Matrix Spaces

Summary

This issue proposes to the Eclipse Foundation to set up Matrix infrastructure, effectively providing Matrix Spaces (aka chat rooms) for all Eclipse Working Groups, Projects and Sub Projects.

Justification

While in former times mailing lists and online forums had been the stereotypical means of communications among committers, many new members prefer chat rooms, or even do not own an email account at all. Due to the lack of an open and acceptes standard, people are separated into groups, some using ICQ or XMPP standards, other using proprietrary services like Slack, WhatsApp, Threema or Signal. In an attempt to provide one unified chat communications standard, the European Union (EU)'s Digital Markets Act (DMA) mandated that by end of 2022 all chat providers in the EU MUST open their APIs to become interoperable. As a consequence, some providers (e. g. Gitter and Rocket Chat) already started to migrate their systems to the vendor-neutral, open and free Matrix standard. Also, many organizations already have migrated to Matrix-compatible systems, including public services like the complete Government of the Republic of France, Germany's complete Army (Bundeswehr), some European universities, etc. or private parties like Germany's complete health service, German chapter of The Red Cross (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz e. V.), and lots more, but also member organizations of the Eclipse Foundation like the iJUG e. V. (Association of Java User Groups in DE, A and CH).

The major benefit of the Matrix standard not only is that it is free, open, and cross-vendor, but also that there exist bridges to all major chat services like e. g. Slack and Signal. This means, Matrix-hosted chatrooms can be shared not only among Matrix users but also by Slack and Signal users (and many more). Ontop of that, as Matrix is an open standard, a lot of client and server implementations exist, allowing people to chat with others using different apps.

Due to the broad success of Matrix, it makes sense for the Eclipse Foundation to set up an infrastructure which is hosting Matrix Spaces (aka chat rooms) for each Working Group / Project / Sub Project, allowing committers and contributors to use chat communication in their project, without enforcing all parties into a contract with one specific close-communications provide like Slack.

NB: I am the vice-ambassador of the iJUG e. V. at the Eclipse Foundation and I am administrating the iJUG e. V.'s Matrix infrastructure, hence I personally and / or the iJUG e. V. can help with setting up and maintaining a Matrix infrastructure at the Eclipse Foundation.