Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

We believe that real-time communication is fundamentally broken and fragmented on today's internet - be it for VoIP, IM or IoT services. Some initiatives like XMPP and SIP have tried to solve this, but have not taken off as they might have done, leaving the internet dominated by closed proprietary islands of communication like WhatsApp, Facebook and Hangouts for human communication, and a myriad different vendor silos for IoT device communication.

This talk provides a general review of ways of fixing this problem and introduces Matrix: an open standard for decentralised communication - which may provide a new hope.

Matrix is an open standard defining a distributed persistent messaging fabric using RESTful HTTP APIs and open source, Apache-licensed reference server and client implementations for exchanging and persisting arbitrary JSON data. Communication history is a first class citizen in Matrix, and just like email, you can either run your own Matrix homeserver - which means you own and control your own communications and history - or you can use one hosted by someone else (e.g. matrix.org). There is no single point of control or mandatory service provider in Matrix: you get the control of your communications back.

Matrix has been received very positively by the WebRTC community by providing a much-needed pragmatic standardized HTTP JSON API for WebRTC call setup - winning the Audience Award at WebRTC Expo 2014 and Best of Show at WebRTC World 2015!

We hope Matrix will crack the problem of a interoperable communication by becoming a widely successful open federated platform for any kind of communication on the internet - from group chat and WebRTC to IoT - and anywhere else you need a common data fabric to link together fragmented silos of communication!

URLs: Homepage: http://matrix.org Code: https://github.com/matrix-org Debian repo: http://matrix.org/packages/debian/

Speaker