Hello again from the Rust Leadership Council! We wanted to share an update on what the Council has been working on since our last update.
Accomplishments so far
Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund
The Funding team has been established from RFC#3931 to work with the Rust Foundation to administer the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (#294). This fund is directed towards supporting Rust Project maintainers with long-term funding so that maintainers can focus on important work that ensures the long-term health of Rust. More information can be found in the launch announcement.
We have allocated $50k for them to spend on maintainer support (#304). Additionally, the Council delegated the management of the Project grants program to the Funding team (#301).
All-Hands 2027
The Council approved an All-Hands event in 2027 (#300). This event is an opportunity for Project members to meet in person to collaborate on the future of Rust. The event will take place during RustWeek 2027 in the Netherlands on May 27-29. More information will be coming soon.
Comprehensibility team
The Council approved the formation of a new Comprehensibility team lead by David Wood to document the inner workings of the Rust project (#298).
Comprehensibility has been a long-standing deficiency of the Rust Project. New contributors and organizations interested in participating often struggle to understand how to contribute, and cross-team collaboration is hindered by mismatched expectations and working practices. The team aims to document the policies, processes, team structures, and other aspects of the Project to help contributors understand how the Rust project operates, to clarify contribution processes, and to improve cross-team coordination.
Initial work will involve setting up a structure for documenting team charters and working with teams to fill those out.
Project priorities budget
Since 2024, the Project has managed a Project Priorities budget. The council spends funds from this budget on activities that support the work of the Project. Since the last update, the Council approved the following additional allocations.
As mentioned above, $50k was allocated to the Funding team for spending on maintainer support (#304).
An additional $7k was allocated to the Mentors team to support an extra Outreachy intern, bringing the total up to four interns. (#288).
$15k was allocated to the Content team to help pay for equipment, software, and editing support for video production. (#279)
The travel budget is essentially fully spent, though we are still waiting for the final costs from the All-hands. As a reminder, the Foundation has allocated a dedicated $50k to support travel to RustConf 2026.
For 2027, we have provisionally allocated $50k for the next All-hands (#300).
Additional items
- The Foundation gave a presentation to the Council regarding the EU CRA and what its impact might be (#291). Separately Æva Black gave a presentation to the Project with an overview of how it relates to open source projects like Rust. There's still ongoing work between open source coalitions and the European Commission in understanding, clarifying, and finalizing the regulatory guidance. A particular concern for the Rust Foundation is whether or not it would be categorized as an "open-source software steward". More details should be worked out later this year.
- The annual Council survey was just launched to receive feedback from Project members on the Council (surveys#409).
Following our work
As you can see from the many links above, the work of the Council happens mostly in public on GitHub issues posted in our repository. The items on our meeting agendas are drawn from these. After discussing an item, we summarize that discussion and any shared rationales on the issue. When we make decisions, we propose on the issue a "final comment period" (FCP), and as with all FCPs in the Project, we're interested in and review any feedback that people have before or during this final comment period.
To follow our work in real time, watch our repository. You can also see meeting summaries posted on Zulip in #council > Meeting minutes & summaries.
Meeting minutes
We publish minutes from all Council meetings to the Leadership Council repo. Links to the minutes since our last update are: