January & February 2026 Project Director Update

Mar. 25, 2026 · Carol Nichols and David Wood on behalf of Rust Foundation Project Directors

This month, we have a combo board-meeting update to share covering the Rust Foundation's January and February 2026 Meetings. Thanks for your patience!

As a reminder, the Project Directors are an elected group that represent the Rust Project on the board of the Rust Foundation, and are responsible for the Rust Project's relationship with the Foundation.

January

Read the full minutes for the January meeting on the Foundation's site.

Starting this year, the format of board meetings has changed to emphasise discussion, which has been a great! As part of that, our regular updates are provided in a separate executive briefing, but fret not, we'll include those updates here even if they aren't in the meeting minutes:

  • Funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency, a new Infra Engineer has started on the 19th January. Learn more about Ubiratan Soares in this blog post.

  • Foundation staff attended a variety of events at EU Open Source Week, including: Code & Compliance, EU OSS Awards, EU Policy Summit, FOSDEM, Google Foundations Meet-up, and OFE EU roundtable. These events are a great opportunity for the staff to collaborate with their peers at other foundations on policy changes affecting open source projects and developers.

  • The RustConf Call-For-Proposals was open through February 16 Sponsorship opportunities are also live on the website (which is undergoing a rebrand and will be relaunched by the end of Q1).

  • There was a great turnout and reception for Rust Global in Tokyo and there are ongoing discussions with Rust Tokyo organizers to explore other opportunities in the region. Recordings have since been published.

  • The Foundation's engineering team made lots of progress on their projects:

    • cargo-capslock has been developed to perform both static and runtime capability analysis on Rust binaries

    • The vulnerability surfacing to crates.io RFC has been officially accepted

    • The security tab implementation continues with reviews and feedback, providing more and more improvements before going live.

    • crates.io's frontend is being migrated from EmberJS to Svelte

    • A plan of action is being developed for the interop initiative in 2026, focusing, in part, on a continued pursuit of a memory-safe subset for C++ to establish a win for long-term interoperability, which is end-to-end memory safety between the two languages

    • Also, as part of a defined project goal, we will continue in earnest mapping the interop problem space that will likely consist of issues in Rust, C++ or both languages

    • The Infra team supported the docs-rs team to move all their metrics, dashboards and alerts from the deprecated self-hosted monitoring solution to Datadog, which is more reliable, secure and offers a better developer experience

    • An end-of-year review is being prepared for the work around TUF and signing

    • As part of our STF funding goals, major changes to the docs.rs environment to take greater advantage of in-kind infrastructure have been made

    • AWS gave the Rust Project a generous donation of credits, giving us breathing room for 2026

    • A new travel grant request form was created to streamline the process for project members

  • The board discussed the eligibility requirements for the Rust Innovation Lab, agreeing to work asynchronously to have concrete guidelines written prior to the next meeting

  • The board reviewed the outline of the proposed structure for a yet-to-be-named End User Group within the Foundation. Its aim will be to create a stronger reciprocal relationship between the industry/commercial users of Rust, the Rust Foundation, and the Project; aid Rust adoption; and spur innovation in tooling for industrial users

February

The section below covers the Rust Foundation board meeting that happened on February 10, 2026. Read the full February minutes on the Foundation's site. Highlights include:

  • Alexandru Radovici was re-elected as the Silver Member board representative. Congrats, Alexandru!
  • The board discussed clarifications on what would make a project a great fit for being accepted into the Rust Innovation Lab. This discussion continued via email and resulted in improvements to the documents in the RIL repo that we plan to do a dedicated blog post about soon!
  • The Foundation's engineering team have made progress on their efforts:
  • The Foundation held interviews with team leads in the project to learn about their concerns and needs
  • RustConf early-bird registration, a website re-launch, and speaker announcements coming later in March! The Program Committee is hard at work reviewing and selecting talks now.

We'll be back soon with the update from the March meeting, which took place on March 10, 2026!