The Matrix Conference 2026

Principal Product Designer at Element

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maintainer of Trixnity and founder of connect2x.

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.

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.

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

Project manager

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.

TBD

Daisy is a technologist and legal enthusiast based in Berlin. She has worked in Canada and Germany and enjoys reflecting on the technological impacts of society, engaging with community spaces, and is particularly interested in open source systems. Her non-technical interests include knitting, baking, and learning new natural languages.

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.

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.

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.

Senior Engineering Manager for Element Web/Desktop and Integrations

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.

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.

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

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

Senior Product Designer @Element

Adjunct Professor at Federal University of Ceará, Brazil

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Jade develops Continuwuity, an upcoming Matrix server.

Produkt Owner TI-Messenger at gematik and Matrix enthusiast

Hi! I am a nerdy ambivert who recently moved to Vienna and I'm trying to not trip over my own fingers while learning jazz and classical piano.

I started seriously tinkering with Linux and FOSS in high-school and that addiction only got worse over time. Fast forward 15 years and that gusto got me into working with universities and institutions running their own FOSS stacks: from Jitsi to Matrix, Linux to Kubernetes and much more.

I work closely with Uni-Graz and Fairkom (and their many projects) and specialize in their Linux and K8s infrastructures and of course a lot of [matrix]

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

Jani is a Product Marketing Manager at SSH Communications Security who specialize in securing humans, systems and networks for organizations around the globe. He is a self-described mixed-marketing artist with a background spanning telecommunications, network operators, and cybersecurity. His career journey from translator to technical writer to marketer has taught him how to navigate different languages, disciplines, and perspectives. He is particularly interested in making complex technologies understandable and exploring how secure, open communications can earn the trust of both users and organisations.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Kenneth Edwall

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.

👋

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Professor of Computer Science at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Quixadá Campus, holding a PhD from the Informatics Center (CIn) at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from UFC, with a sandwich internship at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His research and expertise focus on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, with an emphasis on Performance Engineering, Programmable Networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Network Management and Security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and DevSecOps.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Paulo Antonio Leal Rego is an Adjunct Professor in the Computing Department at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Ceará (2016), with a Sandwich Doctorate internship at Cisco Systems Inc, in the United States. He works in the field of Computer Science, with an emphasis on Distributed Systems, Complex Systems Development, and Computer Networks. He is a CNPq productivity fellow in Technological Development and Innovative Extension (DT/C). He is the technical coordinator of the msg gov project.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

VoIP and front-end engineer at Element

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.

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.

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

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.

VoIP engineer at Element.

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.

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.