Leadership Council update — September 2026

Sept. 28, 2026 · Jakub Beránek on behalf of Leadership Council

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

Welcome Mark Rousskov and Pete LeVasseur to the Council

Every six months, the Leadership Council performs a Council representative election, to elect new representatives of several top-level teams. This time, the representatives of the Infrastructure, Language, Library, and Moderation teams were elected.

The September representative selections have completed. Here are the results:

  • Jakub Beránek (@kobzol) will continue representing the Infrastructure team
  • Pete LeVasseur (@PLeVassuer) will represent the Language team
  • Mark Rousskov (@Mark-Simulacrum) will represent the Library team
  • Oli Scherer (@oli-obk) will continue representing the Moderation team

We welcome Pete and Mark to the Leadership Council!

We would also like to thank our outgoing representatives TC and Josh Triplett for their time on the Council. We appreciate your help and support!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the process! The next representative selections will be in March 2027 for the other half of the Council.

Project Director Elections

Same as last year, the Leadership Council has launched an election to select two new Project Directors who will sit on the Rust Foundation Board of Directors (#324). The nominations for the Director positions have been gathered, but the actual election will happen in October. Once we know the two elected Project Directors, we will announce them on the Rust Blog.

Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund

Since the last update, we decided to allocate an additional $120k to the recently established Funding team (#328), in addition to the $50k which we have already allocated previously.

The funding team used this money, together with other funds from the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund to financially support seven Rust contributors, five Maintainers in Residence and two Maintenance Grantees. Read the announcement blog posts (1, 2) to learn more.

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.

At the start of July, we led talks about the Project Priorities budget with Rust Project Directors and the Rust Foundation. Based on those discussions, we decided to spend the whole available budget every year, instead of keeping a buffer for the following year, which is what we have been doing so far (#314). This makes tracking of the budget and accounting simpler, and it also has the benefit of giving us more money to spend in 2026! You can find the additional allocations that we made since the last update below.

  • As mentioned above, $120k was allocated to the Funding team for further spending on maintainer support (#318).
  • An additional $32k was allocated to the Mentors team for the next Outreachy round in December 2026 (#320).
  • We allocated an additional $32,325 to the travel budget for Rust Project members, in addition to the $100k that we previously allocated for 2026 (#316).

LLM policy discussions

The Council, together with many other members of the Rust Project, spent a lot of time discussing various policies related to using Large Language Models (LLMs) when interacting with the Rust Project and its repositories. Thanks to the awesome work of jyn514 and many other people, the main rust-lang/rust repository now has an official LLM policy. Several other rust-lang/rust repositories followed suit and adopted this policy, usually with slight modifications.

That is not the end of the policy discussions though, because we would also like to have a Project-wide policy, and also have someone who will be responsible for updating the policies in the future. After many discussions, we settled on creating a new LLM policy team, to which we delegated the responsibility of coming up with a Project-wide policy and updating our existing LLM policies.

Additional items

  • We updated the Council observer policy, which specifies who can join the Council meetings and what they are allowed to do during them. The updated policy reflects more accurately how our meetings work today, and is generally more permissive (#110).
  • We slightly updated the suggestions for the Leadership Council representative selection process. The guidelines now suggest consulting Council candidates with the moderator team prior to them being selected as Council members (#327).
  • Tomáš Šedovič, one of the members of the Program Management team who was previously funded from our Project Priorities budget, has now been hired as a full-time employee by the Rust Foundation! We are very happy about that.
  • We finished the annual Council survey to receive feedback from Project members on the Council (surveys#409). We are analyzing the results now, and will share them with Project members once the analysis is complete.

A word of thanks

For the past couple of years, the Leadership Council update blog posts were always prepared and written by Eric Huss, who has recently left the Rust Leadership Council. We wanted to thank him for all the work he put into them, and all his contributions to Rust. Thank you very much, Eric!

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: