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.
The Business and Impact Award is given to those who have advanced open source businesses and promulgated open source innovation across Europe, oftentimes showcasing open source can provide access to untapped market potential.