Amandine Le Pape, Head of Section – Business & Impact at the Open Source Academy, is the COO and co-founder of Element, a secure and interoperable open source communication platform built on Matrix—the open standard she also co-founded. Element enables sovereign communications for complex organisations that cannot depend on commercial cloud solutions or unencrypted platforms, serving millions of users including NATO, the UN, the German Armed Forces, the US Navy, and companies like Mozilla. Since 2014, Amandine has worked to balance the growth of a thriving open ecosystem through the non-profit Matrix.org Foundation with building a sustainable open source company through Element, with a strong focus on gov tech. She received the Business & Impact Award for her role as a disruptor in open source innovation, with the Matrix project addressing fragmentation in communication technologies like Chat, VoIP, VR, and IoT.
Reflecting on the award, she said, “It is a true honour to receive this first Business & Impact award from the Open Source Academy. I have spent the last 10 years working closely with governments and have been thrilled to see the awareness of the value of open source grow at high speed in gov tech. However it has been very hard to change the mindset around buying open source, and instil an understanding of what type of financial support the projects and companies need to be sustainable and able to compete with proprietary alternatives. Some organisations are taking great steps in the right direction but most of the market is still in the old ways. Having been lobbying with a supplier hat on, this Award and my new role as the Business & Impact section lead in the Academy will allow me to have a louder voice to help our ecosystem and hopefully accelerate change in both the public and private sectors.”
