FOSDEM 2024 Wrap Up

2024-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

This year again the Matrix.org Foundation was at FOSDEM, and what a huge energy boost it has been for us! Between a Fringe Event for the Matrix community to gather, a booth where the vast majority of people came by to show their support for our work, a devroom with four hours of awesome Matrix content, and last but not least a main track talk where Matthew covered what we had been doing for the past year… It has been a very intense weekend!</p> </span>

Fringe Event</h2>
The first stop in our FOSDEM journey was the Fringe Event on Friday afternoon at HSBXL</a>, a hackerspace that was very on-brand: you need to follow the white rabbit to get in</a>. More than a 100 of us gathered in that disused factory to talk about everything Matrix.</p>
Thanks to the sponsorship of Nordeck</a> and Famedly</a> and to the extensive efforts of Adrian and the rest of the HSBXL staff, the Foundation could offer 70 pizzas and crates and crates of drinks to the community. Not only was it great to meet people in the flesh: we could also have a tonne of interesting discussions around the Foundation’s governance, funding, trust & safety tooling, and plenty more that we’re going to factor into our roadmap. And look at this happy community!</p>
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A crowded Booth</h2>
After an already successful Friday, it was time to head to FOSDEM itself: for two days the booth was manned by a tireless team, answering questions from a very enthusiastic community. What struck me the most this year was the number of Matrix t-shirts and hoodies people wore at the conference before even stopping by our booth.</p>
Needless to say, Matrix is extremely popular</em> in OSS communities. Most people knew and already loved Matrix when coming to the booth, a few didn’t know Matrix, and even fewer people told us where we need to improve for them to consider using it.</p>
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We brought a box of 100 t-shirts and several thousands of stickers with us this year. Some t-shirt sizes were sold out on the first day, and by the end of the weekend we had sold everything. Lesson learnt: bring much more next year!</p>
A main track talk selected for the highlights</h2>
Matrix is well on its way to become the one ubiquitous protocol that will finally open up the communication silos. During the past year, a lot has been going on. As a testament to Matrix maturity, the majority of our work was around polishing the rough edges and stabilising the protocol, rather than launching plenty of new features.</p>
In his main track talk</a>, Matthew covered the past year in Matrix, our implication in the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and how Matrix could possibly be part of the solution for WhatsApp to become interoperable and compliant with the regulation.</p>

Matrix.org - FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2024 Wrap Up