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Happy holidays from the Matrix.org Foundation
🕑 Added 2023-12-20 01:27:02 +0000 UTCHello, wonderful supporters!
It's been a big year for Matrix â more than I can possibly summarize, and I suspect Matthew will cover that well in his forthcoming holiday update on our blog. On the tech side, the Spec Core Team and other contributors to the Matrix ecosystem have been doing a lot of polishing and advancing key long term initiatives, and the Foundation itself has hired its first ever Managing Director (hi, hello, that's me) who immediately got to work getting our house in order and preparing us all for a big 2024.
Today we announced our election timeline for the first ever Governing Board, as well as the introduction of two new membership tiers to increase community representation.
Part of today's announcement included information on how to become an Individual Member of the Matrix.org Foundation. Individual Members get to vote in our elections, and can even self-nominate to run in the elections. There are 4 seats for Individual Member representatives on our Governing Board.
To become an Individual Member, we are asking people to sign up on Donorbox at or above $60/year or equivalent in other currencies. (You can donate at lower levels, too.)
Relatedly, you may have noticed that this Patreon has been unmaintained. It's a pretty common pattern for nonprofits to set up lots of ways to donate, but then struggle to service them all â in the end, absent a robust staff, it is usually a net loss to maintain many donor platforms.
We're sorry to have let this Patreon fall into disrepair. We, unfortunately, fell into that common pattern, and you, our supporters, deserve better.
To that end, we are going to officially sunset our Patreon before the end of 2024. We encourage you to migrate to Donorbox at your earliest convenience. By consolidating, we can provide you with the level of support and responsiveness that you deserve.
And if you sign up on Donorbox before April 2024, you'll even get to participate in our first Governing Board election!
* Become an Individual Member on Donorbox, or
* Donate at any level on Donorbox
Any patron who contributed on Patreon at a level that makes them eligible to be an Individual Member between April 2023 and now will be eligible to vote, but must be in our new system. We will reach out to you to coordinate this.
This won't be the last message we post here, but all future messages will be aimed at migrating folks over to Donorbox or otherwise keeping them engaged as we move to sunset Patreon.
As we wrap up the year, from us to you: happy holidays, thank you for your support, and we look forward to forging our future together with Matrix in 2024!
Best wishes,
Josh Simmons
Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation
ad astra per aspera đ
Comments
Matrix.org
Thanks for your support and for commenting! Please take a look at the "Donate at any level on Donorbox" link in the post, that allows contributions starting at $1.
Andrew J. Caines
Matrix.org
Following up, we'd like to thank Mehrad for helping us catch an error and asking good questions, the answers to which we're sharing here for completeness and transparency! 1) We updated this post for clarity after it was first published, making two changes. (a) EVERYONE who has donated >=$60 since April 2023, regardless of platform, will be eligible to participate in next year's election â though we'll need to do some manual work on our end to coordinate that across platforms, so please stay tuned. (b) It's possible to donate at any level on Donorbox, and if you'd like to donate at less than $5/mo there's a different form for that â we've made the links to both forms more conspicuous in the post. 2) We chose Donorbox after spending more than a month evaluating CRM software and donation platforms. There was no option that met all our needs and constraints. Donorbox was the least bad option: we already use it, it has lower transaction fees than Patreon, it's very extensible, and it has the bare minimum of features we need in order to manage the Individual Member side of our membership program. Long term, we'd like to set up a FOSS CRM for ourselves but that requires significant up-front investment and introduces more overhead than we can take on given how hard our small but mighty team is already working. If folks have questions, concerns, or feedback, we're here for that. The best ways to reach us are to join our new-ish Matrix room #foundation-office:matrix.org or ping us on the fediverse.
