Matrix.org - Foundation

A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation

2024-01-30T17:00:00+00:00

A new fundraising drive</h2>
Today we launch a new fundraising drive, talk about the scope of the Foundation's work, and begin to unpack our emerging roadmap for the future. There is a lot going on and we need your help to keep it going!
At the end of 2022 Matthew and Amandine sounded the alarm</a>: the Foundation needed more support. To deliver that, they launched the Foundation's membership program</a>. They also introduced open governance, and committed to hiring a Managing Director to act as a robust, neutral steward.
You can help: If you are already sold on Matrix, become a member today</a>. To find out how the last year has gone, and how your support helps us to serve the Matrix ecosystem, read on. 
Over the last year, there are lots of positive, healthy signs for Matrix. New members like Beeper</a> and gematik</a> — and hundreds of individuals — boosted our annual revenues from £82K to £364K. The open network has grown from 80.3M to 115M addressable users. We've invested in long-term interoperability efforts at the IETF. And we've shifted focus from experiments to polish, usability, and advocacy.
We've supported development of core libraries, and subsidize hosting for FOSS communities like GNOME and KDE. The Foundation runs the Matrix.org homeserver, with over 250K daily active users, and operates several public bots and bridges. And indeed, the Foundation hired a Managing Director</a> 👋.
You'll find a full accounting of our 2023 activity and finances in our first Annual Report, slated to come out around April 2024.

An inflection point for Matrix</h2>
We are incredibly proud of what we've accomplished in the last year. As Matrix approaches its 10th anniversary, we are arriving at an inflection point. To continue on this trajectory, we need your help. 
Element used to subsidize our activity, and still donates upwards of £3M in core development annually, but we are paying our own bills now. While we managed a 400+% increase in revenue to £364K last year, at £440K our expenses exceeded our revenue. As we enter our first full year of paying our own bills, the full cost of operating the Foundation at its current scope is projected to stabilize somewhere north of £900K in 2024. And the more we can raise beyond £900K, the less dependent the ecosystem is on Element.
As I get more settled in, we'll deliver more granular financial projections and reporting. For now, the rough breakdown of those projected expenses:

£550K in staffing 4 full-time people covering management, advocacy, standards development, and trust and safety, as well as external part-time staff for core project and bridge maintenance and infra ops</li>
£250K in servers and other third-party providers</li>
£100K in administrative costs covering legal, accounting, and compliance</li> </ul>
To put that £900K figure in perspective, the Python Software Foundation's expenses</a> are nearer £2.9M, and Signal's annual costs</a> are in the ballpark of £39M!
This year is exciting and full of promise, and there are many reasons to be hopeful. If the work we are doing to support Matrix is valuable to you, we need your help to continue it well past 2024. We need more organizations to step up as members</a> to invest in the Matrix ecosystem. Otherwise, we need to start scaling back programs and staff starting January 2025.
We're going to publish a series of blog posts over the next three months to unpack our work and our roadmap for the future. You'll see posts covering: governance, ecosystem diversity and community engagement, infrastructure, trust and safety, fighting for your digital rights, and more.
With your support, the Foundation can charge full steam ahead to deliver on the promise of making open, unencumbered, safe, secure, and private communications technology.
A hint of the year ahead</h2>
The forthcoming posts in this series will dive into several of our core program areas, and explore where we aim to go. But when I think about the year ahead, three overriding themes stand out to me:

Ramp up open governance of Matrix and the Foundation</li>
Prioritize Trust & Safety</li>
Cement the Foundation as an independent and sustainable organization</li> </ul>
2024 will see the Foundation sustain and deepen work in our ongoing responsibilities:

Empowering the Spec Core Team (SCT)</a> to deliver an effective, modern spec change process</li>
Running the Matrix.org homeserver and public bridges</li>
Trust & Safety</li>
Communications and community engagement</li>
Compliance</li>
Governance</li>
Fundraising</li> </ul>
We will also continue investing in long-term initiatives, such as driving work toward Matrix 2.0</a> and beyond</a> and building a fully independent Foundation. With this in mind, we see several exciting milestones including:

Establish a fiscal sponsorship framework, starting with t2bot.io</a>,</li>
Publishing our first ever Annual Report,</li>
Electing our first ever Governing Board</a>,</li>
And hosting the first ever official Matrix conference!</li> </ul>
We couldn't be more excited about what we have to share in the coming months, and we hope that our vision – which is deeply informed by community input – is something you are ready to stand behind.
Thank you for donating</a>, becoming Individual Members</a>, and rallying your organization to become a funding member</a>!
Ad astra per aspera 🚀
Josh Simmons, Managing Director of The Matrix.org Foundation

Open letter to EU Member States on the proposed CSA Regulation

2024-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

We join our voices to technology companies, trade associations and other supporters in asking EU member states to align the Council's position on the CSA Regulation to the position agreed by the Parliament.
Safeguarding encryption should be a priority in negotiations, ensuring the protection of rights and freedoms around privacy and security of communications.
A copy of the open letter sent to ministers can be read below.
Open letter to EU Member States on the proposed CSA Regulation</h2>
Dear Ministers of the Interior, Justice, and Economy of EU Member States,
We write to you as small and medium-sized companies and organizations from Europe, concerned about the proposal for a Regulation on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA). Collectively, we call on you to ensure that your country’s position on this file is brought as close as possible to the European Parliament’s (EP) one. We all agree that ensuring children are safe online is one of the most important duties of tech companies and for this reason, we find the European Commission’s proposed Regulation extremely worrying. If it were implemented as proposed, it would negatively impact children’s privacy and security online, while also having dramatic unforeseen consequences on the EU cybersecurity landscape, on top of creating an ineffective administrative burden 1</a>. The European Parliament recently adopted its position on the file, acknowledging that scanning technologies are not compatible with the aim of having confidential and secure communications. The crucial changes it therefore puts forward for the proposal reflect the opinions of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), the Council legal services as well as countless experts in cryptography and cybersecurity 2</a>. It also reflects the opinion of between 63% and 69% of the companies, public authorities, NGOs and citizens consulted by the European Commission in its Impact Assessment 3</a>. As small and medium-sized tech companies and organizations, we share their concerns as we know that looking for specific content – such as text, photos and videos – in an end-to-end encrypted communication would require the implementation of a backdoor, or of a similar technology called “client-side scanning”. Even if this mechanism is created with the purpose of fighting crime online, it would also quickly be used by criminals themselves, putting citizens and businesses more at risk online by creating vulnerabilities for all users alike.
Data protection is a strong competitive advantage</h3>
As tech companies operating within the European Union, we have built products and services in line with the strong data protection framework of the EU which still serves as an example and inspiration across the world.
The GDPR allowed for the creation of ethical, privacy-first tech companies in Europe, that would otherwise never have been able to compete against Big Tech. It gave European companies a strong competitive advantage in that field internationally and allowed consumers to finally be able to find alternatives to American and Chinese services. Our users, both within the EU and beyond, have come to trust our commitment to safeguarding their data and this trust is a key driver of our competitiveness. The learning curve for adapting to the necessary administrative burden brought about by the GDPR was high but was worth it. However, the CSA Regulation could threaten this unique selling point of European IT companies and would also add a new administrative burden which we fear could overwhelm both our companies and law enforcement bodies. Considering the volume of communications and content transiting through our services, even an insignificant error rate of the technologies applied to scan for abusive material would result in millions of false positives to be manually reviewed every day.
The CSA Regulation could erode trust and safety online</h3>
In a world where data breaches and privacy scandals are increasingly common, the EU's reputation for stringent data protection is a unique selling point for businesses operating within its borders. It provides us with a competitive edge, assuring our customers that their information is handled with the utmost care and integrity. This trust, once eroded, is challenging to rebuild, and any measures that compromise it such as mandatory scanning, or mandatory age verification have the potential to harm businesses both large and small. Furthermore, the EU has recently adopted Regulation 2023/2841, which mandates that EU Institutions and bodies to consider the use of end-to-end encryption among their cybersecurity risk-management measures. There are also multiple ‘cyber’ EU proposals currently on the table, such as the Cyber Resilience Act and the Cybersecurity Act. Supporting an opposite approach for the CSA Regulation would only undermine the EU cybersecurity framework creating a contradictory, incoherent and inefficient new set of measures that companies would not be able to enforce without putting citizens and businesses at risk.
The EU Parliament's proposal goes in the right direction</h3>
Therefore, we applaud the European Parliament for its resolute stance in defending the European citizens' right to privacy and secure communication. The European Parliament’s commitment to these principles is not only a testament to its dedication to human rights, but also a beacon of hope for businesses like ours that prioritize data protection and security. The position of the Parliament includes alternatives to scanning which have a minimal impact on cybersecurity and data protection, and which experts believe would be both more effective and more efficient than mandatory scanning. Such changes of paradigm would mean going beyond the false dichotomy between privacy and security, while also making the proposal respect the proportionality principle, as requested by the Regulatory Scrutiny Board. Even if not perfect in our eyes, the changes the European Parliament made in its position are a good compromise to maintain digital security and confidentiality and to better protect children online. We believe that these changes strike the right balance between child protection and safeguarding privacy and cybersecurity.
As representatives of the vibrant European small businesses community, we encourage EU Member States to continue championing the values of privacy, cybersecurity and data protection. These principles not only align with the EU's commitment to human rights, but also serve as a foundation for a thriving and competitive business environment. Let us defend and strengthen these principles, ensuring that the EU remains an advocate of privacy in the global marketplace.
For these reasons we call on you to:

Ensure that Council’s position is aligned as closely as possible to the European Parliament’s. This will allow for a swifter adoption of the Regulation while building on the important work of the European Parliament.</li>
Maintain the high level of fundamental rights - and in particular data protection – enjoyed by citizens in the European Union.</li>
Refrain from forcing companies like us to conduct mass surveillance of private correspondence on behalf of law enforcement agencies.</li>
Guarantee a high level of cybersecurity in the EU by protecting end-to-end encryption and bringing the necessary safeguards in the text. Client-side scanning and backdoors in particular should not be mandated.</li>
Preserve the confidentiality of correspondence.</li>
Minimize the administrative burden of the proposal by making it more effective and efficient, through alternatives to mass scanning.</li> </ul>
Signed,

Blacknight Solutions (Ireland) </li>
Element (United Kingdom)</li>
Mail.de GmbH (Germany)</li>
Matrix Foundation (United Kingdom) </li>
Nextcloud (Germany)</li>
Open-Xchange (Germany) </li>
Renvis (Greece) </li>
TelemetryDeck (Germany) </li>
Tresorit (Switzerland)</li>
E Foundation (France) </li>
Logilab (France) </li>
Mailfence (Belgium) </li>
Murena (France) </li>
Olvid (France)</li>
Proton (Switzerland) </li>
Surfshark (Lithuania) </li>
Threema (Switzerland) </li>
Tuta (Germany)</li> </ul>
Trade associations and supporters:

ACT | The App Association </li>
Defend Democracy</li>
Gate 15 </li>
Myntex</li>
Quilibrium</li>
Studio Legale Fabiano</li>
Cyberstorm</li>
Encryption Europe</li>
ISOC-CAT</li>
Privacy & Access Council of Canada</li>
SecureCrypt</li> </ul>
^{1
A detailed summary of the proposal, drafted by the NGO EDRi, is available here: https://edri.org/our-work/private-and-secure-communications-put-at-risk-by-european-commissions-latest-proposal/</a>
</div>
^2For more information, you can read their statement from July 2023: https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Open-Letter-CSA-Scientific-community.pdf</a>
</div>
^3See in particular page 134 of the impact assessment: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52022SC0209</a>
</div>}

The Governing Board, our next big step in open governance

2023-12-19T18:00:00+00:00

Forging our future with Matrix</h2>
As 2023 winds down and I find myself in the thick of planning for 2024, I’d like to start preparing all of us in the Matrix ecosystem for what is to come.
Next year will mark a number of important milestones in the history and evolution of Matrix: the protocol will mark its 10th birthday</a>, we’ll see key initiatives</a> in the spec cross the finish line, and we’ll seat the first ever community-elected Governing Board.
The election of our first Governing Board is what I’d like to focus on today, because it is a huge milestone on the path to an independent, self-sustaining, and self-governing ecosystem. When we celebrate Matrix’s 20th birthday, we’ll look back and our history will be divided much the same way it is in other ecosystems: before and after incorporating a foundation, and before and after introducing community governance.
Let’s talk about what the Governing Board is, why it matters, and how to get involved! 
What is the Governing Board</h3>
The Governing Board is an elected advisory board that supports and guides Matrix. It is a group of up to 25 people who offer a representative set of perspectives that will keep the Foundation on track and accountable in its work to evolve the spec and nurture the ecosystem.
The specific duties of the Governing Board include:

Approving the Foundation’s budget based on the Managing Director’s recommendations.</li>
Approving partnerships and relationships with an annual value over $50,000.</li>
Approving initiatives and programs which will have a major impact on the brand and reputation of the Foundation, or create a new revenue stream.</li>
Helping the Spec Core Team prioritize their work, such as which MSC’s need attention in any given release cycle.</li>
Providing conclusions, recommendations, and guidance on next steps to the Guardians.</li> </ul>
Ultimately, the Governing Board is meant to be a clearing house of feedback, expertise, and perspectives from across the ecosystem. Meeting at least twice a year, the Governing Board will shape our operational reality, influence our technical roadmap, and explore the next steps in making the Foundation increasingly transparent and community-governed over time.
The Governing Board and membership program have been intentionally structured to ensure key stakeholders from across the ecosystem have a voice. That structure was first codified in April 2023 with the Governing Board Terms of Reference, and I’m pleased to say that, with Guardian approval, I’ve introduced a round of improvements that incorporate community feedback and improve on the initial design.
A more in-depth discussion of the membership groups follows later in this post, but at a high level the composition of the Governing Board is as follows:

Nonprofit and community representatives

4 Individual Members</li>
3 Ecosystem Members</li>
2 Associate Members</li> </ul> </li>
Funder representatives

4 Platinum Members</li>
3 Gold Members</li>
2 Silver Members</li> </ul> </li>
Foundation representatives

Managing Director</li>
2 Spec Core Team Members</li>
3 Guardians</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
All of the Governing Board members, with the exception of the Foundation’s Managing Director, are selected based on elections run by the Foundation within each group. Every year half of the groups’ representatives will end their term and those groups will vote in a new election – with the exception of our first elections in 2024.
In 2024, we will elect Governing Board members from all of the groups so that no one has to wait until 2025 to be represented. Half of the members elected in 2024 will have 1-year terms in order to enable this staggered election timeline. The reason for the staggered elections is that we want to maintain a degree of continuity so that we can accumulate institutional knowledge.
Why does it matter</h3>
The Governing Board matters because it is the beginning of shared decision making for our collective assets, complementing the Spec Core Team which brought shared decision making to the protocol itself. The two, together, represent a complete set of basic community governance.
Not only will the Governing Board weigh in on our shared assets, it will also channel community feedback to the Spec Core Team in a more structured and representative fashion. Further, the Governing Board is itself a mechanism for introducing even more community governance.
This is a key threshold that all major open source communities must cross, and a pivotal moment in which individual and collective behavior sets precedents – good or bad – that echo for years to come.
The importance of the Governing Board is heightened by the context in which the Foundation itself was created: as an organization being spun out of the for-profit, Element, that Matrix’s founders Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape started in order to fund research and development of the project.
In many cases, for-profit organizations created to fund R&D of an open source project end up going down an unfortunate path that ultimately sees the project fall into a “rights ratchet</a>” pattern that takes it out of the open source commons. The last 5 years of open source have been littered with dispiriting examples of this.
Much to the credit of Matrix’s founders, they have charted a different course. Matthew and Amandine formed the Matrix.org Foundation, gave it all the core project assets, and donated millions of dollars annually in services through Element. Even when they ultimately made the decision to fork some of the Foundation’s projects in a bid to keep Element stable, they implemented a Contributor License Agreement with a clause that ensures those projects, and all third party contributions to it, remain available under an open source license. This is a laudable pattern when cast against the backdrop of the rest of the industry.
But the fact remains that the Foundation was spun out of an existing organization, and the resulting power dynamic is one that is unequal. The broader community and Matrix’s founders all agree: we need a Foundation that is more representative and more independent.
The Governing Board is how we get there.
Getting ready for our first elections</h3>
Running the first Governing Board elections will require preparation from both the Foundation and everyone who aims to participate in the elections.
Election timeline</h4>
Our first election season begins April 2024 and ends in June. The timeline looks like this:

Monday, April 15: Announcements with logistical details</li>
Saturday, April 20 through Friday, April 26: Nominations</li>
Saturday, April 27 through Friday, May 17: Campaigning</li>
Saturday, May 18 through Friday, May 31: Voting</li>
Monday, June 3: Results announced</li> </ul>
Following the election, the duly elected members of the Governing Board will participate in an onboarding process prior to their first official meeting which will be scheduled following the conclusion of the election.
Preparations at the Foundation</h4>
First, the Foundation itself needs to establish its membership and voter rolls, which requires new tools to manage membership, and processes paired with an outreach campaign to make sure we bring everyone along with us.
We’ve started that by beginning to consolidate on Donorbox as our donor management platform, and making it possible to become an Individual Member</a> simply by signing up at the appropriate level on Donorbox. If you’re an existing donor on Donorbox or another platform, you’ll be hearing from us about how to make the transition.
Please keep your eyes on our blog, social channels, official Foundation rooms, and your email inbox. We’ll be using as many channels as we can to make sure we reach people – including donors who are eligible to be Individual Members that have donated anonymously such that we have no direct contact info.
Preparing yourself and your community for the election</h4>
There are many membership groups (referred to in the Terms of Reference as “constituencies”) from which people may nominate themselves as candidates.
Among those membership groups are three who represent the grassroots corners of the community:

Individual Members are people who donate at least $60 per year, or equivalent in other currencies. In the future, we will allow people to apply for Individual Member status on the basis of non-monetary contributions to the community. They are elected to represent themselves. You can become an Individual Member today</a>!</li>
Ecosystem Members are open source projects that speak Matrix – such as clients, servers, or bots. If you are the maintainer of such a project, stay tuned, we'll begin accepting applications for Ecosystem Members in late January. Each Ecosystem Member may nominate a representative to run in the election. </li>
Associate Members are open source foundations, standards bodies, other nonprofits, and organizations that use Matrix but are resource constrained such as universities. If you are in leadership at such an organization, stay tuned, we'll begin accepting applications for Associate Members in late January. Each Associate Member may nominate a representative to run in the election.</li> </ul>
Then there are three membership groups who represent the major funders of the Foundation, major funders who are typically service providers who use Matrix or organizations with major deployments. Each funder is entitled to nominate a representative to run in the election. These funders, as of today, include both for-profits and public sector organizations. If your organization is interested in becoming a funder, please reach out</a>.
Members must be in good standing with the Foundation and its Guardians in order to qualify as candidates. This is discretion we don’t expect to have to exercise often, thankfully. One needn’t be agreeable to be in good standing, but one ought to, for instance, not violate our Code of Conduct. We need to build a Governing Board that can have healthy debates and get things done.
If you are considering nominating yourself, it would serve you well to build positive working relationships with others in your community and membership group. That’s something you can start doing today, even before the official nomination period opens.
As we get closer to the elections, we’ll share more about the level of commitment that is required of Governing Board members and how we aim to work together.
But until then, the best thing you can do to support the Foundation and prepare for the elections is to become a member!

Hello, world! You, me, and The Matrix.org Foundation

2023-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

A letter from the Managing Director</h2>
Hello, world! My name is Josh Simmons and it is a joy and a privilege to introduce myself as the first Managing Director of The Matrix.org Foundation. While I’m no stranger to open source and I have been a Matrix user for several years, I am new to the Matrix community and so I’d like to share a little about myself and the work we have ahead of us. 
Matrix is on a journey, charting a course through technical and social evolution like all the successful open source projects that precede us. Once a project gets traction, the question quickly becomes: how do we sustain this and how do we make collective decisions? And set against a backdrop of an industry where many projects backed by for-profits are ultimately relicensed out of the open source commons, there’s added intensity around the question: how do we protect this public good and keep it in the commons? The answers to these questions evolve as the community grows and the landscape changes, but the seeds of success are planted early.
I step into this role for the Matrix community with the greatest of confidence about our future, based on current conditions as well as the decisions that were made years before the Guardians</a> began their search for a Managing Director. But who am I to make such an assessment?
About Josh</h3>
I am a community organizer, web developer, nonprofit geek, inclusion specialist, and activist based in the North Bay Area</a>. I’m working full-time as the Managing Director of the Foundation, and volunteer as Vice President of Petaluma Pride</a>, organizer of the Public Health Pledge</a>, co-organizer of North Bay Python</a>, and an advisor to Independent Federated Trust & Safety</a> (IFTAS). But most people know me for the six years I spent on the board of the Open Source Initiative</a> (OSI), which I concluded as its President then Chair after running a strategic review process and hiring OSI’s first ever Executive Director. In the past I’ve worked as a Foundations Advocate at Tidelift, helped start the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) at Salesforce, worked on Google Summer of Code at Google, and did community management for O’Reilly Media, in particular for OSCON (RIP).
Suffice it to say, I’ve spent a lot of time observing how projects, communities, and organizations change, celebrating their successes and learning from their failures. And my time at OSI was themed by external crises, navigating challenging new social and economic circumstances, and fighting against for-profits that embrace open source only so long as it’s convenient marketing before engaging in open washing and the ‘rights ratchet</a>.’
About Matrix</h3>
So when I look at Matrix and say I feel confident, those are not empty words. Why do I feel confident? It doesn’t hurt that there are already 115 million users, or that people and their governments are increasingly fed up with a world littered with siloed communication tools and tech companies that chase short-term gains at the cost of user experience, privacy, and security.
It’s also because of decisions that have already been made around licensing and governance. First, the core assets of Matrix – from the trademark and domain name to the spec and reference implementations – all belong to The Matrix.org Foundation, a UK-based Community Interest Company</a> (CIC) – and cannot be extracted for private benefit. And second, relicensing has been made a deliberately impossible task by allowing contributors to retain their copyrights when they contribute to Foundation-stewarded projects. The one exception is made in an effort to thoughtfully address the power dynamics in the ecosystem: the copyrights for contributions from Element are assigned to the Foundation.
All of this, combined with the existing open governance via the Spec Core Team</a> and the soon-to-come community-elected Governing Board</a>, sets us up for collective success in bringing private, secure, decentralized, open source communication to everyone on the planet.
Granted, the conditions for success isn't enough. We have work to do together in the years ahead, work that will challenge us and require us to summon our best selves.
The journey ahead</h3>
We must build the Foundation into a self-sustaining organization through fundraising and staffing. We must increase transparency and actualize self-governance. We must improve the diversity of contributors, both in terms of their lived experiences and who employs them. We must rise to the challenge of robust Trust & Safety on decentralized protocols in a chaotic world. 
These are all hard problems, but the solutions aren’t shrouded in mystery. It’s a matter of learning from our fellow travelers, coming together, putting in the time, and continuously building the capacity to tackle these things head on.
We won’t get to where we want to go overnight. This is a yearslong project. But day by day, together, we will accomplish great things.
Our next steps</h3>
Today, it is great to see the traction that Matrix has, particularly in open source and the public sector with users including: the United Nations, the Republic of France, The Document Foundation, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Debian, GNOME, KDE, Fedora, Ansible, World Ethical Data Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Open Source Initiative. However, while this adoption is encouraging, it also puts additional strain on the small but mighty team of paid staff at the Foundation and the countless volunteers responsible for critical work like that of the Spec Core Team.
Last year Matrix's co-founders rang the alarm</a> and launched our membership program. It is my job to finish operationalizing that program, and I'm pleased to say it has brought in some funding. But it's not nearly enough.
In order to avoid being a victim of our success, I have a singular, familiar call to action: provide financial support</a> and become a member</a>. We need your help to ensure the continued development of Synapse and the Matrix Rust SDK, help us fill gaps in Trust and Safety tooling, and nurture the ecosystem for everyone's benefit.
If you are invested in the success of Matrix, in particular if it provides you critical infrastructure or product features, as an individual or as an organization, please, contribute. And if you want to have a hand in shaping the future together, stop by the new Office of the Matrix.org Foundation</a> room and come say hello!
Ad astra per aspera 🚀
Josh Simmons, Managing Director of The Matrix.org Foundation

What people are saying</h2>

“I couldn't be more excited to see Josh Simmons chosen for the Matrix.org Foundation's first Managing Director. Josh is a dedicated open source community builder with a track record of personal accountability and integrity. Matrix.org's mission to provide reliable, decentralized, secure communications is a great match with Josh's personal mission to empower and protect software users while making sure that vulnerable communities — for whom privacy is paramount — are fully included.” </blockquote>
— Deb Nicholson, Executive Director of Python Software Foundation

“This is a promising development. When I joined the Open Source Initiative as its first Executive Director, I stepped into an organization with renewed focus and energy thanks to Josh’s leadership. I know Josh will accomplish great things for the Matrix ecosystem.” </blockquote>
— Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of Open Source Initiative

“I've crossed paths with Josh in numerous ways throughout his career, most recently working with him on the North Bay Python conference and talking to him in his role with the Public Health Pledge. In each case, Josh was thoughtful and productive. I can't wait to see the great work he accomplishes with the Matrix community!” </blockquote>
— Karen Sandler, Executive Director of Software Freedom Conservancy

“Josh is a quick study and a capable organizational leader. I saw him rapidly rise to the challenge for the Open Source Initiative, where he worked to mature the organization and served as a fierce advocate for the Open Source Definition even as industry titans sought to undermine it. Those are leadership qualities I welcome, particularly in the growing community of European open source foundations.” </blockquote>
— Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation

Welcoming Josh Simmons as Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation!

2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Hi all,
Today is a big day! As you know, over the last few months we’ve been searching for a Managing Director</a> to join the Matrix.org Foundation</a> full-time, focused on managing the Foundation’s finances, organising the Foundation’s membership programme</a>, helping raise funding to support Foundation work, working with the Guardians to ensure the Foundation stays on mission, and ensuring the Foundation can operate successfully as a fully independent entity. 
We’re super excited to announce today that our search is complete, and so we’d like to welcome Josh Simmons</a> to the Foundation as its first ever Managing Director (and first ever employee, for that matter!). Josh has a huge amount of experience in open source and non-profit foundations (including many stints on the board of the Open Source Initiative, including President) - as well as being an existing Matrix fan and user</a>, even running a personal homeserver. This was a really tough search, by the way - we were genuinely blown away at the number of amazing folks who responded to the job listing, and if we’d had the $ we’d have been sorely tempted to make additional offers :)
I’m sure Josh will intro himself properly in a bit, but here’s a quick reaction from him on what he’s getting into:

“It is humbling to step into this role to lead the Foundation and fully realize the Foundation’s mission as a neutral steward for the Matrix ecosystem. Our work to bring decentralized, secure, open source communication tools to all has never been more important than it is today, amidst a panoply of power structures that surveil, oppress, extract, and fundamentally do not serve people or planet. I look forward to working together to strengthen the Foundation’s independence and make the Matrix ecosystem even more vibrant.” </blockquote>
If you’re wondering what the Matrix Foundation is, and why it needs a Managing Director: as a reminder, the team who created Matrix set up Element</a> in 2017 as a way to help fund our work on Matrix - and then in 2018 incorporated The Matrix.org Foundation</a> as a not-for-profit foundation to act as a neutral custodian for the Matrix protocol. We formally launched the Foundation</a> alongside Matrix 1.0 in June 2019, and since then the Foundation has acted as the copyright holder of the core Matrix IP donated by Element, and custodian of the open governance process</a> by which Matrix evolves. 
However, until today the Foundation has not had any dedicated employees - all the Foundation’s work to date has been either donated by the Foundation’s Guardians (Directors) or by Element staff. As a result the Foundation has historically been very dependent on Element’s donations to keep Matrix thriving - but it’d be way healthier for Matrix (and Element!) if the wider Matrix ecosystem itself financially supported Matrix and helped steer its direction, and if the Matrix Foundation was fully operationally independent of Element.
With Matrix 2.0</a> rapidly coming up on the horizon, and the increased importance of the membership programme in helping sustainably fund Matrix, it’s the perfect time to be welcoming Josh to the Foundation with a view to getting Matrix entirely self-sustainable as rapidly as possible. Practically speaking, Josh reports to the Foundation’s Board (i.e. the Guardians), and will be focused primarily on running the membership programme, fundraising for the Foundation in general, spending Foundation funds to the greater glory of Matrix, as well as working with Thib</a> on helping spread awareness of Matrix as enthusiastically as possible.
Talking of the membership programme</a>: we’d like to enormously thank everyone who has joined and expressed willingness to join the Foundation since we launched the programme in June! We’ve been running late on onboarding and announcing folks, but now that Josh is on board we have way more bandwidth to accelerate the programme and establish the Governing Board for steering the organisational decisions of the Foundation.
Now is a great time to become a member</a> to support Matrix and be part of shaping its future. One of Josh’s first projects is to establish the Governing Board infrastructure and run its first election. Joining now gives you the great opportunity to be part of the first elected Governing Board!
Finally, Matthew and Amandine are still involved as much as ever, both as the founders of Matrix, and as two of the five Guardians of the Foundation, and Matthew continues to be Project Lead and lead for the Spec Core Team. However, given they also have a day job running Element, it’s fantastic to have Josh join to focus exclusively on operating the Foundation.
We’d like to thank everyone who’s financially supported Matrix over the years - whether that’s as an individual supporter on Donorbox</a>, Patreon</a> or Liberapay</a>, or by joining the membership programme</a>! We’re entering a whole new era for Matrix, with your donations being proactively deployed by an independent Governing Board to best fund core Matrix development - and we can’t wait to see the Foundation grow into an open source powerhouse to rival the best of them.
We’d like to wish Josh good luck in the new role, and hope you’re as excited as we are to see the Foundation finally gaining independence and spreading its wings!
Matthew, Amandine, and the whole Matrix.org team.

The German Digital Healthcare Agency joins the Matrix.org Foundation

2023-06-29T07:00:00+00:00

We were already proud to announce</a> that the national agency for the digitalisation of the healthcare system in Germany (gematik</a>) had selected Matrix as the open standard on which to base all its interoperable instant messaging standard, back in 2021.
We are now delighted to let the world know that they are doubling down on sovereignty and sustainability: gematik is the first organisation of the public sector to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member.
Collaboration in the public sector</h2>
Our friends at the FSFE</a> have been calling for software used in public services to be free software in their Public Money Public Code campaign</a>. As advocates of open standards and an open source project ourselves, this is something we can get behind.
Software development can be an impenetrable world for people who don’t work in the field. It can sometimes be difficult for people outside of our industry to understand the importance of bitrotting and refactoring. One very unfortunate effect of this is that new features are easy to fund because they feel very tangible, but the most critical housekeeping work is not as appealing.
Yet, without regular refactoring to clean things up, it gets increasingly costly and difficult to add new features. Counterintuitively, spending money on “the boring tasks” is the most efficient use of money: without it the technical stack would become either obsolete, bloated, or both, and it would be much more costly to move to something else or maintain an in-house fork.
We’re very happy gematik is doing the right thing by supporting the technical stack it builds TI-Messenger on. By supporting the Matrix.org Foundation, gematik contributes to the sustainability of the protocol powering the communications of the German healthcare system… but not exclusively.
Sharing costs across public services, and with the private sector</h2> Matrix is an open standard, which means not only everyone can use it: when someone contributes to Matrix, everyone benefits from it. This makes Matrix particularly interesting for the public sector: if the German healthcare contributes to Matrix, the German Armed Forces</a> benefit from it, and the other way around. It allows both to contribute less of their budget, instead of contributing each to an entirely different product. The German Federal Ministry of Defence already actively contributes to Matrix development and funding via its public IT services provider BWI GmbH, who relies on Element’s consulting services to develop their own Matrix-based messenger.
But Matrix being open source, it also allows the public and private sector to share the costs of maintenance by design. The public sector benefits from the contributions of the private sector to Matrix, and the opposite is true as well.
The Foundation plays a critical technical and social role in this system: it centralises and curates contributions to the protocol so it remains unbiased, coherent, and efficient.
This is just a beginning</h2>
We’re extremely happy to welcome the first public sector organisation in the Matrix.org Foundation! Given how popular Matrix is among governments and the public sector in general, we know this is just a beginning: it would be illogical to deploy any solution at a large scale without contributing to its sustainability.
Whether you’re an organisation from the public or the private sector, looking to cut costs down by building on a common, standard and reliable foundation, you can support Matrix</a> and join the Foundation</a> today.

Beeper joins the Matrix.org Foundation

2023-06-22T13:12:00+00:00

We're proud to announce Beeper</a> is the first member to join the Foundation! Beeper is a universal chat app, built on top of Matrix. Beeper is strongly committing to support Matrix by becoming the first member in the Gold tier as well.
Matrix is a strategic choice</h2>
Beeper allows you to connect accounts from up to 15 different chat platforms to get a unified inbox in a single app. The core business of Beeper is to provide a polished app and service to their users. Beeper is built upon Matrix: behind the scenes, a Beeper account is a Matrix account on the Beeper homeserver, and the company hosts bridges for its users. The experience is completely transparent for them.
Matrix was an obvious choice in Beeper's stack because of its interoperable nature. Bridges</a> are the core of Beeper's business: they are the most active bridges maintainer of the Matrix ecosystem, and most of them are open source too. It makes a lot of sense for Beeper to build on top of Matrix so they don't have to reinvent the wheel: homeservers exist, the AppService API that allows them to create bridges exists, and maintaining an in-house solution for this all would cost more than their contribution to Matrix.
Matrix also solves the difficult problem of End-to-Bridge Encryption: it allows bridges to decrypt messages from a third party platform like WhatsApp and re-encrypt it for Matrix users. This makes the homeserver completely oblivious to the content of the messages. It protects customers against passive leaks, and the most privacy conscious ones can even self-host their bridges</a> to get total control of the messages making it through.
Mission aligned</h2>
Beyond the obvious business choice of relying on Matrix, Beeper and the Foundation have a lot of values in common. The Foundation is fighting for interoperability possible at a technical level… but it's also fighting to make it possible at a legal and systemic level. We've been very vocal in the Digital Markets Act discussions In Europe. Beeper's CEO Eric Migicovsky also took part in the consultation launched by the EU in the hopes of opening up the walled gardens of Gatekeepers</a>. The regulation change brought by the DMA will accelerate the adoption of interoperability across the board, bringing the tools to make it sustainable and reliable, which is a direct business enabler for Beeper.
Join us</h2>
We once again welcome Beeper and congratulate them for being the first member to support the stack they rely on! As for organisations who depend on Matrix: we still need your support to make Matrix sustainable.
Join us in our mission to make Matrix the ubiquitous foundation for respectful products and services, become a member today</a>!

Announcing the Matrix.org Foundation Membership program!

2023-06-20T13:00:00+00:00

We shared back in December how we wanted to find a way for people and organisations to support Matrix in a more impactful manner. We wanted it to also enable the Foundation to be more autonomous and more powerful in growing the ecosystem. Well the day has come: the Foundation is now able to formally accept members! 
So what is a member of the Matrix.org Foundation? It's an organisation or individual who financially supports the Foundation by paying a yearly membership fee, and in return gets some influence in driving the direction of Matrix and the Foundation's activities.
The key has been to create a balanced governance model, to make sure the Foundation stays aligned with the Matrix manifesto</a>. For this we've created a Governing Board</a> to set the direction of the Foundation whilst the membership fees will fuel our efforts to get us there.
So why become a member?
A common, durable platform</h2>
Matrix is an open protocol everyone can contribute to. However we believe that to remain healthy, a protocol is better off having a single spec that needs to be curated. The additions need to be debated, implemented in actual software, and the rest of the specification needs to be adapted to the new changes. Such curation and edition work take time and effort, but the benefits of it are enormous.
A curated protocol benefits individuals, digital rights activists, and philanthropic investors who believe in the fundamental right to control and privacy in online communication. As an open standard for real time communications, Matrix brings the sovereignty, security and interoperability, which are key to having full control over one's own communication. By financially supporting the project, people who are aligned with our beliefs allow us to keep fighting for our collective rights, be it by providing secure software or persuading regulators to protect their citizens (such as our DMA promotion work</a> or our fight against the Online Safety Bill</a>).
A curated protocol benefits profit-making companies building communication products and services. Decentralisation is a hard problem. End-to-end encryption is a hard problem. Decentralised end-to-end encrypted communications are a very hard problem. Matrix is doing the heavy lifting in these areas so companies can focus on building what they do best: creating great user experiences on top of it. By financially supporting the project, organisations building on Matrix rest assured it keeps evolving, being patched and staying secure. In short it ensures Matrix remains a competitive advantage over other products, at a fraction of what it would cost to maintain an in-house solution.
A curated protocol benefits entire governments, and large parts of the public sector, who have both adopted it widely. Public organisations can not only benefit from a sovereign, secure and interoperable solution - they can also ensure public money is spent for public good, not shareholder wealth. By joining the Matrix Foundation, public sector entities contribute to the stability, security and performance of Matrix. Investing into the project ensures that the open standard that is supporting their healthcare, defence and public administration continues to benefit from innovative open source software development.
Stay unbiased & vendor neutral</h2>
The Matrix manifesto hasn't changed. We still believe people should have full control over their own communication, not be locked in silos, be able to converse securely and privately, and that communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
The Foundation maintains the Spec, which formalises the behaviour expected from the various software components of the Matrix ecosystem. We believe it's important for both individuals using the protocol - and organisations building products on top of it - to be part of the decision process when it comes to shaping the evolution and features of Matrix. So we have designed membership tiers catering for all budgets, and mapped the Governing Board representatives evenly across the tiers.
The Spec Core Team appointed by the Foundation's Guardians is particularly vigilant against features which only benefit particular players, or are designed to somehow cripple or fragment the open protocol and ecosystem in favour of competitive advantage. As such it is a guardian of the neutrality of the protocol, making sure it will serve the general public's interests and be a solid base to build robust products on for commercial organisations.
Delivering from the get go</h2>
The Matrix.org Foundation wants to take a more active stance in supporting the protocol. The Foundation needs to respond appropriately to the Governing Board's recommendations. We are hiring a Managing Director</a> who will be in charge of identifying and building programmes the Foundation can deliver, obtaining funding for it, building a team and overseeing the delivery with the approval and support of the Governing Board.
Such programmes could include an accreditation process, to give more visibility and credibility to the organisations adopting Matrix seriously, organising more Matrix events, to promote the standard and share experiences amongst the community etc. Their mission will overall be to make the ecosystem thrive and grow.
A Managing Director working full time will also allow us to increase the Foundation's transparency by allowing it to report more often on such programmes, independently from any vendor.
Going where we're expected to</h2>
The Governing Board is the new compass of the Foundation: it refines the vision of the Foundation and steers the Managing Director and Spec Core Team in the right direction.
This gives the Governing Board a lot of power over the Foundation and Matrix, so we've put in place several safeguards to ensure the Foundation remains healthy.
For example, the Guardians remain the ultimate authority, should the Governing Board take decisions against the interest of Matrix, and the Governing Board cannot appoint or remove members of the Spec Core Team.
To ensure that the Governing Board is representative from every stakeholder in the ecosystem, we've included both representatives from every membership levels, including individuals, but also representatives of those who are rooted in its day to day operations (i.e. the MD and the Spec Core Team), and of the Guardians.
Since the Governing Board sets the direction for the Foundation, continuity is important. Therefore, members of the Governing Board are serving for two years, with yearly elections renewing only half of the board at once. This makes room for fresh ideas without losing context of the previous decisions.
Finally, this membership scheme is also meant to formalise and better distribute the relations of power in the Matrix ecosystem, to make it more independent of specific vendors. We believe this is a major next step to make Matrix thrive, and welcome everyone to join us in our mission</a>. You can also check our Prospective Members presentation here</a> for more details. 
In short, become a member today!
Send an email to funding@matrix.org</a> or browse matrix.org/membership</a>

Matrix.org - Foundation

A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation

Open letter to EU Member States on the proposed CSA Regulation

Open letter to EU Member States on the proposed CSA Regulation</h2> Dear Ministers of the Interior, Justice, and Economy of EU Member States,</p>

The Governing Board, our next big step in open governance

Forging our future with Matrix</h2> As 2023 winds down and I find myself in the thick of planning for 2024, I’d like to start preparing all of us in the Matrix ecosystem for what is to come.</p>

Election timeline</h4> Our first election season begins April 2024 and ends in June. The timeline looks like this:</p>

Preparations at the Foundation</h4> First, the Foundation itself needs to establish its membership and voter rolls, which requires new tools to manage membership, and processes paired with an outreach campaign to make sure we bring everyone along with us.</p>

Hello, world! You, me, and The Matrix.org Foundation

Welcoming Josh Simmons as Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation!

The German Digital Healthcare Agency joins the Matrix.org Foundation

Beeper joins the Matrix.org Foundation

Announcing the Matrix.org Foundation Membership program!