Hey everyone! Back in August of last year, the core team wrote a blog post titled "Laying the foundation for Rust's Future." Ever since then, the Core Team has been doing a tremendous amount of work to help get the foundation going, and prepare the project for the changes that have now occurred because of these events.
But that also means we've been very quiet! This sort of work has largely been focused inward, and not really something that's visible from the outside, even if you are on a Rust team. However, thanks to these efforts, the Foundation now exists, and is starting to work on its mission. That also means it's time for the core team to shift the focus of its work.
Beyond the Foundation efforts, we've also had several initiatives underway that you may or may not know about:
The 2021 Roadmap
The 2021 Roadmap RFC was merged back in January. This set the goals for the core team for this year. This is a bit different from previous years, where we laid out goals for the entire project. We decided this year to focus on Core, and give the teams the leeway to set their own goals, while we focused on overall organizational health.
Later in the year, we'll be starting the process for next year as well. We're not actively thinking about this yet, but ideally, a yearly roadmap would be merged in December, rather than in January, so we want to make sure and begin early enough to get this shipped on time for 2022.
Team Charters
As part of that work, we've begun the first steps of a process to give each team a formal charter. Way back in RFC 1068, the scope of the initial teams was laid out. While that has served us well over the years, as teams were spun up, shut down, and changed, we haven't always done a good job of making it clear where the boundaries of responsibility lie in each team. Part of the magic in Rust's governance structure is that individual teams are given significant authority to do as they see fit, but that also means that we have to be concious about scope. We'll have more to report on this process as it continues to unfold, but the end goal is stated in the roadmap:
The Rust teams, in concert with the core team, will work to establish a charter for each of the Rust teams over the course of the year, with an aim for defining, particularly, the purpose and membership requirements. Our goal is that going into 2022, all active groups within the Rust project will have well-defined charters and membership.
Now is the time to redouble efforts here, and we are excited to work with all of the teams on nailing these charters down. As a start, we've been working with the Libs, Release, and Cargo teams for an initial pass at their charters. We've structured this to be largely team-driven; we're setting expectations and framing what charters should look like, but the teams work on what goes in them. As this progresses, we hope to learn more about the challenges involved so that we can improve our process and bring in more teams.
It's worth pointing out explicitly that this work also includes the Core Team; we'll be creating a charter for ourselves as well.
Audit of packages owned by the project
As another example of something the core team has been working on, we've been doing work to clarify the status of a number of packages owned by the Rust team on crates.io. We are conducting a full audit of these packages, making sure that they're things that should be owned by the project, making sure that they have appropriate permissions, making sure that they have people taking care of them, all of that kind of thing. Historically, we've been fairly ad-hoc about this sort of thing, but as we grow, it is very imporant to be deliberate. An RFC was just opened to create a policy here.
Thanks!
So that's a quick summary of what we've been up to, and some of what we'll be doing in the immediate future. We plan on trying to communicate what Core is working on more often in the future; 2020 was an extremely complex year for a variety of reasons, but we're feeling really positive about the future of Core and the Rust project generally. Thank you to the teams for all you've done for Rust.