FOSDEM

Hi all,

FOSDEM this year was even more crazy and incredible than ever - with attendance up from 6,000 to 9,000 folks, it's almost impossible to describe the atmosphere. Matt Jordan from Asterisk describes it as DisneyWorld for OSS Geeks, but it's even more than that: it's basically a corporeal representation of the whole FOSS movement.  There is no entrance fee; there is no intrusive sponsorship; there is no corporate presence: it's just a venue for huge numbers of FOSS projects and their users and communities to come together in one place (the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and talk and learn.  Imagine if someone built a virtual world with storefronts for every open source project imaginable, where you could chat to the core team, geek out with other users, or gather in auditoriums to hear updates on the latest projects & ideas.  Well, this is FOSDEM... except even better, it's in real life.  With copious amounts of Belgian beer.

Anyway: this year we had our normal stand on the 2nd floor of K building, sharing the Realtime Lounge chill-out space with the XMPP Standards Foundation.  This year we had a larger representation than ever before with Matthew, Erik and Luke from the London team as well as Manu & Yannick from Rennes - which is just as well given all 5 of us ended up speaking literally non-stop from 10am to 6pm on both Saturday & Sunday (and then into the night as proceedings deteriorated/evolved into an impromptu Matrix meetup with Coffee, uhoreg, tadzik, realitygaps and others!).  The level of interest at the Matrix booth was frankly phenomenal: a major change from the last two FOSDEMs in that this year pretty much everyone had already heard of Matrix, and were most likely to want to enthuse about features and bugs in Synapse or Riot, or geek out about writing new bridges/bots/clients, or trying to work out a way to incorporate Matrix into their own projects or companies.

#RTCLounge with @ara4n from @matrixdotorg busy demoing cool stuff pic.twitter.com/Vc0uLEceQP

— miconda (@miconda) February 4, 2017

Synapse 0.19 and Riot 0.9.7 were also released on Saturday to try to ensure that anyone joining Matrix for the best time at FOSDEM were on the latest & greatest code - especially given the performance and E2E fixes present in both.  Amazingly the last-minute release didn't backfire: if you haven't upgraded to Synapse 0.19 we recommend going so asap.  And if you're a Riot user, make sure you're on the latest version :)

We were very lucky to have two talks accepted this year: the main one in the Security Track on the Jansen main stage telling the tale of how we added end-to-end encryption to Matrix via Olm & Megolm - and the other in the Decentralised Internet room (AW1.125), focusing on the unsolved future problems of decentralised accounts, identity, reputation in Matrix.  Both talks were well attended, with huge queues for the Decentralised Internet room: we can only apologise to everyone who queued for 20+ minutes only to still not be able to get in.  Hopefully next year FOSDEM will allocate a larger room for decentralisation!  On the plus side, this year FOSDEM did an amazing job of videoing the sessions - livestreaming every talk, and automatically publishing the recordings (via a fantastic 'publish your own talk' web interface) - so many of the people who couldn't get into the room (as well as the rest of the world) were able to watch it live anyway by the stream.

This is how popular decentralised communication with @matrixdotorg is at #fosdem2017. pic.twitter.com/6T5PK6RRJE

— Jan Weisensee (@ilumium) February 5, 2017

Security track at #FOSDEM: @matrixdotorg project & @ara4n pic.twitter.com/QwroHSNh8Z

— miconda (@miconda) February 5, 2017

https://t.co/x0x7xuzlH2 presentation at the Decentralized Internet Devroom @fosdem pic.twitter.com/J2Wxo9SZ8H

— Tristan Nitot (@nitot) February 5, 2017

You can watch the video of the talks from the FOSDEM website here and here.  Both talks necessarily include the similar exposition for folks unfamiliar with Matrix, so apologies for the duplication - also, the "future of decentralised communication" talk ended up a bit rushed; 20 minutes is not a lot of time to both explain Matrix and give an overview of the challenges we face in fixing spam, identity, moderation etc.  But if you like hearing overenthusiastic people talking too fast about how amazing Matrix is, you may wish to check out the videos :)  You can also get at the slides as PDF here (E2E Encryption) and here (Future of Decentralisation).

Huge thanks to evevryone who came to the talks or came and spoke to us at the stand or around the campus.  We had an amazing time, and are already looking forward to next year!

Matthew & the team

The Matrix team had a very successful trip to FOSDEM '16 last weekend. Many, many words were exchanged, and at times there was a queue of people just waiting to have a chat! We spoke to a whole lot of interested and interesting people, some of which had heard of Matrix already, and some who hadn't. The nice thing with the crowd at FOSDEM is that they very quickly "get" what we're trying to do with Matrix - and then start thinking aloud about how they might want to use it or extend it - which means we have many great conversations!

At the beginning of FOSDEM, I think we had around 2000 people "currently" in the Matrix HQ room - the next day, that number had increased by a hundred (and now it's even bigger due to a hackernews post where we mentioned Matrix)!

Our talk in the IoT dev room was very popular; unfortunately a lot of people that were queueing to get in never made it due to the limited space. However, the talk was recorded, and it's already been made available:

You can also look at the slides from the talk. Note that due to technical problems, the first half of the talk was not recorded.

We also did a talk in the Real Time dev room, which was equally popular. Hopefully the video from this talk will also be available shortly (you can keep an eye on the video repository for this dev room) - once it is, I will add it to this post.

For now, you can look at the slides from the talk.

Another interesting talk where Matrix ended up being represented, was Daniel Pocock's Improving Telepathy talk. I'll add the video from that too, once it's available.

Finally, thanks to everyone who came to say hello and have a chat - and to everyone who has since set up their own homeserver. Please do join the Matrix HQ room (using any of these clients) and let us know how your Matrix experience is going!

Matrix will again be represented at FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium, January 30th and 31st. This year, we have two talks scheduled: one in the IoT devroom on Saturday at noon, and one in the Real Time devroom at 3.10pm the same day.

We also have a stand on the 2nd floor of the K building - next to the Real Time lounge (potentially same spot as last year). If you're going to FOSDEM, please come and say hi to us at the stand or at the talks!

Our trip to FOSDEM '15 was very enjoyable; we met a lot of smart people and learnt about a lot of interesting technologies and projects. Hopefully we made a few people enthusiastic about Matrix as well!

As always, for any questions or comments, please come talk to us in the official Matrix HQ room - you can join via any of these clients (or write your own!).

FOSDEM was great fun! Two days full of conferences and demos; lots of interesting technologies and interested people - and most of all: talking to so many new faces about Matrix and potential uses and integration ideas.

Both our lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk were completely filled up with huge queues outside (sorry folks), and our demos seemed to go down fairly well. In fact several people set up their own homeserver and joined the federated network of Matrix servers during FOSDEM itself!

Here's a view from our stand, from our lightning talk and from our IoT-devroom talk.

If you missed the talks, recordings will (soon) be available from the FOSDEM site (links will be added here once available) - in the meantime you can check out the slides here: lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk.

Thanks to everyone who came to have a chat about Matrix and/or help with setting up their own homeserver (or to play with Sentinel, our mascot) - please do reach out to us via our Matrix HQ room or IRC (#matrix on freenode) if you have any problems - or want to help us fix our python packaging ;) Now is a great time to get involved as we are currently landing new APIs and soon will be offering an Application Server API to ease bridging to other services.

This weekend, Matrix is heading to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium. We will be hosting two events: a lightning talk on Saturday at 16:30 in room H.2215 (Ferrer), and an IoT devroom talk on Sunday morning at 11:00 in room H.2213.

FOSDEM's schedule is looking very interesting and varied, and we hope we can learn about interesting projects - and of course show how and where Matrix can be used to lots of FOSDEM-attendees. Please come over and have a chat if you are interested; we have a stand on the second floor in the K building - just take a right after coming up the stairs and say hi!

We have also set up a Matrix <-> IRC bridge on the #fosdem channel on freenode, which means that any conversation happening there will be copied over to #fosdem:matrix.itmanbu.com - and vice versa. Making bridges to other services is currently being worked on as part of the Application Services API - we want to be able to connect different services together via Matrix.

Finally, we are always available in the official Matrix HQ room - please join and say hi!