requirements, and ideally you’re excited by an existing initiative or looking to bring a new one to fruition.
🔗</a>How to prepare yourself</h2>
If you want to be a candidate in the election, there are a few things you should know:

All candidates will be listed on our website, grouped by the constituency group.</li>
We do not require people to use their “legal name.”</li>
Candidates who are nominated by an organizational member will have their affiliation listed.</li>
We expect candidates to provide a short bio and a short statement, collectively covering qualifications and priorities. Candidates may also provide a link to an extended statement or platform on their personal blog or website.</li>
You are encouraged to make yourself available for conversation with members of your constituency group: campaigning rooms</a> will be available for each constituency.</li>
The period for campaigning runs from 16th May to 29th May. Please note our community Code of Conduct</a> while campaigning.</li> </ul>
🔗</a>Expectations: what to consider before accepting a nomination</h3>
You can familiarise yourself with the Terms of Reference, Bylaws, expectations and other processes on the Governing Board page of the website</a>.
Besides, as mentioned above, the Governing Board exists to support the project. The role of the Governing Board is to offer guidance and support to the Guardians, Foundation staff, and Spec Core Team: this can only be achieved if Governing Board members are actively involved.
A seat on the Governing Board of the Foundation is not an overseeing one, and there are some expectations</a>: we have tried to spell them out below, so please consider whether you are ready to fulfill them before signing up for a nomination.
All in all, we expect a GB member to spend a few hours a week on average in Governing Board activities, including Committee and WG involvement.
🔗</a>1. Governing Board meetings</h4>
The Governing Board meets as a full board twice a year, for at least 90 minutes each time, and meetings are facilitated by the duly elected Chair or Vice Chair. Expect one meeting before the end of the year, and another before the next election.
You are likely to receive a packet of materials before each meeting which you 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.
🔗</a>2. Committees</h4>
The Committees of the Governing Board</a> are subgroups focusing on specific areas of interest to The Matrix Foundation. They are the primary working units of the Board and consist exclusively of Board members.
An important function of Committees is to host Working Groups which enable broader community participation in the Foundation.
We expect Governing Board members to join and be active in at least one Committee.
🔗</a>3. Working Groups</h4>
The Working Groups</a> are a collection of groups that are formed to work on specific tasks or projects that are important to the Matrix ecosystem. The Working Groups are made up of members from the Matrix ecosystem and anyone can participate in them. They are overseen by the Governing Board in that they are attached to a given Committee and require at least one sponsor from the Governing Board to exist.
We expect Governing Board members to join and be active in at least one Working Group.
🔗</a>4. Ongoing discussions</h4>
With everything going on in the ecosystem and our attempt to continuously improve, there are always ongoing discussions within the Governing Board. We expect every GB member to join our Discourse and participate in these discussions, in particular to relay potential inputs from their constituency.
🔗</a>What to expect if you win the election</h3>
Congratulations! All of the winners will be announced on 15th June, but since the elections conclude on 12th June, you may get an email with the results of the election you participated in before 15th June.
All elected representatives will be added to a private mailing list, Discourse forum, shared calendar and of course Matrix room so that they can introduce themselves and communicate in between meetings. I will be reaching out to every elected representative to meet one-on-one, get acquainted, and answer questions before we convene for their first Governing Board meeting.
We are looking forward to seeing who will be stepping up for nomination and welcoming new Governing Board members!
Thank you for your ongoing support, and good luck to all the candidates in the upcoming elections!
Amandine

Announcing Our First Trademark Policy

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Today we are publishing The Matrix.org Foundation’s first trademark policy</a>. As a foundation we believe that everyone should have control over their own communications and that secure communication should be available to everyone as a free and open standard. We exist to act as a neutral custodian for the Matrix protocol and to ensure that it operates as an unfragmented standard, which benefits the whole ecosystem. If the Matrix ecosystem is thriving everyone benefits, from people using Matrix for their daily conversations to companies building products on Matrix.
A big part of our work as custodians is ensuring that there is clarity in sources of information and services, in which trademark protection plays a big role. Our aim with this trademark policy is to help people understand if a product claiming to be compatible with the protocol is actually compatible, and if a specific product or service is officially supported by the Foundation. 
The aim of this policy is to ensure that there is clarity on which projects are endorsed by or affiliated to the Foundation. However, it is not meant to stop projects from announcing their compatibility with the Matrix specification or even using the word “matrix” in their naming. For example, projects like matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (MDAD</a>) or matrix-authentication-service (MAS</a>) are not official Foundation projects, nor do they claim to be. On the other hand, if a project were to name itself matrix-official-authentication-service that would be in clear violation of this policy.
Our assumptions are always from a place of good faith and assuming everyone is working towards the improvement of Matrix. This is why the policy is as relaxed and permissive as it is – we encourage everyone to build on Matrix and contribute in any way they can. To ensure our trademark protects projects that genuinely contribute to the Matrix ecosystem, we will monitor more closely those abusing it. To be clear and summarise, you will still be able to use the Foundation’s trademarks to:

Refer to the Foundation and/or to explain how your software is compatible with the official Matrix specification</a>;</li>
Promote social and small non-profit events, as long as you make it clear they are not officially endorsed or run by the Foundation;</li>
Describe social media accounts, pages, or communities, provided there is no form of misleading users about affiliation with the Foundation.</li> </ul>
There are certain circumstances where we expect you to seek explicit approval from the Foundation before using our trademarks, which we detail in section 3 of the policy. Additionally, we are launching a brand guidelines</a> area on our website to help you navigate this new policy and continue to use the Foundation’s trademarks in an appropriate way.
We also need to make it clear that this policy is exclusively about the Matrix.org Foundation’s trademarks, registered in the UK</a> and the US</a>, with further protection in Canada and the EU. It is not about open source licenses or any other form of licensing. You need to ensure your projects comply with this policy and also with any relevant licensing terms – this is not something we can offer legal advice on.
Finally, like we with all of our policy documents, we are always open to feedback and ways to improve. If you think there are ways we can improve this policy feel free to reach out to legal@matrix.org</a>. Whilst we won’t create individual exceptions, if there are suggestions being made that would benefit the entire ecosystem we will consider them and include them in further iterations of the policy.

Matrix Conf 2025 was a blast!

2025-10-30T12:00:00+00:00

The Matrix Conference 2025</a> is over, and it was a significant success for Matrix, its Foundation, and its ecosystem! If you couldn't make it to the Conference, here is what you missed and how you can catch up.
The first success was of course in attendance. With more than 250 attendees on-site and hundreds of attendees online, the Conference was attractive to many. This is particularly remarkable because the majority of our audience is in Germany, and this year's Conference was held in France. We want to thank our community for being so dedicated to Matrix and for following us here!
</figcaption> </figure> 
The Conference started by a Barcamp/Unconference: it's an informal workshop day where people join and share the topics they want to talk and hear about. In the evening we all gathered for a Welcome Party at bar Le Météor. Rocket.Chat and Element sponsored the evening, so attendees only had to come and grab food and drinks. We're grateful to both Rocket.Chat and Element for offering us this great night of socializing!

</figcaption> </figure>
The second and third days were the heart of the conference. The global show-up rate was high! Indeed, 96% of people who bought a ticket showed up. We asked people to optionally add their country of origin, and for those who replied 20 countries were represented. Matrix is already crossing seas and continents: the bulk of our audience came from Europe, but we also got representatives from Brazil, Canada, and Japan! We got 68 speakers, including 2 remote sessions and 1 hybrid session. We concluded the conference by a slower day of workshops on Saturday where people remained very engaged.
More than a day's worth of video was recorded by the excellent Audio/Video team. The Chaos Computer Club Video Operation Center</a> (VOC) indeed brought their audio and video equipment and expertise, and have set up a professional recording and streaming set up. They trained volunteers to use their equipment and home-developed software. Volunteers found it easy and great fun to operate the camera and audio/video mixers. We're grateful to VOC for their expertise, patience, enthusiasm, and calm all along the conference. They have been excellent people to work with.
Amazingly, talks were not only live-streamed, they were then available on our YouTube Channel</a> and on the Chaos Computer Club's own streaming platform</a> within minutes after the speaker stopped talking. Even more impressive? The VOC team members are volunteers.
</figcaption> </figure>
We owe this conference to volunteers. More than 30 of them signed up to give their time and enthusiasm to the Conference. They took shifts to welcome people at the check-in booth, operated cameras, controlled the video mixers, helped during build-up and tear down, and generally happily asked for more things to do. We are sincerely grateful to everyone who showed up to lend a hand. It is heartwarming to be part of such an engaged community! If you want to join this welcoming community, drop us a line in the Events Working Group room</a>.

</figcaption> </figure>
But all the goodwill in the world won't go anywhere without the finances to rent a venue, get catering, and cover the general expenses to organize a conference. We also owe this conference to the sponsors who showed up en masse to support the event! Our gratitude goes particularly to:

Our Anchor and Video sponsor Element</a>. You can find their Keynote, The Element Update: Shininess, Scalability and Sustainability on our YouTube channel</a>.</li>
Our Champion sponsors Rocket.Chat</a>, Automattic</a>, Connect2x</a>, Famedly</a></li>
Our Sustaining sponsors ERCOM</a>, Futurewei</a> and RISE</a></li> </ul>

</figcaption> </figure>
If you missed the Conference, you will be able watch the videos on demand and find the talks slides on the Conference website</a> right after we finish adding the photos. In the meantime you can find them on our YouTube Channel</a> and on the Chaos Computer Club's streaming platform</a>.
If you wanted to get some Conference gear but couldn't get one of those fantastic Black & White T-shirts or hoodies, you have until Monday 3 November to order yours</a>.
Your next opportunity to catch up with us is at FOSDEM in Brussels, on January 31 and February 1, where we will be coordinating the Decentralized Communications Devroom. We also asked for a booth, but booth allocations haven't been announced yet. Heads-up that we will also organize a Fringe Event this year again, so make sure to be there a few days before FOSDEM!
You can follow what we're up to on our socials (Fediverse</a>, LinkedIn</a>, Bluesky</a>), you can follow our blog via RSS, or join our Matrix Space</a>.

A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley

2025-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

After 2 years serving as the first Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation, it’s time to open a new chapter. Amandine already touched on it in the Matrix Conference keynote, but personal matters meant I’ve had to bring this change forward. I’ll be winding down and closing out my time here before the end of November.
Organizations need different skills in leadership as they mature, and the Foundation is ready for the next set of hands. It’s also true that my own circumstances have changed significantly as someone based in the United States.
It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve this ecosystem, to get to know its communities and the wonderful people in them, and to work alongside you all to launch open governance, improve collaboration, and fortify the trajectory of private, decentralized, sovereign, and open source communications for all with Matrix.
I’m deeply grateful to the Foundation staff, the Guardians, the Spec Core Team, the Governing Board, and everyone in the ecosystem. Your talent, passion, integrity, and the depth of humanity – it’s an awe-inspiring thing to take in. I have great confidence in what you will continue to accomplish together!
As I move on, I take with me a deep hope. At a time when we see grand experiments in self-governance straining, I take heart in the laboratories of democracy that we see everywhere. Open source, and the stewardship of any commons, is an inevitably messy and difficult endeavor. It requires an embrace of healthy tension, deliberate efforts to sustain a good nature, active address of power dynamics, and collective vigilance. I see us teaching, learning, and practicing those things in open source ecosystems like Matrix. And each of us takes that with us as we engage as members of the body politic, which so desperately needs our tending.
Looking forward for Matrix, I’m excited to see the ecosystem continue to hit major milestones in performance, ease-of-use, feature parity, and adoption, and the Foundation’s ever improving role in cultivating that. Amandine will step in as acting Managing Director while the Foundation finds the right person to take it to those new heights.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t close with a familiar pitch. Seeing governments, particularly in Europe, expanding their investment in open source development as well as the organizations that steward the projects, is really encouraging. The French government’s support of the Matrix.org Foundation, through DINUM’s new membership, is a major milestone in that direction! But we have a long way to go before we achieve systemic funding at appropriate levels.
If you value privacy, digital autonomy, and data sovereignty, or if you benefit from Matrix, become a member of the Foundation today</a>. Your donations are necessary to sustain and realize our goals!
Keep up the good work, folks. I’ll see you in the wild blue yonder.
Robin Riley
Ad astra per aspera 🚀

Matrix for Public Sector: DINUM joins the Foundation as we launch a new forum!

2025-10-21T12:30:00+00:00

🔗</a>DINUM becoming the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation</h2>
Today DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, has officially announced that they were joining the Matrix.org Foundation</a> as a Silver member</a> and becomes the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation!
This is particularly exciting news as it will hopefully set an example for other public sector organisations using Matrix to communicate, and there are many of them. 
In France, Matrix is the basis for Tchap</a>, the secure messaging system of choice for public officials. It was selected for its security, but also openness, transparency and sovereignty as it limits dependence on proprietary solutions from outside Europe.
With this support, DINUM is committed to:

participating in the governance of the protocol and enhancing its quality, in conjunction with other user states (Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany...) and the open source business ecosystem;</li>
contributing to the development of the community versions of the various software components of the ecosystem, used by many public services;</li>
ensuring that its actions are part of a framework for sustainable investment in digital commons.</li> </ul>
DINUM has been an active contributor to projects of the Matrix ecosystem for a while, including by providing improvements to the implementation of Sliding Sync, which optimises performance and user experience; as well as the development of a community version of a border gateway, which enhances the security of the communications between distinct organisations.
Stéphanie Schaer, the Interministerial Director for Digital Affairs says: “With this partnership, we are choosing to make a long-term investment in a strategic digital commons for the benefit of the European ecosystem. Matrix is an essential building block for secure and sovereign communication services. This sponsorship reflects our conviction that the digital sovereignty of the State requires direct investment in the commons.”
🔗</a>Matrix for Public Sector</h2>
This announcement comes a few days after the second edition of The Matrix Conference</a>. The Conference was held in Strasbourg (France), gathering about 300 attendees, amongst which more than a dozen public sector organisations, brought together by their use of Matrix as a sovereign, secure and resilient communication protocol.
The Conference saw two full days of public sector track</a>, shedding light on the various exciting deployments of Matrix by these organisations. All the talks are already available for watching here</a>, and will be soon published on the website, but you can find a list of the public sector related ones at the bottom of this post.
We also took the opportunity of having many representatives of these public organisations present in person at the Conference to officially launch a Matrix for Public Sector forum. This is the very first group of its kind that the Foundation sets up and already many other industries are asking for something similar. The group will be proposed to the Governing Board for approval to potentially become an official Working Group</a>.
The goal of the Matrix for Public Sector forum is for the Foundation to bring together all public sector players who have already deployed Matrix or are looking to do so, and enable them to share knowledge, learnings and experiences, generally grow the usage of Matrix in the public sector, hopefully ultimately federating all these deployments into a proper Matrix network.

Launching the Matrix for Public Sector forum at the Matrix Conference 2025 </figcaption> </figure>
This seminal meeting gathered a dozen of organisations including representatives from France, the European Commission, Sweden, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Romania. The discussion focused on the type of knowledge and learning could be shared as well as how to structure the group.
All this activity, concretising years of growth of Matrix in the public sector is a huge step forward for the ecosystem, and we are very much looking forward to enabling this group of users to grow. It is also great to start implementing new ways for the Foundation to support the ecosystem and we can’t wait to replicate it with other industries!
And again: Welcome DINUM!
Amandine
🔗</a>Public sector talks at the Conference</h3>
Matrix for Public Sector</a>, Amandine Le Pape, The Matrix.org Foundation
Trialing Matrix within the European Commission for resilient and sovereign communications</a>, Nicolas Dubois, European Commission
Matrix French gov deployment: opening a private federation securely</a>, Mathieu Velten, Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM)
Consolidating Germany’s administrative communication: Towards a joint Matrix-based architecture</a>, Dominik Braun, Federal IT-Cooperation (FITKO)
Sweden’s Public Sector in Transition</a>, Anna Engström and Kenneth Edwall, Försäkringskassan
Luxchat(4gov)</a>, Patrick Weber, the Luxembourg government
Secure communication leveraging the Matrix protocol for UNICC and its partners</a>, Tima Soni, United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC)
Supporting TF-X with Matrix: best practices and pitfalls</a>, Jeroen Franssen, NATO ACT
The German BundesMessenger</a>, Kai A. Hiller, BWI
No Desk Is an Island: Enabling Cross-Border Workspace Communication</a>, Alexander Smolianitski, ZenDiS
Matrix’s role in the German Healthcare System</a>, Marie Ruddeck, Gematik
Nationwide Rollout of Matrix-Based Instant Messaging (TI-M) for 74 Million Statutorily Insured Citizens</a>, Jan Kohnert, Gematik
Medical Care over Matrix with Delay during a Simulated Moonwalk</a>, Jan-Lukas Furmanek (FAU Erlangen; University Hospital Erlangen) and Aileen Rabsahl (European Space Agency)
An Update on reaching the German Government via Matrix</a>, networkException, Federal IT-Cooperation (FITKO)

Introducing your new Governing Board representatives

2025-06-16T17:00:00+00:00

It is an honor to unveil the election results and introduce the newest elected representatives of the Governing Board!
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. Thanks also to the outgoing members of the Governing Board for their service in the precedent-setting first cohort!
I'd also like to express our gratitude to all the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learn a lot in each election and we look forward to improving it each successive year.
Read on to see who is on the Governing Board and a brief discussion of next steps. 
Our Governing Board has 8 constituencies that have elected representatives. Last year was our first election, and so we ran an election for all 8 constituencies. Starting this year and moving forward, we run elections in only half of the constituencies. This staggered approach to our elections allows us to strike a balance between experienced representatives and fresh perspectives, and the continuity it affords allows us to build up institutional capacity and knowledge over time.
This year we are seating representatives for the following constituencies: Individual Members</a>, Associate Members, Silver Members</a>, and Gold Members. Because we had fewer candidates than seats for Associate and Gold Members, we did not run elections in those categories.
🔗</a>Elected representatives</h2>
These are the elected representatives for each of those constituencies:
Individual Members

Andy Balaam (he/him)</li>
Gnuxie (she/her)</li>
Greg Sutcliffe (he/him)</li>
J.B. Crawford (they/them)</li> </ul>
Associate Members

Tobias Fella (he/him), KDE e.V.</li>
One vacant seat</li> </ul>
Silver Members

Christian Kußowski (he/him), Famedly</li>
Jan Kohnert (he/him), Gematik GmbH</li> </ul>
Gold Members

Brad Murray (he/him), Automattic (Beeper)</li>
Two vacant seats</li> </ul>
Learn more about the Governing Board and see the full set of representatives on the Governing Board information page</a>. You can find the entire slate of 2025 candidates on the 2025 election page</a>.
🔗</a>Next steps</h2>
All of the elected representatives will soon receive a welcome email and details about onboarding which will take place over the next month. We'll hold a Governing Board meeting soon thereafter, in addition to the twice annual meetings that the Terms of Reference require us to convene.
Our next meeting will include updating committee assignments, filling any vacant Chair or Vice Chair positions, and other agenda items within the Governing Board's remit.
I'll be coordinating with our Governing Board Chair and Vice Chair in managing the onboarding and offboarding of Governing Board members to the private Matrix rooms, Discourse forums, and mailing list.
Onwards and upwards 🚀

Introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver

2025-06-13T14:00:00+00:00

🔗</a>TL;DR</h2>
As we need to take more concrete steps to improve the financial situation of the Foundation, we will be rolling out a freemium offer for the matrix.org homeserver users. The alternative is to turn off the server, which we want to avoid doing. The goal is for the most active users to support the cost of the service. Free users will have limits on how they can use the service (mostly around media). The change can be supported by any client with limited to no development. Premium plans will be rolled out over the summer, and we will be iterating on the exact scope in the first few weeks. The Homeserver Terms and Privacy Policy will be updated accordingly and deployed in the coming weeks. 
🔗</a>The full story</h2>
We have been communicating on the lack of funds in the Foundation for a while now, the latest being here</a>. And whilst we’ve been working hard to gather new members and are happy to see the number of logos increasing</a> (thank you all for seeing the need for Matrix to stay independent and safe, and the value in supporting it!), none of the big players in the ecosystem have actually committed to one of the higher membership tiers, so we need to find other ways towards sustainability.
The Foundation’s mission</a> can basically be summarised by 4 main goals:

Ensure the specification of the protocol stays canonical and unencumbered, to avoid fragmentation and being overridden by a single player.</li>
Ensure that all players in the ecosystem are at a level playing field, helping them succeed by giving them visibility and listening to their needs.</li>
Promote the Matrix standard, as the value of Matrix is directly proportional to the size of the public network and how much it is used and commercialised.</li>
Ensure the public network is safe by building moderation tools that can be used by the server admins, for the sake of our users and making sure the network is attractive.</li> </ol>
In practice, it means that we are currently spending money on:

A small team of developers and moderators, to develop Trust & Safety tooling, moderate the matrix.org server, and redirect people who do not understand the decentralised nature of Matrix reporting abuse to us towards the appropriate server admins.</li>
The infrastructure of the matrix.org homeserver, including the SRE team, who are on call to keep it running, and the support team.</li>
Organise and sponsor events to promote and evangelise the protocol.</li>
A tiny team to run the Foundation itself, including the support of external contractors for the administrative side (finance, legal, tax). The staff works on governance (organising the governing board elections, running the meetings, liaising between the different teams), raises money and brings members in, manages social media and liaises with the community, keeps the website up and up to date, publishes TWIMs and blogs, organises the events, etc. This team whose day job is to keep the Foundation running is also supported by a lot of volunteer (and sometimes sponsored by employer) time from the Governing Board and its Working Groups, the Spec Core team, the Guardians, and other external staff.</li> </ul>
We haven’t gotten to the point of publishing the public financial report (although it should be almost finalised now), because we are frantically trying to focus on closing the financial gap, but here is an overview of the split of expenditures in the last year:

As you can see, 20% of the Foundation’s expenditure goes towards hosting the matrix.org free and public homeserver. If we add in the cost of the moderation work done by the Trust and Safety team, the total share of the costs attributable to the matrix.org homeserver account for almost 50% of all expenditure. Meanwhile, today, only 50% of the spending of the Foundation is covered by its revenues (donations and memberships), and we are working hard towards reducing this gap.
We’ve kept the matrix.org homeserver around so far, despite its costs, as we consider it essential to seed the network in support of the nurturing part of the Foundation’s mission: despite Matrix being decentralised by design, users need a trusted place to create a free Matrix account to try it out in the first place.
However, we can’t continue to bear the cost of the server as is, and before we get to the extreme position of being forced to turn it off leaving its 370k monthly active users in the awkward position of finding a new home for their account, we’ve decided to try to alleviate some of these costs by setting-up a freemium offering and proposing premium plans in addition to the free ones. The goal is to get the server to an at least financially break-even position. If, by any chance, it was ending up profitable, the profit would directly be invested in Trust and Safety</a>, or other new programmes which can support the ecosystem. As a reminder, the Foundation is a Community Interest Company, i.e. a limited company which operates to provide a benefit to the community it serves rather than private profit.
🔗</a>What will the freemium offer look like?</h3>
The idea is to set some limits for users on the free plans, which would be lifted for users on the premium plans in exchange for an affordable membership.
We are still iterating (and will do for a while) on how it looks, but users can expect limits around media sizes and/or volumes. The goal is to ensure that the most active users participate in covering the costs of the service, in return for the access to a fully encrypted and decentralised open network.
We are limited in scope and design by the fact we need to ship a minimum viable product as soon as possible (we need to reduce costs now) and by not wanting to impose too much development (if any) to Matrix client developers.
Obviously we would have preferred to keep everything free of charge. We will never sell our users’ data or cripple our services with ads, so we need to find ethical sources of revenue.
🔗</a>When will the new plans take effect?</h3>
The roll-out will happen progressively, starting in the coming weeks and hopefully completing in the summer of 2025. We will start by opening up premium plans to new users only, before progressively migrating all existing accounts to a free plan which will give them the option to upgrade to a premium plan. Users will of course be notified ahead of their account being migrated.
🔗</a>Will this work with whatever Matrix client I use?</h3>
Yes. The plan management will be handled via the My Account</a> screens provided by the Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), and notifications to users will be sent in a dedicated room using the Server Notices</a> feature built into the Matrix protocol – already used by the homeserver to send automatic messages to the user – so should be seamless for every client.
🔗</a>I am a Matrix client developer, do I need to do anything?</h3>
There are two considerations from a Matrix client point of view:

support for the Server Notices</a> feature</li>
if the client is distributed via the Apple App Store, then support for MSC4286</a></li> </ul>
If the client doesn't show server notices at all then, whilst the client will remain usable with the matrix.org homeserver, your users will have a degraded UX as they won't receive notifications when encountering usage limits.
Apple places restrictions</a> on how payments are implemented by iOS (et al) apps that are distributed via the App Store.
We expect that most, if not all, apps that fall within scope would be classified as what Apple calls “Free Stand-alone Apps</a>”. Such apps do not need to use in-app purchases so long as “there is no purchasing inside the app, or calls to action for purchase outside of the app”.
In order to meet these requirements we have proposed MSC4286</a> which provides a way for a homeserver (such as the matrix.org homeserver) to flag parts of messages as containing a call to action and for affected clients to be able to hide that content. Example implementations are linked in the MSC.
🔗</a>I am already supporting the Foundation by paying an individual membership, will I have to pay for a premium plan too?</h3>
No, individual members</a> of the Foundation will get access to the premium features at no extra cost. This benefit will be implemented as part of the process of migrating existing accounts to the free plan.
🔗</a>What else will be changing?</h3>
In order to support these changes we will be releasing updates to the Homeserver Terms and the Privacy Policy in the coming weeks. Users of the matrix.org homeserver will be notified and will need to accept the new terms. The scope of change will be clearly highlighted in the release note, but essentially you can expect new terms around payment and additional information on the types of information we will collect about your account, as well as the processors we will use to enable payments.
We realise this is quite a big change, but our position is that a slightly limited service is better than no service at all, so we chose to ask for financial contribution rather than turn off the server. Paying a subscription for the matrix.org homeserver is basically a way to support Matrix, ensuring the Foundation can continue to play its role of neutral custodian, enabler and safeguardian of the protocol and the network. We will be publishing more details and a proper FAQ as the roll-out happens, so watch this space for more details.

Announcing the 2025 Governing Board elections

2025-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Today we kick off the second Governing Board</a> election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, May 3rd and closes on Friday, May 16th. This year’s deadlines are anchored to the UTC timezone, rather than the AOE</a> approach that we used with mixed results last year.
We’ll be doing our best to reach out to everyone in the Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Member constituent groups to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety. 
🔗</a>Election schedule</h2>
Here is the timeline for this election season, which will happen in the second quarter of every year:

Announcement on Monday, April 28</li>
Nominations from Saturday, May 3 to Friday, May 16</li>
Campaigning from Saturday, May 17 to Friday, May 30</li>
Voting from Saturday, May 31 to Friday, June 13</li>
Results announced on Monday, June 16</li> </ul>
🔗</a>How our elections work</h2>
Our Governing Board is made up of 9 different constituency groups across 3 categories: nonprofit and community representatives, funder representatives, and foundation representatives. Each group has been allocated seats on the board, gets to nominate its own slate of candidates, and gets to vote within that slate of candidates.
For example, Individual Members get to nominate themselves, and vote on the Individual Members who are qualified candidates. The only exception is with the Managing Director (hi, that’s me) who automatically gets a seat on the Governing Board, but that’s just one seat of many.
Here is the composition of seats on the Governing Board:
Community representatives</th> Funder representatives</th> Foundation representatives</th></tr></thead>

4 Individual Members</td> 4 Platinum Members</td> 3 Guardians</td></tr>
3 Ecosystem Members</td> 3 Gold Members</td> 2 Spec Core Team Members</td></tr>
2 Associate Members</td> 2 Silver Members</td> Managing Director</td></tr> </tbody></table>
Learn how to become a member</a> and see a list of our current organizational members</a>.
We will be seating candidates for half of the constituency groups in 2025, namely: Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members.

There are currently no term limits, but term limits are a best practice in open governance so we intend to introduce them as we find our collective footing.
🔗</a>Who can nominate</h2>
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. 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</a>, then you are eligible to nominate and vote. You must donate before the election period begins, as we cannot change voter rolls after that.
All nominees must have consented to nomination before being nominated and must be a community member in good standing. That means they must have a clean track record with respect to our Code of Conduct</a>. We want our Governing Board to be a clearing house for a variety of priorities and perspectives, and to be able to hold space for each other even when there are disagreements.
🔗</a>Who can vote</h2>
All members of each constituency group are entitled to vote on the candidates within that constituency group. We will be reaching out to everyone we have contact information for, to ensure we have our voter rolls together before voting begins at the end of May.
We will hold an election in each of the four constituencies that are up for election this year, even if a given constituency has fewer candidates than there are seats allocated for them on the Governing Board. This is, effectively, a vote of confidence.
If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us or OpaVote</a> – the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections – by May 24th, please email us promptly</a>. We build our voter rolls on May 31st and can't change them after that!
All of the candidates will be listed on an elections page here on our website which we’ll publish on May 17th.
🔗</a>How to prepare yourself</h2>
If you want to be a candidate in the election, there are a few things you should know:

All candidates will be listed on our website, grouped by the constituency group. (See last year's election center here.</a>)</li>
We do not require people to use their “legal name.”</li>
Candidates who are nominated by an organizational member will have their affiliation listed.</li>
We expect candidates to provide a short bio and a short statement, collectively covering qualifications and priorities. Candidates may also provide a link to an extended statement or platform on their personal blog or website.</li>
You are encouraged to make yourself available for conversation with members of your constituency group.</li>
The period for campaigning runs from May 17th to May 30th. Please note our community Code of Conduct</a> while campaigning.</li> </ul>
🔗</a>What to expect if you win</h2>
Congratulations! All of the winners will be announced on June 16th, but since the elections conclude on June 13th, you may get an email with the results of the election you participated in before 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. I will be reaching out to every elected representative to meet one-on-one, get acquainted, and answer questions before we convene for their first Governing Board meeting.
The Governing Board meets as a full board at least twice a year, for at least 90 minutes each time, and meetings are facilitated by the duly elected Chair or Vice Chair. Expect one meeting before the end of the year, and another before the next election.
You are likely to receive a packet of materials before each meeting which you 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.
Most of the work of the Governing Board happens in its Committees and their Working Groups, who meet in between Governing Board meetings and present their assessments and recommendations to the Governing Board.
🔗</a>How to nominate</h2>
We will update this blog post with a link to a nomination form and a template document on Friday, May 2nd. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who is eligible and whose contact information we have to let them know. We’ll also be announcing it on our social channels.
All nominations should be submitted through the form</a>, though anyone who has technical difficulties can fill out the template document</a> and email it to elections@foundation.matrix.org</a>.
For discussion related to the Governing Board and the elections, we encourage people to drop by the Office of the Governing Board (#governing-board-office:matrix.org)</a>.
Thank you for your ongoing support, and good luck to all the candidates in the upcoming elections!

Update on Native Matrix interoperability with WhatsApp

2024-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Hi all,
Back at FOSDEM</a> in February we showed off how Matrix could be used for E2EE-preserving messaging interoperability as required by the Digital Markets Act messaging interoperability</a> - and we announced that Element had been working with Meta on integrating with its DMA APIs in order to connect WhatsApp to Matrix. You can see the video here</a>, and we also demoed interop working at the technical level to the European Commission a few days beforehand.
Subsequently WhatsApp launched</a> its DMA portal</a> on March 8th, and the proposed Reference Offer (i.e. the terms you have to accept as a Requesting Party in order to interoperate) was revealed. The Reference Offer for Facebook Messenger was launched on September 6th. At the time of the WhatsApp launch we flagged up some significant unresolved questions - the main points being that:

WhatsApp would require their users to manually enable DMA in settings before they can receive any traffic from interconnecting service providers (e.g. Element) - meaning that WhatsApp users would not be reachable by default. </li>

WhatsApp would require the client IP of any interconnecting users, in order to apply ‘platform integrity’ anti-abuse / trust & safety controls. </li>

WhatsApp would not allow an interconnecting service to buffer messages serverside. </li>

WhatsApp would require each Matrix server provider to sign a separate agreement in order to interconnect - i.e. you can’t bridge other server’s users unless those servers have signed a contract with Meta. </li> </ol> 
Now, the good news is that we’ve subsequently been talking with WhatsApp to see if we could progress these points - and we’re happy to say that they’ve listened to us and we’ve made progress on the first 3 items:

Meta recently shared an update</a> on the messaging interoperability user experience and will allow all EU users to be reachable by interoperable services by default. It’ll also give people the option of how they want to manage their inbox as well as a range of features like read receipts, typing indicators and reactions. </li>

We’ve come up with a plan with WhatsApp to reduce the amount of matrix user data we share with WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s interop solution however, doesn’t yet support multi-device conversations or shared conversation history like normal Matrix, which means that normal Matrix server-side synchronised history won’t work for these conversations. </li>

In terms of not allowing open federation: this looks unlikely to change, given Meta needs to know who is responsible for the servers who connect to them, and ensure they agree to the terms of use as required by DMA. </li> </ol>
During discussions, another point came up which we’d previously overlooked: section 7.5.1 of the current reference offer states: “Partner User Location. Any Partner Users that Partner Enlists or provides access to the Interoperable Messaging Services must be located and remain in the EEA”. In other words, interop would only be available to Matrix users physically in the EEA, which is obviously against the Matrix Foundation’s manifesto</a> to provide secure communication to everyone. Moreover, to demonstrate compliance the Matrix side would have to geolocate the client’s IP.
It turns out that this limitation to EU users ended up being the biggest obstacle for productising the native Matrix<>WhatsApp bridge, as it is unclear whether it’s financially viable for anyone (e.g. Element) to launch such a bridge if it only works for Matrix users physically within the EEA (not to mention the costs and privacy issues of geolocating Matrix users).
Now, on one hand, deploying Matrix as a mature standards-based protocol for WhatsApp interop with native E2EE feels like a worthy goal: indeed, it effectively gives DMA interoperators a stable standardised API with pre-existing SDKs to implement against, rather than having to implement against proprietary and potentially shifting vendor APIs. So overall it moves the needle towards the end goal of Matrix’ mission.
On the other hand, this all may be moot if the return on investment of building DMA interop with WhatsApp via Matrix is too far away for any company in the Matrix ecosystem to be able to afford the investment, and if there isn’t an appetite for anyone to fund it. Funding constraints</a> on both the Foundation and the ecosystem today are such that this work will only happen if explicitly sponsored by an organisation who is willing to commit to fund it.
So: if you are an organisation with users in the EU who would like them to interoperate with EU WhatsApp users via Matrix, and have the funds to sponsor development of building out an official production-grade Matrix<->WhatsApp bridge, please get in touch with me</a>.
Alternatively, if the geographic constraints are a showstopper for you, please let us know.
We’re assuming that there may be smaller messaging providers, or domain-specific messaging services who want to connect their end-users through to WA end-users, and may be happy to be constrained to EU geography. However, bridge developers need evidence and financial support to progress this. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the strategic importance of the Digital Markets Act, this is an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.
Looking forward to hearing feedback!
thanks,
Matthew

Protecting the projects at the heart of the Matrix ecosystem

2024-08-15T19:00:00+00:00

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. 
🔗</a>Where we are and where we’re going</h2>
The Foundation’s primary responsibility is to the Matrix specification itself, but the ecosystem has a lot to gain when we provide a neutral home and stewardship for other relevant projects as well.
We currently host an array of projects</a> and even proactively fund maintenance and development on a small number of them. Most of those projects were created by the same set of people who first created Matrix, and the folks they trusted with commit access – providing a consistent set of expectations around trust, security, code quality, maintenance, advocacy, and support – almost all of whom still work on the projects today. This group is referred to as the “Core Team” – which is formally defined</a> as those who have direct commit privileges on any of our repositories. But the structure and expectations for this team are due for an update, and the mix of projects under our banner has grown sprawling and a bit chaotic.
The time has come for us to design a coherent, modern framework, with the benefit of hindsight and a Governing Board that can channel important perspectives from across the ecosystem. And once we’ve established that framework, then we can get to designing the processes by which projects join or leave the Foundation, and how decisions are made about resourcing.
If you’d like to get involved, we encourage you to jump into conversations in the Foundation’s rooms and make your voice heard through your representatives on the Governing Board</a>.
🔗</a>Answering the immediate questions</h2>
But three questions remain that we think are worth offering provisional answers to now: what will the Foundation do to protect projects at the heart of Matrix? How do we determine what those “core” projects are? And are there any projects that don’t belong at the Foundation?
The first question is easy to answer:
The Foundation will seek to fund and coordinate maintenance and development of core projects even if faced with a competing fork. We believe some projects, like the spec, test suites, SDKs, and shared cryptographic libraries, are so important that they require ongoing stewardship, under a permissive open source licence, by an organisation that is accountable to the ecosystem.
The Foundation may host a variety of other projects for the benefit of the ecosystem, and may also fund and coordinate maintenance and development of some of those projects where we see a meaningful gap in the ecosystem. This broader set of projects is more subject to change over time, and is less likely to receive direct investment from the Foundation.
But that second question – what is “core?” It’s not as easy to pin down exactly, and we look forward to formalising a definition and designation process in collaboration with the Governing Board, Spec Core Team, and Guardians.
A non-exhaustive list of projects we think are core includes:

The Spec, Spec Proposals, the matrix.org website and homeserver, and matrix.to link redirection service</li>
Integration test suites, to confirm that implementations conform to the spec:

sytest</li>
complement</li>
complement-crypto</li> </ul> </li>
SDKs and libraries which are used extensively by the wider community:

matrix-rust-sdk</li>
matrix-js-sdk</li>
vodozemac</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
As to the third question – are there any projects that don’t belong at the Foundation? Probably, yes. It’s debatable whether it makes sense to host experimental or speculative projects, and we don’t think it’s appropriate to host projects that don’t have anything to do with Matrix specifically.
🔗</a>Taking the next steps</h2>
We hope this helps answer some of the questions that folks have been raising, illuminates where we are on our journey in defining these things, and provides some assurance that the Matrix.org Foundation is ever evolving in partnership with the community and will draw a line to protect and maintain projects that are truly at the heart of Matrix.
Next, we’ll be deliberating on these things with the Governing Board, Spec Core Team, Guardians, and the broader ecosystem including you, the reader. We encourage you to reach out to your representatives on the Governing Board</a> along the way.
Ultimately, we’ll define a framework and begin aligning our operations with it – including defining a legal and governance framework and setting up the infrastructure to facilitate it.
As always, we can’t do this without your support. Some organisations have stepped forward to support our work, but we still don’t have enough to sustain our operations. The more people that come together to fund the Foundation’s work, the more capable we are of investing in core projects, operationalizing more open governance, and nurturing the broader ecosystem.
Please join the Foundation today</a>, especially if you depend on Matrix, to ensure the Matrix ecosystem is here for you today and tomorrow.
Thanks,
Josh Simmons and Matthew Hodgson

Matrix.org - Foundation

The Matrix Conference 2026: Our biggest edition yet

Announcing the results of the Governing Board election

🔗</a>Representatives of the Ecosystem members</a></h2> All three seats were up for renewal this year: we’re glad to keep Kim and Nico around for another term and happy to welcome Jade!</p> Kim Brose</strong> (Matrix Community Events)</li> Nicolas Werner</strong> (Nheko-Reborn)</li>

🔗</a>Representatives of the Spec Core team</a></h2> Two seats were up for renewal this year, we are happy to welcome Alexey and keep Rich around for another term!</p> Alexey Rusakov</strong></li>

🔗</a>Representatives of the Guardians</a></h2> Three seats were up for renewal this year, but only two candidates stepped up (as I am sitting on the Governing Board as the Acting Managing Director). We are glad to keep Ross and Matthew around for another term!</p> Matthew Hodgson</strong></li>

Kicking off the voting period for the Governing Board election

Announcing the candidates for the 2026 Governing Board elections

Kicking off the nomination period for the 2026 Governing Board elections

Announcing the 2026 Governing Board elections

Announcing Our First Trademark Policy

Matrix Conf 2025 was a blast!

A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley

Matrix for Public Sector: DINUM joins the Foundation as we launch a new forum!

Introducing your new Governing Board representatives

🔗</a>Elected representatives</h2> These are the elected representatives for each of those constituencies:</p> Individual Members</p> Andy Balaam (he/him)</li> Gnuxie (she/her)</li> Greg Sutcliffe (he/him)</li>

Introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver

Announcing the 2025 Governing Board elections

Update on Native Matrix interoperability with WhatsApp

Protecting the projects at the heart of the Matrix ecosystem