Posts tagged "council" | Rust Blog

Leadership Council update — September 2026

2026-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

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:

July 3, 2026
July 17, 2026
July 31, 2026
August 14, 2026
August 28, 2026
September 11, 2026: cancelled due to RustConf

Leadership Council September 2026 Representative Selections

2026-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

The selection process for representatives on the Leadership Council is starting today.

Every six months, half of the council terms end. The following teams are up to choose their representative for the next year:

Infra
Lang
Libs
Mods

We are aiming to have the teams confirm their choices by September 23, 2026, and for any possible new members to be ready to join the council meetings starting September 25th.

Criteria for representatives

Any member of the top-level team or a member of any of their subteams is eligible to be the representative. See candidate criteria for a description of what makes a good representative.

There is a limit of at most two people affiliated with the same company or other legal entity being on the council ^[1]. During the selection process, the council will consider the affiliation of candidates to decide if all choices will be compatible with that constraint.

Representatives may serve multiple terms if the team decides to choose the same representative again. There is a soft limit of three terms.^[2] It is recommended that teams rotate their representatives if possible to help avoid burnout and to spread the experience to a broader group of people.

What do Representatives do?

A representative provides a voice on the council to represent the interests of their teams and contribute to the long-term success of the Rust Project. A detailed description of the role may be found at the Representative Role Description.

How should teams make their selection?

The Leadership Council has put together a Representative Selection Guide with recommendations for teams on how to go about choosing a representative. It is not a requirement that teams follow this guide; top-level teams may choose their own process.

See Limits on representatives from a single company/entity ↩
See Term limits. ↩

Leadership Council update — June 2026

2026-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

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

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:

April 10, 2026
April 24, 2026
May 8, 2026
June 5, 2026
June 19, 2026

Leadership Council update — March 2026

2026-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

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 Rémy Rakic and Josh Triplett to the Council

The March representative selections have completed. There were several changes made to the Council:

Mara Bos stepped down as the libs team representative to switch to be the launching pad representative.
Josh Triplett has joined to take Mara's place as the libs team representative.
Rémy Rakic has joined as the compiler team representative.
Eric Huss remains as the dev tools team representative.

We'd like to thank our outgoing representatives James Munns and Josh Stone for their time on the Council. We've greatly appreciated their support!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the process! The next representative selections will be in September 2026 for the other half of the Council.

Welcome Nurzhan Saken as our second Program Manager

In February we welcomed Nurzhan Saken as our second Program Manager joining Tomas Sedovic. This will help make our PM program more sustainable and strengthen the support it provides. You can read more about Nurzhan in the recent PM update.

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 2026, the Foundation allocated to this budget $306k (USD) in new funds and transferred $106k in remaining funds from the Project Grants program. For the past several months the Council has been working on allocating towards various priorities. The following items have been approved:

Raised our travel grant limit to $100k (#254). Note that in addition to this, the Foundation is providing an additional $50k for RustConf travel.
Allocated an additional $160k for the Program Manager program, which combined with the remaining budget from 2025 gave us about $344k starting balance for the year. (#255)
Allocated $25k for Outreachy mentorship (#264).
Allocated $55k for the compiler-ops contract (#244).

In addition to these already allocated funds, we are discussing whether to reserve the remaining amount with the following:

Funding the Content Team with $15k to help produce video content (#279).
Restarting the grants program with $100k to support existing maintainers (RFC#3919).
Considering an unspecified amount for web design support on crates.io (#278).

Additional items

Finalized an alumni policy that involves an annual notification to members to let them know which teams they are a member of, and to check if they are still active. #218
Updated the responsibilities of Project Directors to better define and clarify expectations. #250
Clarified that the mentor team doesn't need to ask the Council to participate in GSoC 2026. #253
The Foundation has updated the process for travel grant applications. #259
Approved a proposal for delegating guest invites for the All-Hands. #252

Ongoing work

Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund

In December we formed a committee (#248) to put together a proposal to define how to use the funds from the Rust Foundation Maintainer Fund. The RFMF is a dedicated fund used to support Rust Project maintainers.

The team has been working very hard on a proposal which is now open for comments at RFC#3931.

Contribution policy

A lively discussion has been taking place around policies for AI contributions, prompted by an increase of "slop" submissions to the project. An interim proposal was submitted in #273, which was intended to address some of the immediate concerns in the rust-lang/rust repository. A second proposal was also submitted that focuses on the desired kinds of contributions and that has since moved to RFC#3936 to gather comments from the project. This is an important question for the Project, and we expect this to continue to be a focus in the near term as we continue discussions and consider different proposals.

Additional items

James Munns has continued to work on the Rust Society proposal by collecting a group of interested parties to help administer the program. #260

Following our work

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:

December 5, 2025
December 19, 2025
January 16, 2026
January 30, 2026
February 13, 2026
February 27, 2026
March 13, 2026
March 27, 2026

Leadership Council March 2026 Representative Selections

2026-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

The selection process for representatives on the Leadership Council is starting today.

Every six months, half of the council terms end. The following teams are up to choose their representative for the next year:

Compiler
Devtools
Launching Pad

We are aiming to have the teams confirm their choices by March 20, 2026, and for any possible new members to be ready to join the council meetings starting March 27th.

Criteria for representatives

Any member of the top-level team or a member of any of their subteams is eligible to be the representative. See candidate criteria for a description of what makes a good representative.

What do Representatives do?

How should teams make their selection?

See Limits on representatives from a single company/entity ↩
See Term limits. ↩

Leadership Council update — December 2025

2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

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 Jakub Beránek to the Council

As announced in September, Jakub Beránek joined the Council representing the Infrastructure team.

Foundation updates

In October we wrapped up the election process for the Project Directors of the Rust Foundation. Jack Huey, Niko Matsakis, and David Wood are our new Directors (see announcement). We'd like to thank Tomas Sedovic for facilitating the election process.

We've been discussing the 2026 "Project Priorities" budget with the Foundation, which would continue the program funded by Microsoft in 2024 and 2025. We're happy to report that we will be able to continue this program, which funds initiatives such as our travel budget, program management, compiler operations, and other maintenance support for the Rust project. The final budget will be submitted for board approval at the next meeting in December. We'll have more to share about this in the future. #183 #234

We have engaged in extensive discussions regarding the Foundation's 3-year strategy, which is also scheduled for approval at the December board meeting. #197

After monitoring travel budget spending and addressing concerns regarding 2025 expenditure levels, we have decided to maintain our current policy for the time being. #182

We coordinated with the Foundation on the announcement of the Rust Innovation Lab, and are excited to see this initiative move forward.

Shape of Rust

We have implemented changes to the team structure to further clarify the status of teams in the Launching Pad. The following teams have been moved or archived:

Team	Tracking Issue	Outcome?
Community Content Team	#129	Archived
Community Rustbridge Team	#132	Archived
Book Team	#123	Moved to lang-docs
Docker Team	#124	Moved to T-Infra
Async WG	#137	Moved to T-Lang
Rust By Example WG	#139	Moved to lang-docs

The following teams have confirmed that they will stay in the Launching Pad, which will likely be rechartered in the future to cover cross-cutting teams:

Team	Tracking Issue	Outcome?
This Week In Rust	#125	Stay in Launching Pad
Community Survey Team	#133	Renamed, Stay in Launching Pad
Security Response WG	#141	Renamed, Stay in Launching Pad
Triage WG	#142	Renamed, Stay in Launching Pad

Progress has been made with other Launching Pad teams, though these efforts have not yet concluded. The following teams are still under discussion:

Team	Tracking Issue
Secure Code Working Group	#140
Embedded Working Group	#127
CLI Working Group	#138
Gamedev Working Group	#126

James Munns submitted a proposal detailing the vision and operational structure of the Rust Society.

Additional items

Other updates include:

We concluded a contributor survey primarily focused on understanding the balance between funded and volunteer-based contributions within the Rust Project. The results will help inform how we can better support maintainers. #222
We approved a requirement for all Project members to have a Zulip account (in addition to a GitHub account) to ensure more reliable communication. #228
We agreed to extend an invitation to the Rust for Linux contributors for the 2026 All-Hands. #236
In response to a query regarding responsibility for stable versus unstable support in stable releases, we clarified that this generally falls under the Lang team's purview, with the Compiler team primarily responsible for implementation. #180
We agreed to delegate decisions regarding GSoC mentor rewards to the Mentorship team. #232
We considered a request to establish a Project Representative position but decided against it for the time being. #226

Ongoing work

Several projects have seen significant discussion since our last update but have not yet reached a conclusion.

Foundation

We are excited about the development of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. We are working closely with the Foundation to guide how this program will fund Rust Project maintainers. A working group is forming to define the usage of these funds (#248). We expect to have an approved plan and policy in place in January 2026. #242

David Wood has proposed a clarification of Project Director responsibilities, which we hope will improve understanding and communication between the Council, the Directors, and the Foundation. #250

Additional items

We are following up on a request to add Graydon Hoare to the alumni section of the website. #231
Regarding a request to link the community Discord from our website, we have deferred the decision to the website management team. #219
We received invitations to apply for funding from the Rust Ecosystem Fund. #240

Following our work

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:

August 29, 2025
September 12, 2025
September 26, 2025
October 10, 2025
October 24, 2025
November 7, 2025
November 14, 2025
November 21, 2025

Leadership Council September 2025 Representative Selections

2025-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

The September 2025 selections for Leadership Council representatives have been finalized. The infrastructure team has chosen Jakub Beránek as their new representative. TC, Mara Bos, and Oli Scherer will continue to represent lang, libs, and mods respectively.

We'd like to give our thanks to outgoing representative Mark Rousskov for being instrumental to the formation of the Council and representing the infrastructure team these past two years. We've greatly appreciated Mark's support!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the process! The next representative selections will be in March 2026 for the other half of the Council.

Leadership Council update — September 2025

2025-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

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

Content team

Pete LeVasseur and TC created the Content team (leadership-council#206). The team is charged with producing publishable content that is of interest and benefit to the Rust Project and its community including blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc. The team is talking with people in the Project and the community to share their knowledge and experience, and most immediately, the team has been organizing interviews that will be recorded at RustConf.

We are looking forward to soon seeing what they produce.

All-hands 2026

The Council approved the 2026 All-Hands event (leadership-council#192). This event is an opportunity for Project members to meet in person to to collaborate on the future of Rust. The event is scheduled to occur again with RustWeek 2026 in The Netherlands on May 21-23. More information will be coming soon.

Additional items

And a few other items:

Coordinated with the mods team on the creation of the venue mods team, which is responsible for moderating venues such as GitHub and Zulip. team#1874
Approved the renewal of the compiler ops contract. leadership-council#181
Approved substitutes for the July and August Foundation board meetings. leadership-council#187 leadership-council#194 leadership-council#201
Coordinated with the RustConf organizers on how to distribute free or reduced-price tickets for Project members. leadership-council#190
Added @jieyouxu to the team-repo-admins, who are responsible for updating the Rust team memberships and resources. leadership-council#205
Coordinated with the infra team to set up the email alias for contact@rust-lang.org as the contact address of the rust-lang GitHub organization. leadership-council#202
Coordinated with the social media team to approve the creation of an official LinkedIn page for Rust, now up at https://www.linkedin.com/company/rust-lang/. leadership-council#208
Approved a travel grant for @tomassedovic to go to Kangrejos 2025, the Rust for Linux Workshop. leadership-council#217

Ongoing work

There are various efforts underway on projects that have had significant discussions since the last update, but have not concluded with any decisions, yet. They are:

Rust Society

@JamesMunns has continued to develop the concept of the "Rust Society". The Rust Society will be an organizational structure for user groups (commonly called "Special Interest Groups", "Working Groups", etc. in other organizations) outside of the Rust Project, but administrated by the Rust Project via a new "T-Society-Admins" subteam of the Launching Pad.

This structure is intended to be the long-term home for existing Domain Working Groups, which will be retired as a concept after this work is complete. In the future, this structure intends to offer "open enrollment" for any interested group of users.

See the latest proposed charter for how the Rust Society will function.

Foundation

There have been continual discussions with the Foundation on various topics. We are excited to welcome Lori Lorusso, who has started as the Foundation's new Director of Outreach. She hit the ground running and has been helping to coordinate with the Foundation and plan upcoming projects.

We have been discussing with the Foundation the possibilities for continuing the budget for project priorities in 2026. For 2024 and 2025, this budget was made possible by a generous unrestricted grant from Microsoft. We are looking for ways that we can continue this budget so as to continue important programs such as travel grants, the all-hands, project grants, program management, and compiler operations.

We discussed the condition of the 2025 travel grant budget (leadership-council#182). Many Project members used most of their $2,000 limit during the all-hands earlier this year, and we had concerns that members would not be able to attend other events like RustConf. Ultimately we decided to keep with the current policy and will be working on figuring out what our possible option might be for funding this in 2026.

Finally, on the top of our minds is the Foundation three-year strategy. We have a keen interest in working with the Foundation staff to ensure that we are all focused together on the best objectives. We hope to share more on this soon.

Additional items

We have been discussing a policy for better management of the alumni status of Project members. leadership-council#218 leadership-council#175
We had some discussions on who is responsible for how stable and unstable features relate to the stable releases. leadership-council#180
The September 2025 council elections have started. leadership-council#211
The 2025 Foundation director elections have started. @tomassedovic will be facilitating this year. https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/08/20/electing-new-project-directors-2025/
We launched the 2025 Leadership Council Survey, and will be posting the results soon.

Following our work

To follow our work in real time, watch our repository.

Meeting minutes

We publish minutes from all Council meetings to the Leadership Council repo. Links to the minutes since our last update are:

June 6, 2025
June 20, 2025
July 4, 2025
July 18, 2025
August 8, 2025
August 15, 2025

Leadership Council September 2025 Representative Selections

2025-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The selection process for representatives on the Leadership Council is starting today.

Every six months, half of the council terms end. The following teams are up to choose their representative for the next year:

Infra
Lang
Libs
Mods

We are aiming to have the teams confirm their choices by September 19, 2025, and for any possible new members to be ready to join the council meetings starting September 26th.

Criteria for representatives

Any member of the top-level team or a member of any of their subteams is eligible to be the representative. See candidate criteria for a description of what makes a good representative.

What do Representatives do?

How should teams make their selection?

See Limits on representatives from a single company/entity ↩
See Term limits. ↩

2025 Leadership Council Survey

2025-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

One of the responsibilities of the leadership council, formed by RFC 3392, is to solicit feedback on a yearly basis from the Project on how we are performing our duties.

Each year, the Council must solicit feedback on whether the Council is serving its purpose effectively from all willing and able Project members and openly discuss this feedback in a forum that allows and encourages active participation from all Project members. To do so, the Council and other Project members consult the high-level duties, expectations, and constraints listed in this RFC and any subsequent revisions thereof to determine if the Council is meeting its duties and obligations.

We are running a quick annual survey, primarily for Rust project members to provide feedback on the Leadership Council. However, even if you are not a member, feel free to fill out the survey too -- we welcome input from those interacting with the Council in other capacities.

This survey is anonymous. The Council will go through all answers and release a summary after the survey is complete, similar to the one published last year.

Please fill out the survey here. It will be open for 3 weeks, closing on 2025-07-21.