Last week we kicked off the Foundation Conversation, a week-long period of Q&A forums and live broadcasts with the goal of explaining our vision for the Foundation and finding out what sorts of questions people had. We used those questions to help build a draft Foundation FAQ, and if you’ve not seen it yet, you should definitely take a look -- it’s chock full of good information. Thanks to everyone for asking such great questions!

We’ve created a new survey that asks about how people experienced the Foundation Conversation. Please take a moment to fill it out! We’re planning a similar event for this January, so your feedback will be really helpful.

This post is going to discuss how the Foundation and the Rust project relate to one another.

What is the central purpose of the Foundation?

At its core, the mission of the Foundation is to empower the Rust maintainers to joyfully do their best work. We think of the Foundation as working with the teams, helping them to create the scaffolding that people need to contribute and participate in the Rust project.

The scope and role of the Rust teams does not change

For most Rust teams, the creation of the Foundation doesn’t change anything about the scope of their work and decision making authority. The compiler team is still going to be maintaining the compiler, the community team will still be helping coordinate and mentor community events, and so forth. One exception is the Rust core team: there are various legal details that we expect to off-load onto the Foundation.

Let the Rust teams be their best selves

We are really excited for all the things that the Foundation will make possible for the Rust teams. We hope to draw on the Foundation to target some of the hardest problems in running an open-source project. We’re thinking of programs like offering training for maintainers, assistance with product and program management, access to trained mediators for conflict management, as well as facilitating events to help contributors get more high bandwidth communication (assuming, that is, we’re ever allowed to leave our houses again).

What comes next

This last week has been intense -- we calculated about 60 person hours of sync time answering questions -- and it’s been really valuable. The questions that everyone asked really helped us to refine and sharpen our thinking. For the remainder of the year we are going to be working hard on finalizing the details of the Foundation. We expect to launch the Foundation officially early next year! In the meantime, remember to fill out our survey!