This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

This week Thib published the second installment in our roadmap blog post series: Opening up the Foundation. This post dives into the work we’re doing this year to increase community participation and open governance, looking even beyond the Governing Board to things like office hours, working groups, and fiscal sponsorship.

If you missed the first post in the series, check it out: A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation.

We’re grateful for the level of support we’ve received as we share more about the Foundation’s financial needs and the work we are doing in service of the ecosystem. Many dozens of individuals have donated and joined as Individual Members, and we’ve more than doubled the number of organizational members! Huge thanks to Beeper, Fairkom, Famedly, Fractal Networks, Gematik, IndieHosters, and XWiki.

We still have a long way to go, and critically we need larger organizations to step up to the plate, but the early results are encouraging. Onwards and upwards! 🚀

Matthew reports

There's a huge number of Matrix projects active in the German public sector, and the team at Element has had a go at mapping them out and providing a guide to what's going on, how they relate to each other, and to generally try to explain why Germany is the leading country for digital sovereignty - including self-sovereign secure communication with Matrix: https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

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Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

This week MTRNord and myself have launched the Matrix.org Website Office Hours. We hope to turn that into an accessible way to onboard new contributors. Come join the fun with us, and help us making the world a better place!

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Dept of communities

Ubuntu Matrix homeserver just went live 🎉

Nils announces

Even if we are formally still in testing phase until the end of the Ubuntu 24.04 cycle, the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver reached a state in which we can consider it live.

Although Ubuntu used to be IRC-only, we are now adopting Matrix to cater to a wider, diverse audience, including less technical users and younger generations. Matrix allows us to do so while staying true to the values that brought us Ubuntu, Linux and FOSS. When selecting the tools we use, we are always focused on open-source, privacy and freedom respecting software. We believe that Matrix offers all the modern features we need without compromising our values. Moreover, Matrix will make it easier for us to interact with neighboring communities such as Fedora and KDE.

There is still a lot of work to do, but we want to take a moment to thank the Ubuntu and Matrix communities for their great effort and dedication to this project.

You can read more about it on this Discourse thread and of course, you can now join our Ubuntu community from any Matrix federated server. A good start is the Ubuntu Community Space

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Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

Very happy to announce that the Spec Core Team has been reviewing how to make more progress on MSCs and get more organisational diversity into the SCT, and we've decided to expand the team - unanimously voting to add both tulir and clokep to the team effective today. Huge thanks to both tulir and clokep for being up for joining and donating their time... and looking forwards to their contributions in helping get MSCs to and through their Final Comment Period and merged into the spec!

Josh Simmons says

We’re excited to be forging stronger ties with other open source foundations, so that we can work together and lean on one another’s areas of expertise. Last week we announced that the Matrix.org Foundation joined OpenForum Europe as a supporter alongside Mozilla and many others.

Adding to that, we’re pleased to share that we have become an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative and joined their Open Policy Alliance, and we’ve also joined the Eclipse Foundation as an associate member.

We look forward to going further, faster, together! 🚀

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Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but there will be plenty of Matrix talks (live!) on Sunday at FOSDEM in the Matrix devroom, and at Matthew's main track talk. The talks are livestreamed, so you can follow even if you aren't at FOSDEM (or if you are in FOSDEM but the room is full). If you are at FOSDEM, you can also find live Matrix people at the matrix.org stand in Building K, level 2.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Announced today during the EU Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels, the Matrix.org Foundation and Mozilla have joined OpenForum Europe as supporters. OpenForum Europe has proven an effective convener and advocate for open source and open standards in Europe, and we’re glad to help further that work.

Josh Simmons announces

This week the Matrix.org Foundation launched a new fundraiser, shared some high level budget figures, and kicked off a series diving into our emerging roadmap!

We’ve made huge strides over the last year, with the Foundation more robust and independent than ever before, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the future. Critically, we still need more organizations to step up to fund our work before January 2025.

Huge thanks to Beeper, Gematik, Fractal Networks, Fairkom, Thunderbird, and the hundreds of individuals who have already stepped up! Learn more in our blog post and become a member today 🚀

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Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3981: /relations recursion (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Update

For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.

This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!

This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example

The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!

Continue reading…

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?!

Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix was the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It was also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools with open governance, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness. We’re excited to build on this 2024! 🚀

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Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but a YouTube playlist of the Matrix talks given at FrOSCon!

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3981: /relations recursion (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Update

For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.

This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!

This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example

The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!

Continue reading…

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons reports

We’re excited to announce the timeline for our first ever elections as we take the next big step in open governance for Matrix. We’re also introducing two new membership tiers to increase community representation by including open source projects and foundations on the Governing Board.

Read about this and more in our latest blog post.

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Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matrix Community Year In Review 2023

Nico announces

(Please ignore, that I never know, what year number to attach to such a "Year In")

You may remember I organized a small blog post last year to collect stories from the different community projects and what they did in the year and maybe some sneak peaks at the next year. If not, you can find it here or on the Matrix.org blog.

Anyway, enough about 2022, I now encourage you to talk about 2023 and beyond! If you have interesting stuff to report about your projects or projects you have been involved in in 2023, feel free to join #year-in-2023:neko.dev and talk about it! The usual TWIM rules apply there, just that we talk about a whole year and it may involve lots of manual editing on my side, so don't try to break it. Also please be positive in your news and lets try to end 2023 with a bang!

And please share this with projects you want to hear about. :)

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