09-21, 11:15–12:00 (Europe/Berlin), LAB Green (Basement)
Public institutions, at least in Germany, have the reputation of being sluggish and opposed to progress – and, well, it’s kind of true. Nevertheless, for the past four years, we attempted to implement a free/libre and open-source sofware-based infrastructure, primarily based on the [matrix] protocol, at Europe’s largest art university. This talk provides an overview of our prototypes and implementations based on the idea of [matrix] as an institution-wide unified federated data(base) layer, our learnings of institution-wide rollouts, the struggles with the characteristics of public institutions themselves, and a perspective on how such an endeavor can still succeed in other places in the future.
Four years ago, in 2020, we began attempting to transform Berlin University of the Arts, Europe’s biggest art university, from within by building a F/LOSS-based infrastructure for digital communication and collaboration. What initially started with a somewhat customized and stylized Element-Web client quickly reached its limits regarding the specific application requirements of an art university.
Building ontop of the [matrix] protocol, we attempted to conceive this protocol as an institution-wide unified federated datalayer, far beyond the scope of pure person-to-person or room-based instant messaging.
We will contextualize this rather abstract idea with insights into the various F/LOSS projects we’ve developed and deployed university-wide based on this concept. The focus was not only to create institution-specific applications, but also implementing them as configurable and expandable F/LOSS projects, following the paradigm of “public money, public code,” and spinning them off into their own F/LOSS oganisation, the »medienhaus/« project.
Insights will be given into our two main developments during that timeframe and their respective complementary software infrastructure. On one hand, the [matrix]-based »medienhaus/cms« content management system and its challenges with frontend caching with tens of thousands of nested [matrix] spaces, and on the other hand, the collaboration and communication system »medienhaus/spaces«, designed for use by .e.g public institutions, groups, and individuals alike, which—in addition to pure instant messaging—stores different collaborative application data like text pad items or whiteboard items directly “in the [matrix]”.
The talk navigates the intersection of software prototyping, system administration, and insights into architectural concepts, ideas, and decisions regarding how the [matrix] protocol can be used as a unified data(base) layer for institutions. The talk also provides insights into the challenges of such an undertaking in a German public institution, and what needs to change in the future for public institutions to actively participate in the shift towards a F/LOSS-based infrastructure.
researching and teaching at the Berlin University of the Arts