Matrix in the French State - FOSDEM 2019

Matrix in the French State What happens when a government adopts open source & open standards for all its internal communication? by Matthew Hodgson At: FOSDEM 2019 https://video.fosdem.org/2019/Janson/matrix_french_state.webm At the beginning of 2018, the French Government reached out to Matrix.org to discuss the idea of creating an entirely open source, standards-based encrypted messaging app as the official means of instant messaging and VoIP communication across the government; replacing adhoc usage of centralised proprietary services such as Telegram and WhatsApp. As of summer 2018, their app exists (a public fork of Riot.im), and there is now a massive federation of Matrix servers deployed throughout the government serving up to 5.5M users, spanning over 30 clusters, letting each ministry run and admin their own operationally independent deployment. In this talk we'll tell the adventure of rolling out FOSS communications at this scale, and give a tour of the architecture and