The Matrix Conference 2026

Aaron Thornburgh

Principal Product Designer at Element

  • Making Custom Profiles in Matrix More Useful
Alexandru VIGNIDE

Alex is a Service Manager at the European Commission, leading key communication and collaboration services, including Matrix, the newest addition to the communication services. With a background in IT engineering, project management and complex infrastructure delivery, he combines technical expertise with strong experience in service leadership and transformation.

  • Sovereignty meets Interoperability: The European Commission's Matrix Story
Amandine Le Pape

Amandine is a co-founder and Guardian of the Matrix.org Foundation. The Foundation is the custodian for the Matrix open standard, a unique initiative aiming to democratise secure online communication and solve the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP, VR and IoT technologies. Matrix makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email, and brings the power back to the user on choosing who they trust with their data and how they want to communicate.

Amandine is also COO and co-founder for Element, the company building the eponym open source, secure and interoperable collaboration tool built on Matrix. Element delivers Matrix solutions to millions of users, including the French Government, the German Armed Forces, and private companies like Mozilla or Red Hat.

Amandine heads the Business and Impact section of the European Open Source Academy and previously set up and led product management for the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs. Amandine has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon as well as an EMBA from ESC Rennes.

  • Matrix in Public Sector - Panel Discussion
  • Foundation & Governing Board update
  • Sustainable Digital Sovereignty
Andrew Morgan (anoa)

Andrew Morgan (anoa) is a Senior Software Engineer at Element, and a member of the Spec Core Team at the Matrix.org Foundation. He primarily works on Synapse, the Matrix homeserver implementation.

  • Making Custom Profiles in Matrix More Useful
Andy Balaam

Andy is a long-time free/open source contributor who has worked as a programmer in many different industries, using a variety of technologies including C++, Java, Python, JavaScript and Rust. His hobbies are writing programming languages, coding retro games, and making programming videos.

He loves working with people to craft clean, well-tested code, and feels very privileged to be able to work on Matrix full-time in his job at Element.

  • How Encryption works in Matrix
Andy Piper

Andy is the Senior Developer Relations Engineer at The Matrix.org Foundation. His role includes responsibility for organising Matrix events, publishing This Week in Matrix and Matrix Live, and working with the community and ecosystem to encourage collaboration.

Andy's past lives include comms for federated and decentralised platforms (Mastodon), API advocacy (Twitter), and developer community (Cloud Foundry) as well as many years of enterprise software consulting (IBM). He's an open source enthusiast who also hosts his own meetups for fellow makers and techies.

  • Closing
  • Opening
Benedict Benken

Maintainer of Trixnity and founder of connect2x.

  • The Engineering Behind Matrix Notifications
  • Federated Scheduling: Integrating JSCalendar (RFC 8984) into Matrix
Bjoern Reiners

Björn is a Product Manager at BWI GmbH, Germany's IT service provider for the Bundeswehr, where he leads the BundesMessenger, the sovereign Matrix-based communication platform for the German armed forces. With over two decades of enterprise experience, he has made it his mission to build open, secure communication infrastructure that belongs to no single company and no single interest. He believes that digital sovereignty is not a product feature. It is a public responsibility.

  • When to Change the Locks in Your Matrix
  • Why Is There Rust in our Matrix?
Carla Griggio

Carla is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, where she researches and teaches Human-Computer Interaction. Her main research studies how communication technologies, especially messaging apps, affect interpersonal relationships, and how the way people use one platform interconnects with the way they use others. She conducts empirical studies to understand how people adapt software to fit their communication needs and builds prototypes that explore ways of providing them with richer control over their expression and online privacy. She currently manages a 4-year long research project about managing privacy and social boundaries in interoperable messaging platforms.

  • Hello from the other side: a design workshop to bridge asymmetries between messaging clients
Cat

Cat is a Draupnir Maintainer who is also a Publicly known CME Member and Systems Administrator who does T&S work.

  • Introduction to custodial / janitorial moderation and why you are already doing it
Cecilia Spiik

Project manager

  • How can governments collaborate digitally without forcing every organization onto the same platform?
Christian Paul

Christian worked at Element, Nordeck and Polychat, developing and operating Matrix AppServies, bots and clients.
He is one of the founders of the Matrix Community Summits in Berlin, helped with booths and dev rooms at FOSDEM and FrOSCon, interviewed community members for the Matrix Salon Podcast and exchanged knowledge at the annual Matrix Workations in Austria.

To make his job a bit easier, he started developing his side project Matrix Wrench in 2021. As most of his hobby work, it's published under an open-source license for the entire Matrix ecosystem to use and benefit from.

His other tech hobbies include Web of Things, OpenStreetMap and self-hosting.

  • Matrix Wrench - an admin tool for operators and community managers
Damir Jelić

Damir Jelić is the tech lead for the Matrix Rust SDK, working on the core client and crypto libraries that power next-generation Matrix applications such as Element X. Their work focuses on client architecture, end-to-end encryption, and making Matrix usable for real-world applications at scale. They are a regular contributor to the Matrix ecosystem, with experience spanning protocol-level work and production client development.

  • What's New in the Matrix Rust SDK
Dan Woodel

Dan is a cryptographer and systems architect who has spent 15 years building high-security platforms. He started in offensive security, designing rootkit malware from a young age and developing low-level systems. He later went on to lead secure mobile and platform architecture for organisations including Visa, BBC News, NatWest, Deloitte Digital and multiple challenger banks.

He is now CTO at Labrys, where he owns the architecture behind Axiom and the Obsidian stack that runs it.

  • Labrys - deploying air-gapped Matrix
Dario Maisto

Dario Maisto is a principal analyst focusing on digital sovereignty. He advises Tech Executives on how to navigate the complex landscape and emerging opportunities of cloud platforms as well as cloud, software, and digital solutions and services within sovereignty constraints. Dario is also the EMEA champion and consulting partner for the ISG Benchmark deliveries.

  • Forrester Report: Open source and open standards for sovereignty, privacy, and security
Dave Baker

Dave is a Staff Engineer at Element and a Matrix Spec Core Team member. He helped to write the very first version of Element Web, or Vector, as it was known then. He now works to solidify its technical architecture and ensure it grows as sustainably as possible while still delivering the features that its users need. In the past, he has worked across most areas of the matrix stack, from Synapse to push gateways, identity servers and VoIP.

  • A faster, rustier Element Web
David Langley

Senior Engineering Manager for Element Web/Desktop and Integrations

  • Integrations at Work: Bringing Workplace Apps into Element
David Lassig
  • When to Change the Locks in Your Matrix
  • Why Is There Rust in our Matrix?
Denise Almeida

I am the Head of Policy and Compliance at Element, as well as the Data Protection Officer for both Element and the Matrix.org Foundation. I have recently completed my doctorate at UCL, on the topic of technology worker's attitudes and behaviours towards privacy and change. Currently, my research is focused on privacy behaviours, particularly privacy helplessness and cynicism, as well as the intersections between open source, digital sovereignty, and privacy.

  • From helplessness to sovereignty: Matrix as a use case for fairer information infrastructure
Diana GHEORGHE

Diana leads the Communication and Collaboration Services sector within the European Commission's Digital Workplace Foundations team. Combining hands on experience in engineering, architecture and management across defense and EU environments, she drives the evolution of modern communication and collaboration tools for the Commission's workforce.

  • Sovereignty meets Interoperability: The European Commission's Matrix Story
Diego Serpa

Brazilian government official with 15+ years of experience in partnerships, procurement, and project management. Interested in state capacity-building, public policies, and digital transformation.

  • MSG GOV: Building Brazil's Sovereign Government Messaging Platform on Matrix
Florian Duros

Florian is a Senior Engineer working at Element since 2022. He is spending its time to improve and to modernize Element Web.

  • A faster, rustier Element Web
Franziska Streidt

I'm working as management consultant and project lead for adesso SE. Over the last decade I have been passionately involved in various projects like Smart City strategies and the implementation of the Online Access Act for Administrative Services within Germany. I don’t have a deep technical background however; over the years I’ve grown into some cool technical areas including Matrix.

Since 2025 I’m the project manager for the project Neo; in which we are creating a prototype to demonstrate secure and interoperable communication between government agencies and citizens.

I live in the outer area of Nuremberg with my husband, two kids and our dog, though I have lived half a decade in beautiful Scotland. Outside of work I can be found hiking at the mountains or at various sporting competitions for my kids or myself.

  • Practical insights of using Matrix in Germany: External Security, Healthcare & Public Sector
Gaëlle Hunt

Senior Product Designer @Element

  • A Vision for interoperability in Element
Gideon Bleumink
  • Starting a Sovereign Chat Project in the Dutch Government: Early Lessons
Ginger

I work on Continuwuity! Among many other things, I've focused on modernizing our legacy code, implementing recent Matrix features, and improving our user experience for server administrators.

  • A vision for a next-generation timeline
  • A Year (and a half) of Continuwuity
  • Matrix in Minutes
Half-Shot

Half-Shot (or Will) is the lead on integrations at Element. He has worked on pretty much nearly everything Element at one point or another, and has his pawprints in various places upon the spec. Also allegedly trained to work in a bar providing the bar sells Tschunk.

When he's not doing Matrix things, he is making terrible indie games, running somewhere, or possibly making a fuss of a dog!

  • Integrations at Work: Bringing Workplace Apps into Element
  • The Element Module Workshop
Hato Nordeck

CEO of Nordeck. Doing Matrix — building products, teams, and companies.

  • Widgets Working Group
  • NeoBoard at scale - Demo
Hendrik Jaks

Hendrik Jaks is a software developer at OpenNode, the company behind the open-source cloud and HPC management platform Waldur, where he works on the Matrix chat integration and AI features. He is also a computer science student at the University of Tartu.

  • Integrating Matrix Chat into the Waldur Resource Management Platform for Sovereign Conversations
Ivan Enderlin

Young Ivan has met its first computer at 12 years. Since then, young Ivan became old Ivan, with a PhD in Computer Science and numerous contributions to various open source projects. I have worked for different companies like Mozilla, Automattic, Wasmer, with Element being the current one (damn red pill).
I am a Rust Task Force member, a low-level hacker, an FFI wizard. When I’m not behind a split keyboard, I do wood working and I improve my self-sufficient straw-wood-made house.

  • Speedrun Client with the Matrix Rust SDK
Jade

Jade is known in the Matrix ecosystem for co-founding Continuwuity, an upcoming Matrix server. She's a prolific open-source contributor, with highlights including MusicBrainz (where she did Google Summer of Code) and countless smaller contributions. She's also an award-winning "change-maker," loves music, reading and has been known to take some nice videos.

Find her to get a cute sticker!

  • A vision for a next-generation timeline
  • A Year (and a half) of Continuwuity
  • Matrix in Minutes
Jan Kohnert

Produkt Owner TI-Messenger at gematik and Matrix enthusiast

  • Preserving Integration, Rebuilding the Core: Matrix for Healthcare Communication
Jan Krammer (Janonym)

Hi! I am a nerd who loves open-tech and everything related to it. I'm also trying to not trip over my own fingers while learning jazz and classical piano.

I started with Linux System-administration and general FOSS already in high-school and that addiction only got worse over time :)
Fast forward 20 years and that gusto got me into working with universities, institutions and organizations that want to run their own open-tech stacks: from Jitsi to Matrix, Linux to Kubernetes and much more.

I work closely with the University of Graz and Fairkom (and their many projects) and specialize in Linux and K8s infrastructures and of course a lot of [matrix]. I helped or am still helping other institutions (like TU Vienna, University Vienna, FWF) to get their Matrix deployments and/or infrastructure off the ground.

(You can reach me at @janonym:matrix.org, @jan.krammer@fairkom.eu or just with good old mail at jan.krammer@protonmail.com / jan.krammer@fairkom.eu)

  • Common challenges for organizations when deploying [matrix]
Jens-Uwe Thieme

Jens-Uwe Thieme works as General Manager at CompuGroup Medical, one of Europe's leading healthcare IT companies, where he focuses on secure messenger solutions built on the Matrix protocol. He brings firsthand experience of deploying Matrix-based communication in regulated clinical environments and navigating the intersection of open standards, European regulation, and real-world healthcare adoption

  • Digital Sovereignty Is No Longer a Buzzword — It's Procurement Policy
Jeroen Franssen

Jeroen Franssen is a project manager in the Innovation Branch in Allied Command Transformation. He leads the rapid integration and deployment team.

  • Bridging private federations across borders
  • NI2CE network effects in a voluntary adoption paradigm
Jim Mackenzie

Hi! I'm the VP of Trust & Safety for the Matrix.org Foundation, and I try to bring a calm optimism to making Matrix a kinder, safer place. I've been with the Foundation since 2021, and I work on policy and process, tooling and techniques for Matrix.org and Matrix as a whole.

  • Building a safer network, together
Jose Macedo

José Macedo is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and has been a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow since 2009. He holds both a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), including a doctoral research period at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne, in France.

From 2006 to 2009, he worked as a Senior Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, where he taught and coordinated research projects. His research focuses on the processing and analysis of large-scale data (Big Data), combining techniques and methods from artificial intelligence. He has authored more than 200 papers published in leading scientific conferences and journals.

At UFC, he has served as Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Computer Science and as Chief Information Officer, and he currently coordinates the Center of Reference in Artificial Intelligence. From 2017 to 2023, he served as Chief Scientist for the Government of the State of Ceará, leading projects in public security, innovation, and digital transformation.

In 2015, he founded Insight Lab, an applied artificial intelligence research laboratory that brings together more than 200 researchers and has secured over BRL 100 million in funding for research, development, and innovation projects in education, cybersecurity, and healthcare.

  • MSG GOV: Building Brazil's Sovereign Government Messaging Platform on Matrix
Juliet (she/her)

Juliet Shen is the founding Head of Product at ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), where she leads the development of scalable technologies that protect people online while preserving user privacy. She was instrumental in incubating ROOST within Columbia University's Trust and Safety Tools Consortium and now oversees its product vision and implementation.

Over the past decade, Juliet has shaped trust and safety practices across some of the world's most widely used platforms. She served as Snapchat's first Trust and Safety Product Manager, helping establish its foundational moderation systems; led the Trust and Safety product team at Grindr; and deployed advanced AI at Google to detect and prevent abuse across Workspace platforms at scale.

Juliet has also been a driving force behind industry collaboration. She co-chaired the Tech Innovation Working Group at the Technology Coalition, where she helped launch Project Lantern — the first-ever cross-platform child safety signal-sharing program — and currently co-chairs the Tools Research Committee at the Trust and Safety Foundation. She holds Bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Sociology from the University at Albany.

  • Building a safer network, together
Kai A. Hiller
  • A common journey to user federated search
Kegan Dougal

Kegan Dougal is one of the core engineers who created Matrix back in 2014, designing many aspects of the client-server protocol.

He has extensive experience with most of the Matrix ecosystem including servers (Synapse/Dendrite), clients (Element-Web/JS SDK), bots (Go-NEB) and bridges (IRC bridge). He has written several test frameworks from Complement to Chaos, ensuring the entire ecosystem remains interoperable, robust and reliable. His current focus is on improving the federation protocol and is collaborating with academia in the CRDT field to ensure Matrix remains secure against Byzantine actors.

  • Project Hydra (phase 2+3): further improving the security of the federation protocol
Kenneth Edwall

Lead it-architect for SAFOS, a secure collaboration solution for the publict sector of Sweden, delivered by Försäkringskassan (Social Insurance Agency)

  • Bridging private federations across borders
  • Matrix in Public Sector - Panel Discussion
  • How can governments collaborate digitally without forcing every organization onto the same platform?
Kevin Boos

I'm a huge fan of Matrix, Rust, systems development, safe programming languages, and all things open source. I'm the creator and main dev of Robrix, a big contributor to the Makepad UI toolkit, and the tech lead of Project Robius. I also heavily use (and unwittingly test out) the matrix-rust-sdk. I was honored to be a part of the first Matrix Foundation Governing Board.

I'm currently a principal engineer at Futurewei Technologies and live in the Seattle area with my wife and (very old) pup, though I'm originally from Texas. Off the clock, I'm mostly into playing jazz, going backpacking in the wilderness, and otherwise recouping lost time from spending wayyy too long doing a PhD.

  • Robrix: a pure Rust multi-platform Matrix client, and a peek at its future
Kieran Lane

Kieran is a Senior Technical Engineer at Element helping customers configure and deploy Element Server Suite (ESS) Pro, having specifically been focused this year on our Mission Partner Environments (MPE) version that supports Security Labelling in Matrix.

  • Implementing Security Labels in Matrix
Krille (Christian K.)

German coffee-to-code-converter. Creator of FluffyChat with a passion for open source.

  • FluffyChat - Creating a [matrix] messenger for individuals
Luke Wattam

Luke co-founded Labrys after serving as a British Army officer and linguistics specialist, with operational experience across the UK Ministry of Defence, FCDO and allied partners.

He built the company around a problem he had seen first-hand: official systems that cannot keep up in the field, causing people to fall back on insecure tools. At Labrys, he leads the operational and commercial side of Axiom, taking a military-grade platform from concept into live defence, government and high-risk deployments.

  • Labrys - deploying air-gapped Matrix
Maghen Calinghee

With over 18 years of experience in IT development with multiple roles.
Today Maghen is working with the Tchap team to deploy the Matrix solution in the public sector

  • A common journey to user federated search
Manfred Zielinski

Manfred Zielinski is Project Manager for Digital Commons at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. He leads a project to establish a sovereign Matrix-based chat service for the Dutch government, enabling public sector organizations to collaborate and communicate in a transparent, privacy-respecting, interoperable, sovereign, and compliant way.
His work focuses on advancing public values such as autonomy, trust, and open standards, ensuring that digital communication aligns with the principles of a responsible, ethical, and sovereign public sector.

  • Starting a Sovereign Chat Project in the Dutch Government: Early Lessons
Marcel Kolaja

Marcel Kolaja is the Policy and Advocacy Director for Europe at Access Now, an organization defending and extending the digital rights of people and communities at risk. He leads a team of digital rights policy experts and drives the advocacy agenda at the intersection of human rights and digital technologies in Europe.

From 2019 through 2024, Marcel served as a Member of the European Parliament. Throughout his tenure, he was also a Member of the Bureau of the European Parliament: from 2019 through 2022 as Vice-President and from 2022 through 2024 as Quaestor.

In his work in the European Parliament, Marcel focused mainly on topics related to fundamental rights and consumer protection in the digital age, privacy protection, cybersecurity, encryption, transparency, Free and Open Source Software, artificial intelligence, the Digital Single Market, and media freedom. Legislative acts that Marcel directly worked on include the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, the Product Liability Directive, the Cyber Resilience Act, the Media Freedom Act, the Political Advertising Regulation, the European Digital Identity, and more.

Marcel graduated from the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno. He had been working in various capacities in the IT industry in technical and managerial roles before he was elected Member of the European Parliament.

In his free time, he enjoys spending time in the mountains and nature.

  • Europe’s tech sovereignty: what’s in it for Matrix?
Marco Holz

I have been discussing and designing IT infrastructures in the public sector for several years now, both from a civic tech/FOSS perspective as well as within the public administration at the German Federal IT Cooperation (FITKO).

When it comes to the design of modern IT infrastructures, my focus is on privacy- and security-by-design principles and the social impact of technology design. Cryptography and openness are our friends on the way to achieving these goals.

  • Matrix in Public Sector - Panel Discussion
Mathieu Velten

Mathieu is a long time advocate and contributor to Matrix, first as an amateur and then professionally, for Element then Tchap French deployment. He is currently working to open the French federation to third trusted parties.

  • Bridging private federations across borders
  • Matrix in Public Sector - Panel Discussion
Matthew Hodgson

Matthew is Project Lead & co-founder of Matrix, and a Guardian of The Matrix.org Foundation. His day job is CEO/CTO at Element; the company founded by the creators of Matrix to support its development.

  • Next Generation Matrix: P2P, DMLS and more!
  • The Matrix State of the Union
Michael Thiele

Co-Founder of connect2x, a company dedicated to implementing a TI-Messenger for the German healthcare system. Has 15 years of professional software development under his belt.

  • Federated Scheduling: Integrating JSCalendar (RFC 8984) into Matrix
  • Customize your Matrix messenger
Midhun Suresh R

I'm a Software Engineer at Element, where I primarily work on the Element Web team.

  • Implementing Security Labels in Matrix
Neil Johnson

Neil is Chief Engineering Officer at Element and also a member of the Matrix Governing Board.

  • Foundation & Governing Board update
  • Element's year in review: Interoperability in the real world.
Nex

https://timedout.uk

  • A Year (and a half) of Continuwuity
  • Matrix in Minutes
Nico

Developer of Nheko.
Representing the ecosystem on the governing board.
Employed by Famedly to work on Matrix in the healthcare sector and beyond.
Noisy and too involved in too many things.

I am still very proud of fixing the bug, where Synapse wouldn't let you rejoin rooms you have been unbanned from, unless another user from your server was in the room.

I got rid of reply fallbacks.

  • Foundation & Governing Board update
  • Why Is There Rust in our Matrix?
Nicolas Da Mutten

Nicolas is a passionate self-hoster and open source enthusiast with a strong focus in infrastructure. Having a background in software engineering he started his hosting adventures around the age of 16, running collaboration tools and php websites on a iMac with macOS server. Since then, his skillset grew a lot, adding containers, gitops, linux, CI/CD, and ochestration and he took on numerous volunteer engagements with the Swiss scout association, now being part of the national IT committee.

At Matrix Conf 2025 he decided it was time to contribute actively to open source and together with others startet the Homeserver Decentralisation WG.

  • Homeserver Decentralisation Working Group Report
Niklas Zender
  • Matrix and MLS - The next step of the evolution
nohkumado

Bruno Boettcher is a dilettante with a habit of searching the fun in otherwise serious stuff. When not writing Rust or Flutter Apps, he can be found convincing people that decentralized systems are more fun than they sound, and that nothing beats open source.

  • Your Chat App is Actually a Game
Oliver Graml

Oliver Graml leads Software Development and Technical Consulting activities within adesso’s “Äußere Sicherheit” business unit, focusing on software engineering, DevOps, low-code, and technical delivery for defense and public-sector clients.

He acts as internal project lead/Maître, and service delivery coordinator for major BWI projects, including BW-Messenger and BundesMessenger. With a background as a software engineer and former member of the German Armed Forces in military intelligence, Oliver combines technical expertise, defense domain knowledge, and delivery leadership for mission-critical digitalization projects.

  • Practical insights of using Matrix in Germany: External Security, Healthcare & Public Sector
Patrice Zoe Brend'amour

Patrice Zoe Brend'amour works at CompuGroup Medical (CGM), Europe's leading healthcare IT company, and is a Vienna-based technology leader with extensive international experience spanning Germany, the United States, and Austria. Having led diverse, globally-distributed teams across the US, South Africa, and Europe, she brings a unique perspective to healthcare product management - understanding firsthand the complexities of cross-border collaboration and the critical need for secure, seamless communication infrastructure in clinical settings.

Her career has focused on shipping healthcare products while managing international development teams, navigating diverse regulatory environments, and fostering collaboration across time zones and cultural boundaries. This global leadership experience has given her deep insight into the challenges healthcare organisations face when coordinating care, sharing data, and maintaining communication across different jurisdictions and technical standards.

Drawing from her international product development background and her understanding of varied regulatory frameworks, Patrice advocates for open protocols that enable healthcare organisations to transcend geographical and institutional barriers. Her work consistently emphasizes solutions that maintain rigorous security standards while enabling the collaborative workflows that modern healthcare actually demands - not just in theory, but in practice.

At Matrix Conference 2025 in Strasbourg, Patrice presented "Matrix as a Bridge – Enabling Cross-Border Healthcare Communication Through Open Standards," exploring how decentralised communication protocols can transform international healthcare data exchange. At this year's Matrix Conference in Malmö, she returns with "Side Effects Include: Data Breaches, GDPR Fines, and a Group Chat With 47 Nurses" — a frank look at why consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp have become the de facto communication layer of European healthcare, what dedicated solutions built on open standards like Matrix are doing to change that, and why AI may finally be tipping the balance.

  • Side Effects Include: Data Breaches, GDPR Fines, and a Group Chat With 47 Nurses
Patrick Maier
  • Server-side functionality for multilateral use
Patrick Weber
  • Matrix in Public Sector - Panel Discussion
Paulo A L Rego

Paulo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Brazil. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UFC in 2016 and carried out part of his doctoral research at Cisco Systems, Inc. in the United States. His research covers distributed systems, computer networks, and the engineering of complex software systems. He holds a CNPq Research Productivity Fellowship in Technological Development and Innovative Extension (DT). He is the technical coordinator of msg gov, a project that uses the Matrix ecosystem to build secure messaging for the Brazilian government.

  • Towards a Post-Quantum Matrix Protocol: A Hybrid Design Adapted to the Brazilian Scenario
Philipp Monz

I am part of the fairkom team, where I work as a software developer on various open source projects, including SchulchatRLP, DisplayEurope, Termino, and more.

@monz:fairchat.eu

  • Common challenges for organizations when deploying [matrix]
Phillipp Kurtz
  • TI-Messenger goes Europe: Austrian healthcare adopts matrix protocol
Pierre 'McFly' Marty

Pierre Marty is a software architect and engineer currently serving as the Tech Lead for the Twake Chat project at Linagora. Passionate about P2P networks, decentralized systems, and alternative communication means, Pierre has kept a close eye on the Matrix protocol since 2015 and is dedicated to building robust, federated software.

  • Disappearing the Protocol: Integrating Matrix into a Multi-App Platform
Quentin Gliech

Quentin is a software engineer working in the backend team at Element, specialized in everything related to authentication and identity.

  • As a [server administrator], I want to [run Element successfully in my organisation/community]
Renato Becker

I’m a PM member of the global product team at Rocket.Chat, leading initiatives across AI, interoperability, and extensibility for secure communication. With a background in software engineering and product management, I focus on turning complex technologies and open protocols into practical, customer-driven solutions.

  • Between the protocol and the customer: federation expectations in production
Richard Schlögl

Richard Schlögl is a technical product manager and requirements engineer based in Vienna. Over the past fifteen years he has worked in e-health, banking, payments and automotive, with a focus on requirements engineering.

At RISE (Research Industrial Systems Engineering) he was technical product manager on TI-Messenger (TIM), the Matrix-based messaging service used in Germany's national healthcare infrastructure. His work included coordinating with the technical provider that built TIM for the statutory health insurers, designing the service for both insured members and the insurers' staff. Much of the role involved turning gematik's TIM specification into a working product, covering federation, end-to-end encryption and interoperability requirements within the constraints of national healthcare IT.

Richard is a software engineer, certified requirements engineer (IREB CPRE Advanced) and Scrum practitioner (PSM II), with a background in usability and interaction design. He also teaches requirements engineering, usability engineering and web engineering at FH Wiener Neustadt, the University of Zürich and TU Graz.

  • Challenges of Matrix within Europe's most sovereign, most secure and largest IT Infrastructure
Richard van der Hoff

Rich is a Staff Engineer at Element, and has been part of the Matrix project since 2015. In that time he's touched all sorts of things, including Element-Web and Synapse. He implemented the early steps towards encryption in Element Web, and more recently is back in the encryption sphere as part of Element's Crypto team.

  • New phone who dis: User verification using X.509 certificates
Robin Townsend

VoIP and front-end engineer at Element

  • Bringing MatrixRTC to the Matrix Ecosystem
Rodrigo Pacheco

Rodrigo Pacheco holds a PhD in Mathematics, specializing in dynamical systems and differential geometry. He currently works in the field of cryptography for the Brazilian government.

  • Towards a Post-Quantum Matrix Protocol: A Hybrid Design Adapted to the Brazilian Scenario
Roshan Kattil

I'm a Computer Science & Engineering student at UC Merced, working in DevOps and ed-tech in addition to being a full time student. I've been programming since I was 8 years old. With my friend An Le, I built breakfree, an app that pairs a distraction blocker with built-in Instagram messaging, so people can cut out distractions without losing touch with their friends. Building it pulled me deep into Matrix/communication protocols/infrastructure became fascinated by its messaging and secure-communication protocols, set up my own custom bridge and proxy infrastructure, and scaled it to serve thousands of users and was one of the major things that pushed me further in the Dev Ops field and taught me how to scale applications and infrastructure.

  • When the Bridge Looks Like an Attacker: Building a Focus App on Matrix Instagram Bridges
Sameer Chauhan

Mr. Chauhan was appointed Director of the United Nations International Computing Centre on 1 December 2019 by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

The Director is the Chief Executive and has the responsibility to lead all aspects of UNICC’s strategy and operations to facilitate the provision of services to more than 100 Clients and Partner Organizations, to establish the UNICC strategy, to develop a biennial business plan and budget, and to implement the approved plan.

With the advice and backing of the Management Committee, Mr. Chauhan has effectively led a strategic transformation of UNICC since he assumed his post. This has enabled UNICC to become the preferred strategic digital partner for the whole UN system and has empowered the organization to successfully build capabilities in areas such as cybersecurity, AI, data, quantum encryption and cloud computing, as well as in key business areas like treasury, finance, and HR.

  • United Nations (UNICC)
samvie

Sandra is an interdisciplinary scientist and policy advisor who is based in Vienna and Berlin. She is committed to digitalisation for the common good and actively advocates for interoperable digital infrastructure across Europe. Thats why she founded the alliance `Open networks and public spheres. She is co-organizing Berlin Fediday at c-base in Berlin. Sandra has organised and moderated Vienna’s net-political evening for many years, fostering dialogue on democratic alternatives to the platform economy. As a member of the Digital Society and Wikimedia Austria, she champions free knowledge and open, participatory digital spaces. Sandra also strengthens diversity and inclusion in tech through her involvement with FSFE Women, Women in Open Source Software and the Haecksen network.
ActivityPub: https://chaos.social/@samvie

  • Open protocols unite: Common goals in advocating?
Sarah L. Silva

Sarah is a software engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. In her day-to-day work, she builds backend services, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems. She is the creator of Gua, an experimental Matrix-based federated messenger exploring simple identity-based onboarding, OIDC login, and trusted homeserver routing for sovereign communication networks. Her goal with Gua is to make Matrix-based communication approachable for everyday users while preserving the freedom, interoperability, and digital sovereignty that make open federated networks important.

  • Making Matrix Feel Like WhatsApp Without Centralizing It
Stina Olsson

I'm Stina Olsson, a PhD student at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. My PhD project is on Human-Computer Interaction principles for messaging interoperability.

  • Hello from the other side: a design workshop to bridge asymmetries between messaging clients
  • Feature asymmetry in interoperable messaging - a barrier for mitigating network effects?
Thai An Le

Co Founder of Researched Technologies.

  • When the Bridge Looks Like an Attacker: Building a Focus App on Matrix Instagram Bridges
Timm Behner
  • Matrix and MLS - The next step of the evolution
  • When to Change the Locks in Your Matrix
Timo Kandra

VoIP engineer at Element.

  • Bringing MatrixRTC to the Matrix Ecosystem
  • Matrix as a CRDT Backend: The perfect container for private structured Data
Tom Biselli

Tom Biselli is a postdoctoral researcher in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Aalborg University with an interdisciplinary background in computer science, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. His research focuses on how people navigate increasingly complex digital information environments and how technology can be designed to support autonomy, competence and control when interacting with these environments.
His work spans user-centered privacy & security, misinformation, and human-centred AI, with a particular interest in how users understand, evaluate, and interact with digital systems that shape digital information flows. Using mixed-methods approaches including interviews, surveys, think-aloud studies, online experiments, and participatory design, he investigates users’ mental models, information needs, and decision-making processes, and develops interventions to support greater user agency.

  • Hello from the other side: a design workshop to bridge asymmetries between messaging clients
  • The Adoption Gap: How Choice and Stigma Shape User Acceptance of Metadata-Private Messaging
Xinyuan Liu

I am a PhD researcher in human-computer interaction at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. Through empirical studies, I evaluate how people navigate digital ecosystems and their constraints, and the adaptive strategies they develop to maintain (dis)communication with their personal networks.

  • Hello from the other side: a design workshop to bridge asymmetries between messaging clients
Yan Minagawa

Yan enables people with or through technology; he has a focus on federated and distributed technology and free software. As a part of communities, projects, companies and collectives he likes to connect people and drive transformation. He is active in Matrix eco-system and is commited to the values of the matrix manifesto.

  • Widgets Working Group