The Matrix.org Foundation Zola 2024-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 https://f297f985.matrix-website.pages.dev/category/conferences/atom.xml 2024-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 2024-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 Thib https://f297f985.matrix-website.pages.dev/blog/2024/01/matrix-presence-fosdem/ <p>This year again the Matrix Foundation and Community will have <em>plenty</em> of opportunities to meet at FOSDEM! Together with our awesome community, we’re organising a FOSDEM Fringe Event before FOSDEM itself, we will have a booth to meet everyone and spread the word about Matrix, and a devroom to go more in depth on Matrix topics.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=5F2V-7bQHaM">https://youtube.com/watch?v=5F2V-7bQHaM</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="5F2V-7bQHaM"></youtube-player> <span id="continue-reading"></span><h2 id="fringe-event">Fringe Event</h2> <p>The fantastic folks of <a href="https://hsbxl.be/">HSBXL</a> accepted to <a href="https://hsbxl.be/events/byteweek/2024/matrix-community-meetup/">host us this year again</a> for a community “<a href="https://fosdem.org/2024/fringe/">Fringe</a>” event the day before FOSDEM. We will meet on Friday 2, starting at 13:00 CET for a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp">BarCamp</a>. It’s a sort of informal conference where people can meet, talk, and decide informally of an agenda for the afternoon. There are excellent illustrated directions on <a href="https://hsbxl.be/enter/">hsbxl.be/enter</a> to be sure you find the way to HSBXL, situated at Rue de la Petite Île 1, 1070 Anderlecht, Brussels. You can join us already in the <a href="https://matrix.to/#/#fosdem2024-foundation-community-meetup:matrix.org">#fosdem2024-foundation-community-meetup</a> room to talk about practical matters, or chat early.</p> <p>We will likely do a <em>Matrix Live Live</em>, live streamed from the hackerspace The format is not set in stone (it’s a BarCamp!) but it will very probably contain a presentation about the future of the Foundation, and potentially demos and more speakers from the audience. We’re looking forward to meeting you there and I’m sure we will have <em>plenty</em> of great conversations given how vibrant the ecosystem is.</p> <p>A warm thank you to <a href="https://nordeck.net/">Nordeck</a>, <a href="https://futo.org/">FUTO</a> and <a href="https://www.famedly.com/">Famedly</a> who are sponsoring this event, allowing us to offer free drinks and pizzas to the audience! Massive thanks to the HSBXL gang, and to Kim and Yan who coordinated the organisation of the fringe event!</p> <h2 id="booth-at-fosdem">Booth at FOSDEM</h2> <p>We were granted a booth for Saturday 3 &amp; Sunday 4 at FOSDEM, covering the whole conference. With a dozen volunteers on a stand from several organisations working on the Matrix ecosystem, we are more than ready to welcome you for a chat, to show you what cool things Matrix can do, or to help you around with Matrix. Come by our stand for a nice talk, or to buy some merch!</p> <p>You will be able to meet us, learn more about Matrix, or even talk about your projects with us in building K, level 2. The full list of stands is <a href="https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/">published on FOSDEM’s website</a>.</p> <h2 id="devroom-at-fosdem">Devroom at FOSDEM</h2> <p>Finally, in addition to the BarCamp and the booth, we have a devroom on Sunday 4 afternoon, starting at 13:00 CET. State of Matrix, Matrix as a potential answer to Digital Market Act, widgets, moving communities, and more: we have a full schedule covering all the hot Matrix topics!</p> <p>You can find the <a href="https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/matrix/">full schedule of the Matrix devroom on FOSDEM’s website</a>, and you can add it to your calendar automatically <a href="https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/matrix.ics">with this ics</a>.</p> <h2 id="main-track-talk">Main track talk</h2> <p>Finally, Matthew submitted a talk to the main track with his Spec Core Team lead hat on, and it was accepted! On Sunday 5, at 10:00 in Janson you will be able to hear him talk about how Matrix is “Opening up communication silos with Matrix 2.0 and the EU Digital Markets Act”</p> <p>The team is looking forward to seeing you in Brussels!</p> 2023-02-09T21:12:10+00:00 2023-02-09T17:02:40+00:00 Thib https://f297f985.matrix-website.pages.dev/blog/2023/02/09/finally-a-hybrid-conference-that-worked/ <p>For the past two years, FOSDEM couldn’t happen in-person. Fortunately we could help, and Matrix hosted the world's largest free &amp; open source software conference online! This year we were finally back in-person… but not only.</p> <p><a href="https://matrix.org/blog/2021/02/15/how-we-hosted-fosdem-2021-on-matrix">The set-up we have arranged in 2021</a> and <a href="https://matrix.org/blog/2022/02/07/hosting-fosdem-2022-on-matrix">polished in 2022</a> has proved to be robust and served us well during the pandemic. Returning to an in-person conference didn’t mean we had to throw it all away… quite the opposite!</p> <span id="continue-reading"></span> <p>This year the OSS community could gather in-person, go see each other’s stands, and attend all too few of all the fascinating talks the speakers had prepared for us… but the conference was yet more.. Some of us couldn’t make it in person but could attend FOSDEM online from its Matrix Space. Devrooms were broadcasted live into the Matrix rooms where devroom managers and speakers could interact with the online audience.</p> <p>In total, thousands of users joined us online, both locally and remotely as seen from the FOSDEM homeserver: an amazing audience given the possibility to be on site.</p> <p>For us, it was also an opportunity to announce Matrix 2.0 to a live audience! Matrix 2.0 doesn’t mean we’re making breaking changes in the spec. It’s more of a nickname we gave to the milestone <a href="https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special-2022#matrix-20">we had promised in summer to deliver by the end of the year</a> and had far too much giving the mother of all demos to a packed room of nearly 1500 people.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE">https://youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="eUPJ9zFV5IE"></youtube-player> <h2 id="the-first-ever-in-person-matrix-devroom">The first ever in-person Matrix devroom</h2> <p>This year was also the first ever in-person devroom for the Matrix Foundation and Community. We had many proposals and could have used the whole day, but we had to share with many other deserving communities. We’re extremely grateful to FOSDEM organisers for the devroom… and it was a huge success! At many points the room was completely packed, with no seats left at all.</p> <p>We could <a href="https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/matrix/">shoehorn 8 talks</a> in the in-person devroom. Picking them was really difficult! When one of the speakers unfortunately called in sick, the devroom healed the wound and filled the gap very quickly.</p> <p>The devroom started with a quick intro to Matrix from Matthew &amp; Amandine.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPgYy-Y4f7w">https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPgYy-Y4f7w</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="dPgYy-Y4f7w"></youtube-player> <p>Florian followed with a talk about MatrixRTC to explore what Matrix can do beyond instant messaging</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=P--LwIB3deA">https://youtube.com/watch?v=P--LwIB3deA</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="P--LwIB3deA"></youtube-player> <p>Then Matthew did an awesome demo of Third Room and “3D widgets” (user generated content) that can be embedded into its worlds. Of course with a nice “The Matrix in Matrix” scene.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=nG8qJ4on00Y">https://youtube.com/watch?v=nG8qJ4on00Y</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="nG8qJ4on00Y"></youtube-player> <p>Stunning 3D worlds are great, but the most popular use case for Matrix today is instant messaging. And we did a lot as the Matrix Foundation to significantly improve the performance with Sliding Sync, using matrix-rust-sdk as the showcase implementation. Kegan and Ben covered Sliding Sync and matrix-rust-sdk respectively, while Mauro showed us how Element X, the first client to use it, doesn’t stop here and goes way beyond to provide a snappy, sturdy, polished client.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=5iIs1zWuVOU">https://youtube.com/watch?v=5iIs1zWuVOU</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="5iIs1zWuVOU"></youtube-player> <p>Kim and Oliver from Nordeck made an interesting presentation about how widgets can make Matrix a rich app creation environment.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=hhEUe414scU">https://youtube.com/watch?v=hhEUe414scU</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="hhEUe414scU"></youtube-player> <p>The Trixnity project then introduced their fast, multi-purpose, well-tested SDK. A talk you don’t want to miss, particularly if you’re into Kotlin.</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=zDftIZm-DZ0">https://youtube.com/watch?v=zDftIZm-DZ0</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="zDftIZm-DZ0"></youtube-player> <p>Pierre from Technostructures introduced us to <a href="https://technostructures.org/projects/kazarma/">Kazarma</a> a bridge between Matrix and ActivityPub. In Pierre’s own words: “we talked a lot about interoperability, and we found it sad that we talked about interoperability for proprietary platforms, not with alternative decentralised networks, so we tried doing that”. And they did. Bravo Pierre and the team!</p> <noscript>Today's Matrix Live: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=D3olH1aUCkQ">https://youtube.com/watch?v=D3olH1aUCkQ</a></noscript> <youtube-player video-id="D3olH1aUCkQ"></youtube-player> <p>Finally Yan concluded the in-person devroom with a speedrun of all the Matrix projects he could find around. The video is not out yet, so we’ll add it to the second follow-up blog post: the one with the online devroom conferences!</p> <h2 id="matrix-for-more-than-remote-attendance">Matrix for more than remote attendance</h2> <p>FOSDEM staff used the Matrix rooms for on-site support. Whether the camera was blurry, microphones didn’t work, or there was a missing power plug: staff could be notified and answer very quickly before sending someone to actually solve the issue. But it also allowed staff to notify devroom managers for small adjustments, if speakers ever disappeared from the scene.</p> <p>Staff also told us Matrix worked much more reliably than anything other than walkie talkies from a coordination perspective and was more versatile. They consider narrowing down their use of walkies next year in favour of a deeper integration with Matrix. We’re excited to see that Matrix was yet again a great solution in the stressful, high paced context of a conference that gathered several thousand people in-person and several thousand more online.</p> <h2 id="attending-in-person">Attending in-person</h2> <p>Finally, a large part of the joy of attending FOSDEM comes from the people you meet there. The least we can say is that our stand was busy. We ran out of stickers and medium size t-shirts early on Sunday morning, but above all we had plenty of interesting discussions.</p> <p><img src="/blog/img/fosdem2023_stand_blurred.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p>A few people discovered Matrix during FOSDEM and were blown away by messages making it from Slack to Discord before their eyes, all thanks to Matrix and bridges. The overwhelming majority of people who came to us were already happy users willing to discuss architecture, our plans for the future, or even to verify each other with QR Codes or emoji.</p> <p>We want to thank the FOSDEM staff for organising this edition and using Matrix again: a successful return to the in-person format that builds on the online experience of the past two years. See you next year folks!</p>