MSG GOV: Building Brazil's Sovereign Government Messaging Platform on Matrix
Governments increasingly need messaging that is secure, federated, and independent from foreign proprietary platforms, but turning an open protocol into a deployable government tool raises hard questions about sovereignty, infrastructure, and identity. This talk presents MSG GOV, a Matrix-based messaging platform for the Brazilian federal government. Today, it targets a defined set of public servants rather than the entire population or every government employee — a deliberate, controlled scope as the platform matures. We plan to share the factors that drove the need for a sovereign messaging app in the first place and to dig into how MSG GOV is built and run. The solution is designed to operate on SERPRO's sovereign cloud, the Brazilian government's own cloud infrastructure, with all the operational and trust implications that entail. At the center of the talk is identity: how MSG GOV integrates with gov.br, Brazil's national single-sign-on system, through a dedicated user management module we developed to bridge gov.br authentication with Matrix accounts.
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.
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.
Brazilian government official with 15+ years of experience in partnerships, procurement, and project management. Interested in state capacity-building, public policies, and digital transformation.
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.