Open alohapersona opened 4 years ago
ara4n
commented
4 years ago we haven’t published any financial reports yet but will do; the intention is to do them on an annual basis. there are no employees (which is part of the reason for limited reporting so far); currently all donations are being used to fund core dev work on matrix.
alohapersona
commented
4 years ago Great. Annual reporting makes sense, no need to create unnecessary overhead by doing too much reporting. I was just wondering as first year is already over (with foundation being founded in Oct 2018), but using calendar years probably makes more sense and for the 3 months of 2018, I assume there was nothing to report on.
no employees; all donations are being used to fund core dev work on matrix.
Can you share a list of people that receive those funds? Is it the same as this list? https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/people
Thanks for the swift response!
alohapersona
commented
4 years ago @ara4n can you provide an update on this matter?
I found the following information on income/assets on the website of matrix.org:
ara4n
commented
3 years ago oops, sorry for missing the updates on this.
We just did the the annual accounts for the Matrix.org Foundation and should be able to publish them shortly.
To quickly answer the questions: The donated funds have ended up being used to pay for the hosting of the matrix.org website + homeserver; we haven't distributed any of them for development. Instead the Foundation has chartered New Vector (trading these days as Element) to run the infrastructure for the project, who do so for free (but under the governance of the Foundation's requirements). All development for Matrix itself is donated by the respective contributors, who retain copyright (apart from New Vector, who unilaterally assign their contributions to the Foundation, where they are held in asset lock by the Foundation). Finally, we're holding (hodling?) onto the cryptocurrency for a rainy day.
damnms
commented
3 years ago any news on that where this report has been published?
alohapersona
commented
3 years ago According to https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11648710, accounts for The Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C. are overdue since Oct 29. That's close to three months. According to https://www.gov.uk/annual-accounts/penalties-for-late-filing, filing 3-6 months after deadline will cause a penalty of £750.
What's going wrong here? Do you need any help?
@ara4n I think this needs immediate action so this gets resolved before we reach the 3 months after deadline date (Jan 29).
phoe
commented
3 years ago Answered on Hacker News at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25902720
Hi folks - we submitted The Matrix.org Foundation accounts via our accountants to UK Companies House several months ago. It's unclear why they're not showing on record; we initially understood it to be due to Covid delays, but we're now chasing the accountants to out find the specifics. If there turn out to be any fines due to late filing, these would not come out of donations, but whoever's fault it actually is for the delay (i.e. the accountants).
Sorry for the drama, but this is not reason for panic.
(Separately we need to give a summary of the accounts for https://matrix.org/foundation, which we are indeed running late on: it's been hard to prioritise it when we're on fire trying to improve Matrix's mass-market usability, given stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25812536).
ara4n
commented
3 years ago 
...is the response we got from our accountants when we chased them last. We're chasing them again now to find out what is going on.
ara4n
commented
3 years ago Here's another update, from a few weeks before the above:
We also got an update on Dec 15th saying they were still working on it.
We're waiting for a response from today's inquiry.
42lux
commented
3 years ago Sounds a bit strange, just to be sure get something resembling a receipt from your accounts otherwise you are in high waters.
ara4n
commented
3 years ago As the previous mail says, we have a receipt to prove submission to Companies House.
ara4n
commented
3 years ago The update from Companies House (via our accountants) is as follows:
ara4n
commented
3 years ago And another update today. In case anyone is interested in the reason why this is blocked on physical paperwork:
it is due to the fact the organisation is a community interest company. CIC’s have to complete a CIC34 form, these forms have to be filed alongside the accounts which has to be done via postal methods with a cheque for payment. There is no online method at the moment to file CIC34 forms.
Companies house, are from what I’ve heard, very particular about the CIC34 forms.
damnms
commented
3 years ago any news on that or some kind of roadmap?
damnms
commented
3 years ago still no news?
alohapersona
commented
3 years ago Hi @ara4n,
I see the accounts were published on https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11648710/filing-history Unfortunately, this account statement raises more questions.
Maybe it's time to publish a proper financial report to clarify these and other questions?
Thanks
ara4n
commented
3 years ago Sorry for missing this (and thanks @richvdh for pointing out that i'd been missing the notifs). I've asked the accountants to given a more detailed explanation the £ for the 2018-2019 period. At a high level, my understanding is that the reported £s are low because money has been stacking up in various buffers (e.g. bitcoin & ETH addresses, patreon/paypal) - but I'm also not an expert on accounting crypto currencies. It's also been very hard to get a bank account for the foundation (apparently "we receive donations from the internet" triggers a lot of AML and KYC flags), which significantly complicates accounting given the funds end up buffering like this.
alohapersona
commented
2 years ago @ara4n Looks like accounts (and confirmation statement) are overdue again: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11648710
Will we get a report independent of the official reports that also includes donations and crypto funds in buffers that didn't make it into the official reports and also might be a little more recent?
Did Matrix.org Foundation hire a full time developer as the $5000 on Patreon was reached about a year ago? Is this still planned to happen?
Considering the exploded cryptocurrency prices and increased monthly donation amount on Patreon, the total value of donations/sponsoring Matrix.org Foundation received should be more than $1 Mio USD by now ($700k-$1.3M in ETH, $170k in BTC, $170k-$230k on Patreon), so I think this deserves some more attention.
EDIT: Just a reminder that if accounts and statements are not made correctly, Matrix.org Foundation is at risk of being struck of the register and dissolved. In that case, all foundation funds (that is, as shown above, more than $1M USD of user donations) will belong to the Crown (UK is fun).
ara4n
commented
2 years ago Thanks for flagging - chasing with the accountants again.
ara4n
commented
2 years ago Looks like the authorisation letter from HMRC for approval to publish the filed accounts had been mislaid, but is now unblocked.
ara4n
commented
2 years ago (For the record, we are still chasing this)
ara4n
commented
2 years ago (the missing auth letter got found and filed and accts are up-to-date again).
alohapersona
commented
1 year ago Hello there. It's me again.
One year has passed and I'm still not aware of any publication of financial situation reports of The Matrix.org Foundation beyond what is required to be filed by law.
At the same time, The Matrix.org Foundation is asking the public for donations and membership fees, with membership tiers of up to 500k£. Without providing financial reports, it's impossible for the wider community to evaluate the needs of The Matrix.org Foundation and therefor attest if such requests for additional funding are justified.
Given that most of The Matrix.org Foundation's activities according to their rules outlined in MSC1779 - except for sub-contracting the hosting of matrix.org home server - are mostly organisational, with some of them executed by volunteers (Spec Core Team, Code Core Team) that are not paid by The Matrix.org Foundation as per its rules, it's not obvious to me how The Matrix.org Foundation envisions to spend those additional donations. And again, due to lack of reporting, the community does not even know how donations have been spent in the past.
Please make the extra effort of providing some transparency here, both for spendings of the last year(s) and the plan for spending of future donations. The official accounts raise more questions than they provide answers (for example: why is there more than 100k£ owing in from New Vector Limited?).
Thanks.
ara4n
commented
1 year ago I've tried to enumerate the functions of the Foundation in the set of bullet points at the beginning of https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022, and spell out the financial situation. Currently the vast majority of the cost of this (~95%) is borne by Element (the trading name for New Vector Ltd, the company set up by the Matrix core team to try to fund Matrix development), where manpower is donated to the Foundation (and so doesn't show up on the books). The way it works is that all IP that Element employees commit to https://github.com/matrix-org has its copyright assigned unilaterally to the Foundation in an asset lock. You can see the amount of work that is, and estimate the donated costs, via something like Cauldron.io: https://cauldron.io/project/3729.
Historically we have had very little manpower on the financial side to do reporting beyond the legal minimum; we've been spending our $ on building Matrix rather than hiring non-profit finance people. However, as part of operationalising the Foundation to gather and distribute larger donations (as per https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-matrix-org-foundation) we're addressing this: we are trying to hire both a Executive Director for the Foundation to be employed by the Foundation and be responsible for this independently from Element - and put all the legal & financial frameworks in place to handle the large amounts of $ involved. Element is also donating non-profit finance manpower to plug the gap until an Executive Director is in place.
Hope this provides a bit more clarity; we'll update here as things progress further.
alohapersona
commented
1 year ago Hi @ara4n. Thanks a lot for your reply.
I've tried to enumerate the functions of the Foundation in the set of bullet points at the beginning of https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022
Can you please outline how the bullet points described match the Functions of the Foundation as of MSC1779? To me it seems a lot of the items listed are not really in scope of the work of the Matrix Foundation.
Currently the vast majority of the cost of this (~95%) is borne by Element (the trading name for New Vector Ltd, the company set up by the Matrix core team to try to fund Matrix development), where manpower is donated to the Foundation (and so doesn't show up on the books).
I understand that Element is donating large amounts of non-monetary assets to the Foundation. For some of these donations, the transfer is supposed to happen as per MSC1779, for others this seems to not be the case. In any case, those donations are obviously very generous and highly appreciated.
The way I read your messages, it sounds as if the idea is to have the work currently done by Element and then donated to Matrix Foundation be done by the Matrix Foundation in the future (short term probably by paying Element), which seems to not be covered by MSC1779. It also significantly changes the position of Matrix Foundation from a standards organisation (like IETF or W3C) with some additional tasks (like hosting the matrix.org home server and ensuring the existence of a reference implementation).
Would you please explain as to why this approach was chosen rather than
I think such an approach would be much more compatible with MSC1779 and won't persistently raise questions about who to receive how much money from the Matrix Foundation for their developments (e.g. would the independent libQuotient developers be receiving the same funding as the element-hired developers of matrix-js-sdk?).
Hope this provides a bit more clarity
Thanks, It does give some idea on the plans for the future of the Matrix Foundation.
| However it doesn't really give any insights into previous years and current financials of the Matrix Foundation. Even very small documentation would already be very much appreciated. Could be as easy as: | |
|---|---|
| Account balance at beginning of fiscal year: | XXX £ |
| Income from donations: | + XXX £ |
| Income from sponsorships: | + XXX £ |
| Other income: | + XXX £ |
| Expenses for hosting matrix.org: | - XXX £ |
| Expenses for promotion: | - XXX £ |
| Expenses for ensuring existence of reference implementations: | - XXX £ |
| Expenses for administration and organisation: | - XXX £ |
| Other expenses: | - XXX £ |
| Asset re-evaluation (for crypto): | +/- XXX £ |
| Account balance at end of fiscal year: | XXX £ |
Most of this should probably be in easy reach as they'd likely be needed to create the accounting report legally required.
MTRNord
commented
1 year ago put new developments under copyright of Element (instead of Matrix Foundation) which doesn't make a practical difference for users and developers as long as the license remains the Apache License.
While I agree with the rest of you comment I object with this part. As a developer this makes a major difference. Element is a for profit company and while I trust them that trust not only may change but also the motives of element could change at some point which endangers there reference implementations.
Having them legally in the non profit foundation is imho safer than having it in element even if element is the one doing a majority of work on it currently.
This mostly boils down to scenarios like elasticsearch where suddenly for profit reasons the license got changed. The foundation wouldn't have a reason to do that therefor it is somewhat more secure if the code is in their hands imho.
Obviously there is always a chance that something changes about this assumption. But I would be happy if it stays at the foundation since that makes the reference implementations separate from the for profit oriented companies.
alohapersona
commented
1 year ago Having them legally in the non profit foundation is imho safer than having it in element even if element is the one doing a majority of work on it currently.
Let me explain my thinking here:
Or to phrase it differently: We're at the mercy of Element for them continuing to publish their code under Apache License. Whether that happens under the name of Matrix Foundation or Element doesn't really change anything about this.
alohapersona
commented
1 year ago Hello. It's me again.
The latest accounts statement as required by law, was published a few days ago.
I also noticed that in March 2023, The Matrix.org Foundation moved about 25%, totaling about £70k of its cryptocurrency assets (seemingly to Kraken). What is the reason for this transfer, given that it was previously said that the foundation would be holding those for rainy days and (last we know) the foundation has more than £100k on the bank?
Again, @ara4n, I think it would be very beneficial to the foundation if it was publishing any reports, even if as simple as what I suggested above. It will make people understand what donations are being used for and thereby likely will boost the donations the foundation receives.
alohapersona
commented
10 months ago Hello. It's me again.
Not-so-fun note for @MTRNord: Seems like putting Synapse and Dendrite under Apache License 2.0 in name of The Matrix.org Foundation has not stopped or hindered New Vector Ltd. in any way to change license and ownership of those projects. Sadly proves me right that it is really not a big thing.
@ara4n and @joshsimmons (who I guess is now responsible for this): This thread has multiple serious unanswered questions and partially conflicting statements. The way The Matrix.org Foundation publicly handles its financial responsibilities as a mostly donation-funded organisation seem a huge risk to the whole Matrix protocol to me - even more with further things being moved to the for-profit New Vector Ltd.
Looking forward to your replies.
joshsimmons
commented
10 months ago Hi @alohapersona, thanks for the tag and for being a persistent advocate for transparency. Transparency is something we should expect from any open source foundation, and I am committed to delivering on that as the Foundation's first Managing Director.
That said, it is the weekend :-) You'll hear more from me tomorrow.
alohapersona
commented
10 months ago Hi @joshsimmons. Thanks for the swift comment. Also be certain that I recognize that for any of this, you can't be blamed as you just took over responsibilities and probably didn't even know exactly what you are signing up for at the time.
joshsimmons
commented
10 months ago Thanks for your understanding, @alohapersona. As I'm now spending part of my weekend monitoring a pile on over on the other website, I'll take the opportunity to cross-post what I've said there:
I get that we're operating in a low trust environment, and you don't yet have any reason to trust me.
I will say this: I'm not here to carry water for past performance. I am here to build the foundation into the organization the community deserves, and I have a track record when it comes to making organizations more responsive to the communities they serve.
Not only will I respond to the questions and concerns, I am actually working on systemic solutions that will provide transparency as a matter of course. Of course, these are just words for now. Judge me by my actions in the days and months ahead.
Know that I do aim to earn your trust as an individual and as an organization, as well as to build the foundation into the kind of organization that, by merit of its rules, processes, and community representation in governance, doesn't require us to be trusting in the first place.
More to say tomorrow!
joshsimmons
commented
10 months ago Hi @alohapersona, I’ve included answers to your specific questions below, but first I wanted to share some context.
You can expect the Matrix.org Foundation to grow and evolve like other open source foundations, in terms of incrementally staffing up, increasing transparency and community governance, and establishing programs that support the ecosystem.
There are a lot of great examples we can learn from, though the manner in which we are starting adds some complexity. It’s a lot cleaner to start with a small balance and some IP than to inherit massive pre-existing commitments like running the matrix.org homeserver. The added complexity also makes things more difficult, and it’s fair to say the path to now has reflected that difficulty level.
The Foundation hit a key milestone this year when it delivered on its promise to make its first hire. If you look at the landscape and the history, you’ll find that the first hire makes a radical difference in delivering on the kinds of things I see you’ve been seeking for the last four years.
So, I’d like to set some expectations. The Foundation’s fiscal year, as you know by now, runs from November 1 to October 31, and it takes time to close the books. Especially when we’re still separating out our infrastructure and relying on people for whom the Foundation isn’t their first priority. After we close our books, two things happen: we send them off to the tax accountants, and I begin preparing our annual report. That annual report will cover revenue, expenses, and programmatic activity, all contextualized with our vision and where we are on the path to realizing our vision.
The timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’d expect that annual report to land around March or April.
And we should expect further maturation/normalization of process each successive year: when we seat our first elected Governing Board in 2024 Q2, I’ll finally have a board of community representatives to review and approve my budget! With that, we’ll start to see both a public budget before each financial year begins, and an annual report after it ends.
Ultimately, the project is to build this Foundation up into an independent, transparent, self-sustaining organization with community-driven governance at every layer. We will need continued mutual accountability to stay the course on the way to achieving that vision. To wit, I welcome call-ins and incisive questions, and also stress the need to be charitable with each other. This work is hard, it is painfully incremental, and it happens over the scale of years and decades.
I do not, however, welcome escalation to Hacker News with bad faith editorializing, which brings out the worst in people and leaves me wasting time confronting FUD rather than tending to forward-looking work that truly serves the community. Starting fires like that isn’t helpful.
For those who are invested in Matrix and want greater visibility into the Foundation’s activities, I invite you to join the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room I launched last month. We have a lovely community of people there who provide input, offer accountability, and join together to celebrate even the small successes on our collective journey to organizational maturity and self-governance.
I hope this helps you and all those who read this to understand where we are, where we are going, why things are the way they are, and how to get involved.
With gratitude, Josh Simmons Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation
ad astra per aspera 🚀
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
What you are seeing is that the Foundation is beginning to realize the actual cost of its operations. As the Foundation grows and begins to stand on its own two feet, you can expect many of these line items will become internal costs rather than costs bundled into our MSA. Put plainly, we’re still in the process of becoming independent and we aim to eventually staff many of these functions ourselves – whether through hiring employees, or contracting individuals or other companies.
At the risk of upsetting folks who like cryptocurrency, I deemed it irresponsible for the Foundation to be sitting on highly volatile speculative assets – the value could go to zero, or the exchanges could go bust. Indeed, the value has already plummeted from a high of 800K GBP. That’s not a sound approach to a rainy day fund, because, say what you will about the current banking system, our deposits are at least guaranteed there. To that end, I’ve begun liquidating our cryptocurrency and have unpublished our wallet IDs so we are less likely to receive donations this way.
To your question back in August about the book value of the cryptocurrency being reported as unchanged between 2021 and 2022: that must’ve been an error.
Yes, we plan to provide information about donations in our reports, including aggregate figures and some analysis, much the way we see other open source foundations doing so. No, we will not provide live data.
We’re consolidating on Donorbox because it has lower transaction fees. Many early stage nonprofits make the mistake of maintaining too many different channels for donations, which introduces more overhead than it’s worth – not just in accounting, but in monitoring all the inboxes, servicing each of the platforms, and trying to maintain an authoritative record of who the donors are.
alohapersona
commented
10 months ago Hi @joshsimmons. Thanks a ton for your comprehensive reply.
The timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’d expect that annual report to land around March or April.
I think it's totally fine and reasonable to have annual reports land 6 months after end of fiscal year.
Do I understand it correctly, that you do not plan to provide any kind of report for previous years, even though seemingly there have been significant money flows in and out of the foundation in those years?
escalation to Hacker News
Under the previous regime of the foundation, the only way to get a response to this thread was to escalate it to more public venues. I should have had given you a chance to prove you handle this differently before escalating, but I failed to realize that things are already handled by you.
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element
Can you share how much was paid to New Vector under this agreement, if possible on a per-year basis and categorized (e.g. in categories like "maintaining matrix.org homeserver", "promotion", "maintaining the standard/specification", "administration/legal")? Given that New Vector is a for-profit entity with a special role in the Matrix ecosystem and one of the purposes (if not the main purpose) of the foundation is to decouple Matrix from New Vector, I strongly believe the relationship with New Vector is where many people would want to see more transparency.
I deemed it irresponsible for the Foundation to be sitting on highly volatile speculative assets
This decisions (even if a little controversial) indeed gives the feeling that the foundation is now actually being managed responsibly, so thanks for sharing that note.
that must’ve been an error
Will you follow up on this with accountants or whoever is responsible for that? I don't know UK company law, but I bet erroneous account statements must be corrected ASAP.
No, we will not provide live data.
Would you at least consider to provide updated snapshots of donation information more regularly than in the annual report (e.g. monthly). I bet this can even be automated, so that no manual work is needed once set up.
evolve like other open source foundations
A little off-topic to this thread, but this sounds as if you see The Matrix.org Foundation more as an open source organization and less as a standards organization. This seems to not fully match what is outlined in MSC1779. How do you see the Matrix.org Foundation's position to non-free clients and servers (e.g. I see that Beeper is not listed on the clients page on matrix.org)? Can developers of proprietary matrix components participate in the standardization process? Could they get a seat in the Spec Core Team or be a Guardian?
Again, thanks for making an effort to handle my messages. I do know this stuff can be tedious and I also bet when taking over the leadership of the foundation, it wasn't really in best shape, so I appreciate any attempt to improve things from the status quo.
joshsimmons
commented
10 months ago Thanks for the follow up questions, @alohapersona, and I deeply appreciate the spirit in which you received my call-in about escalating. I'm on holiday for the rest of the week for $ComplicatedUSHoliday but will follow up with you on this thread early next week!
joshsimmons
commented
10 months ago Thanks for your patience! Hope you had a great week/end, @alohapersona. Responses in line:
Do I understand it correctly, that you do not plan to provide any kind of report for previous years, even though seemingly there have been significant money flows in and out of the foundation in those years?
It’s just not a priority at this time, and getting around to it would require us to be in substantially better condition. We are in extreme triage mode and housekeeping for past years doesn’t make the cut.
Can you share how much was paid to New Vector under this agreement [...] ?
Absolutely, I will gladly share all of that information with appropriate context in our 2023 Annual Report. For now I can say that mostly things have been donated and much still is, our first significant invoice from Element was in 2022, and only in 2023 are we beginning to shoulder the full costs of our bills and staff time. To give you a sense of magnitude, we’re talking about several full-time staffers and numerous part-timers covering the aforementioned functions.
Will you follow up on this with accountants or whoever is responsible for that? I don't know UK company law, but I bet erroneous account statements must be corrected ASAP.
I appreciate your concern and can assure you that everything that needs to be done will be done :-) It is my job, and the job of the accounting firm we work with, to ensure that everything is above board and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
Would you at least consider to provide updated snapshots of donation information more regularly than in the annual report (e.g. monthly). I bet this can even be automated, so that no manual work is needed once set up.
None of the open source foundations I’m familiar with do this kind of thing. But sure, if there was a compelling reason and the resources to do it, of course I’d consider it.
[T]his sounds as if you see The Matrix.org Foundation more as an open source organization and less as a standards organization.
I see it as necessarily both – as a standards organization for the Matrix protocol, and as an open source foundation for the ecosystem around it. I think we see this duality in many places, for instance the Python Software Foundation and Rust Foundations both support the wider ecosystem as well as look after the process by which their respective languages evolve through PEPs or RFCs.
How do you see the Matrix.org Foundation's position to non-free clients and servers (e.g. I see that Beeper is not listed on the clients page on matrix.org)?
Oh, I love this question. And, I should say, I also generally appreciate your questions: they provoke important conversations that we need to keep having as a community to chart our path.
My view is that we are obligated to focus on and prioritize FOSS clients, servers, etc, based on our nonprofit status as well as on our mission and the Matrix manifesto. That said, I don’t think that precludes recognizing proprietary implementations. Indeed, while five out of six of our Ecosystem pages exclusively list FOSS projects, one of them – Hosting – lists organizations that offer paid solutions and may use proprietary software somewhere in the mix. I reckon it’d make sense to list Beeper somewhere in our Ecosystem pages, I’m just not sure where yet.
Can developers of proprietary matrix components participate in the standardization process? Could they get a seat in the Spec Core Team or be a Guardian?
Yes and yes, though the second “yes” is more theoretical because we don’t yet have community-driven processes by which such a person would be seated. Critically, though, they would need to abide by the rules and mission of the Foundation which bind us to FOSS and.
Further, when it comes to evolving the standard, I believe the Spec Core Team requires an open source implementation before an MSC can be approved and merged in – such that it can be tested, reviewed, and serve as an example for those who are developing FOSS projects that speak Matrix. That would remain true even for those who are developing proprietary components.
turt2live
commented
10 months ago 👋 jumping in on the last point there in two parts:
Can developers of proprietary matrix components participate in the standardization process? Could they get a seat in the Spec Core Team or be a Guardian?
Yes and yes, though the second “yes” is more theoretical because we don’t yet have community-driven processes by which such a person would be seated. Critically, though, they would need to abide by the rules and mission of the Foundation which bind us to FOSS and.
To clarify, MSCs in particular must be submitted in line with the Guiding Principles, where fully-proprietary developers may find their ethos challenged.
Further, when it comes to evolving the standard, I believe the Spec Core Team requires an open source implementation before an MSC can be approved and merged in – such that it can be tested, reviewed, and serve as an example for those who are developing FOSS projects that speak Matrix. That would remain true even for those who are developing proprietary components.
"Implementation" of an MSC is difficult to describe. Often times it's actual real code, but sometimes it can be theoretical. We do not have a requirement that the code (or theory) be open source, but rather evidence that the feature is works well at a pragmatic scale. Each MSC has its implementation requirements evaluated differently, though the common trend is at least one client and one server implementation, either as a PR, commit, or repo (if large enough to be its own project).
These implementations can be proprietary if there's enough evidence externally to show that the feature is working as designed in the MSC and has significant adoption, though the SCT would be hesitant to accept that implementation as the sole satisfying requirement - further, open source, implementations would be required. That open source evidence can be as simple as a passing Complement test against the proprietary system, for example, as the test's existence demonstrates that other compliant implementations can be created.
For the non-code implementations, consider MSC4077 - it changes the process and the spec, but does not have an implementation. It also doesn't have the capability to have a code-based implementation either. It's "implementation" is the theory that someone else understands best practice more than we do, so we're adopting their process into ours. If we required a code implementation for the MSC, it'd be largely pointless as all it'd demonstrate is that a client can use <s> instead of <strike>. This is proven implicitly when we consider a Find & Replace All function in an IDE could "implement" such a proposal. Or in other words, our "pragmatic scale" for such a change is assuming a client developer can write a trivial commit.
joshsimmons
commented
8 months ago Hi folks! Keeping this issue alive and open at least until we get that Annual Report out in April. Wanted to jump in with an update, as today we published some high level financial figures as we launch a new fundraiser and begin documenting the full scope of the Foundation's work as well as our emerging roadmap.
I recommend reading the post, but wanted to share some rough figures here:
Last year's expenses were not representative of the full cost of running the Foundation though, and we expect annual expenses to stabilize just north of £900K. This comes down to us increasingly paying our own bills, instead of Element paying them for us – though Element still donates £3M+ in core development annually.
Breaking down that £900K figure, our 2024 budget looks something like:
Our plan for closing the budget gap is to focus on bringing in more recurring revenue through our membership program, and temporarily shore things up where possible with grants.
If we don't make good headway by ~Q3, we'll start implementing contingency plans to reduce our scope of work to make it sustainable. Fundamentally, if nothing else, the Foundation will fall back to stewarding the spec ... but we'd like to continue investing in advocacy and standards work as well as the operation of public servers, bridges, and bots.
allendema
commented
4 months ago until we get that Annual Report out in April
Hi, Can someone point me to the annual report(s)? Thanks.
joshsimmons
commented
4 months ago @allendema ahh, thank you so much for following up on that, and my apologies for not proactively commenting here.
I am pleased to say that the annual report is nearly complete, and I literally have it open now in a browser tab where I've been working on it.
I am sorry, though, that it is delayed and not already out for public review. Transparently, I'm still getting my arms around workload planning for our whole team as I navigate my first year as our Managing Director and we tackle projects (like the annual report and elections) that we've never done before. That is not an excuse so much as me taking responsibility for having let everyone down by letting the publication deadline slip and not communicating proactively about that.
More soon!
Is there any place where financial reports of The Matrix.org Foundation are published? Like, summary of income through donations, who is currently employed by The Matrix.org Foundation and how are funds spent outside of employments.
If such information already is public, I think it makes sense to link it on https://matrix.org/foundation/ If such information is not public yet, please consider to do it. After all, an organization collecting donations should make clear to some degree how those funds are used.