April & May 2026 Project Director Update

July 1, 2026 · Carol Nichols and David Wood on behalf of Rust Foundation Project Directors

This post covers the Rust Foundation board meetings that happened on April 14 and May 12, 2026.

Find the full April 2026 minutes on the Foundation's site. Highlights include:

  • The board had an open-ended discussion about public perception around the Rust community. The board discussed noting and collecting examples to inform future conversations.
  • The Foundation will be holding a Rust Foundation Members Summit alongside RustConf this year.
  • Project Directors requested that the executive briefings sent out in advance of board meetings include reports on the membership acquisition funnel so that we can provide support if it would be helpful.
  • Joel thanked Mara Bos for attending the WG21 C++ Standards meeting along with the Foundation, where her presence and knowledge helped guide some excellent conclusions around the Rust/C++ interop direction and connections.
  • The Foundation's engineers got access to Project Glasswing through the Foundation's partnerships with Alpha Omega, the Linux Foundation, and the OpenSSF. The board asked for updates on the results.

Find the full May 2026 minutes on the Foundation's site. Highlights include:

  • Canonical is now a Gold Member, and Jon Seager joined the meeting as their representative.
  • Alpha-Omega offered funds for a short-term contractor to be an "AI Security Engineer in Residence" to help with the increasing amounts of security report triage the ecosystem is experiencing.
  • Crates.io received a GDPR takedown request that included some crates that had a few other crates depending on them. The crates did not contain personal information and will remain even though the account and all associated PII was deleted as requested. The Foundation is working on clarifications to Crates.io's policies as a result of this experience.
  • The Foundation is preparing to launch the Rust Commercial Network, a venue for industry adopters of Rust to come together, share their experiences and collaborate.
  • The Foundation's AI usage policy has been published - governing the Foundation's staff use of AI tooling (not the Rust Project's permitted usage).