Hi all,
Back at FOSDEM in February we showed off how Matrix could be used for E2EE-preserving messaging interoperability as required by the Digital Markets Act messaging interoperability - 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, and we also demoed interop working at the technical level to the European Commission a few days beforehand.
Subsequently WhatsApp launched its DMA portal 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:
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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.
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WhatsApp would require the client IP of any interconnecting users, in order to apply ‘platform integrity’ anti-abuse / trust & safety controls.
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WhatsApp would not allow an interconnecting service to buffer messages serverside.
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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.
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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.
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If you have been following the matrix.org blog for some time, you will know that we’ve never been ones to shy away from complex topics like public policy and its impacts on Matrix. With this blog post series, our aim is to introduce a more regular cadence to our regulatory updates and to be more transparent about where we are focusing our efforts in this area.
Each blog post in the series will focus on a given theme or piece of law, as well as its relevant jurisdiction. We will start this series by taking a deep dive into EU regulation, starting with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Future blog posts in the series will cover the digital services package (DMA and DSA), the incoming CRA and the highly controversial CSAM regulation. These will be followed by a series dedicated to the UK, particularly UK applications of European law such as the GDPR and ePrivacy directive, as well as the Online Safety Act and the IPA amendment bill. Finally, we will conclude the series by looking across the pond and diving into the Cloud Act, as well as KOSA and other existing proposals.
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It is an honor and a pleasure to unveil the election results and introduce the first elected Governing Board for the Matrix.org Foundation!
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 – noting that we have an election of Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members scheduled for next year.
Thanks also to all of the people who cast ballots in the election, and to everyone who asked questions along the way! We learned a lot in this first election process that we look forward to incorporating into the next one.
The level of engagement with the process was a very encouraging sign for the health of the Matrix ecosystem, and we’re proud to have had 100% voter turnout in all but one constituency.
Read on to see who is on the Governing Board, a brief discussion of next steps, and reflections on some of the work that remains to improve representation.
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Voting has started for the Governing Board elections and runs till May 31! This is our first election and we are very excited. All of the results will be published here on the blog on June 3.
You can learn about all of the candidates on our 2024 election page. All eligible voters should have received an email from OpaVote, the election system we have chosen for this year’s elections.
If you believe you are eligible to participate but have not heard from us, first check the inbox and spam folders of the email address you have on file with us (such as through Donorbox or Patreon). Please email us if you have any questions.
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The Matrix.org homeserver suffered from an outage on Monday 22 April, between 08:00 UTC and 10:00 UTC, followed by slowness for the next 2 hours.
The outage occurred during scheduled maintenance with no expected downtime. It included upgrading the base OS of the machines running Matrix.org’s deployment.
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Update: the terms of the board have been updated with the follow changes:
- Allow for filling vacancies by appointment or by-election at the discretion of the Managing Director and the Guardians, in consultation with a Governance Committee. (2.7.1)
- Allow for the Governing Board to adopt voting mechanisms other than simple majority on a case-by-case basis. (5.5)
- Disallow nominees from running for election in more than one constituency at a time. (2.4.1)
- Change UTC to AOE in timeline. (2.3)
Welcome to the first ever Governing Board election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a one week nomination period that opens on Saturday, April 20th and closes on Friday, April 26th AOE time.
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. That said, this is our first election and we don’t yet have contact information for everybody who is eligible, so we want your help getting the word out.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.
To learn about what the Governing Board is, what it does, and the context it operates in, read this blog post from last December. You are also welcome to read the Governing Board’s current bylaws.
Go here for instructions on submitting a nomination!
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Hi folks,
The events of the last week have been utterly terrifying as we’ve seen a highly sophisticated targeted attack on open source infrastructure play out in public, in the form of the liblzma backdoor. Matrix is not impacted by the attack (none of our code or infrastructure is using liblzma or xz 5.6), but it has been a massive wakeup call in terms of understanding the risks posed by overstretched open source maintainership.
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Matrix self-defines as the go-to protocol for "open, secure, decentralised communications". The Matrix.org Foundation defines "maximising […] the number of online servers in the open federation" as a key objective in its mission. So why is the Matrix.org homeserver, probably the largest homeserver in the whole federation, still in open registration mode?
Let's dive into the technical, and user experience choices behind it.
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Since the Foundation got itself a Managing Director at the end of last summer, it has been working on its independence. With lines more clearly defined between its major supporter Element and itself, the Foundation has been able to clarify its role. The Foundation's major goal, alongside stewarding the specification, is to fill in the gaps where there is no direct organisational interest, to make the Matrix ecosystem grow.
There are two levels where the Foundation can have an impact: at the governance level, in the form of the Governing Board; and at the hands-on level, with working groups and projects.
See below what the coming year holds for us.
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