Excitement around The Matrix Conference is really beginning to build!
The Matrix Conference is significant as it’s the first global in-person event that The Matrix.org Foundation has created. It complements the phenomenal Matrix Community Summits that have run since 2022, and builds on them with specific content around the use of Matrix in the workplace.
The conference gives Element the opportunity to play a more formal role in helping to shine a light on how Matrix is transforming workplace communications, and in particular large public sector organisations.
So we’re delighted to announce that Element is the anchor sponsor at The Matrix Conference, and also sponsoring a specific conference track around the use of Matrix in the public sector.
Why is Element sponsoring the use of Matrix in the public sector conference track?
While Element is used by a broad spectrum of users - from open source communities to developers to enterprises - our commercial focus is currently on providing enterprise-grade Matrix-based products and services for use within large public sector organisations. We sell these solutions both directly to public sector organisations, and to various hyperscalers, hosters and services firms that work with the public sector.
We’re aiming to get some of our most innovative public sector customers to talk about the reasons for adopting Matrix; from their overarching strategy for technological independence, to the points of pain they are addressing and how they intend to transform the way they operate.
And, in the spirit of working in the open, we also want them to share the challenges, bumps and learnings they met along the way!
Why is the public sector adopting Element and Matrix so enthusiastically?
In an increasingly volatile world, the public sector is striving for digital sovereignty and technological independence (and side-stepping global IT outages such as we saw last week with CrowdStrike). In relation to real time communications, public sector organisations have also repeatedly demonstrated a preference for open source, open standard, end-to-end encryption and interoperability based on the Matrix open standard.
Underlining the push for digital sovereignty, Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) has created ZenDiS (the Centre of Digital Sovereignty), whose core openDesk product includes Element as its real time communications component. Similarly, BWI has created BundesMessenger, a Matrix-based free and open source software messenger for use in the public sector.
Looking at the importance of an open standard interoperability, NATO ACT’s Innovation Hub is experimenting with NI2CE Messenger. It’s a Matrix-based sovereign and secure messenger that aims to complement existing NATO communication solutions with a secure Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) style messenger for ‘unclassified’ use.
United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC), the largest strategic partner for digital solutions and cybersecurity within the United Nations system, has selected Element as its secure communications platform. Also with interoperability in mind, Element will be used as a secure alternative to email for communication between the UNICC and its partner organisations within the United Nations, and for end-to-end encrypted VoIP and video conferencing.
Meanwhile the German healthcare market mandates the use of Matrix for real time communication. Gematik, the National Agency for Digital Medicine in the German healthcare system, has devised a standard called TI-Messenger. All real time communications with the healthcare system will have to be compliant with the TI-Messenger standard. The standard is built on Matrix, and extends it to include interoperability with the FHIR healthcare record system.
Similarly, the P20 programme of the 20 police forces in Germany has chosen Matrix as the standard for secure, decentral, interoperable messaging across the otherwise independent forces.
The French government was the first to make large-scale use of Matrix, devising its messenger Tchap which has more than 350K daily users.
In Education, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has built its Logineo Messenger for school children on top of Matrix, supported by Element, and rolled it out across the state. In Bavaria, a similar project is underway, supported by Fujitsu.
Matrix was popularised in the German public sector when it was chosen by BWI as the basis for the Bundeswehr’s BwMessenger solution. BwMessenger is now the standard messaging tool across the German Armed Forces, with more than 100,000 users.
The schedule for The Matrix Conference is still being assembled, but we expect plenty of those cited above will present at the event.
An open source community and a thriving ecosystem are vital
Matrix has an enormously vibrant open source community - with core projects managed by The Matrix.org Foundation gathering over 5,000 contributors and over 33,000 GitHub stars. Element itself then has its own open source projects with over 22,000 GitHub stars and thousands of contributors - and hundreds of other projects build on top of Matrix alongside Element, with their own communities and contributors.
The success of Matrix has encouraged a number of vendors to build on the open standard. Rocket.Chat has adopted Matrix for interoperable federation, as has Stashcat, and Mattermost now also provides optional federation via Matrix. Meanwhile, both BigBlueButton and Moodle are adopting Matrix as their underlying communication technology layer.
In Germany, firms such as Famedly, Connect2x and Nordeck are building businesses based on Matrix. Large system integrators including Adesso, Bearing Point, Bechtle, Dataport, Deutsche Telekom and IBM also provide Matrix based solutions, often in partnership with Element.
Element has a unique position within the Matrix ecosystem as it’s led by the team that created Matrix, and has contributed more than 90% of the underlying Matrix code base. Element offers the fastest Matrix-based frontend with Element X, and is the only vendor to offer an advanced backend in addition to the default open source codebase, enabling end-user organisations and hosting providers to create and manage enterprise-grade Matrix-based deployments with ease.
Matrix comes of age
The Matrix Conference is a notable milestone. It’s another strong signal that Matrix is becoming its own ‘category’ within the communications landscape, and has triggered an entire ecosystem of richly-featured and highly polished enterprise-grade Matrix-based solutions for the workplace.
We look forward to welcoming you to The Matrix Conference, and can’t wait to see our groundbreaking customers showcasing their excellent projects.
