In August, we on the Core Team announced our plans to create a Foundation by the end of the year. Since that time, we’ve been doing a lot of work but it has been difficult to share many details, and we know that a lot of you have questions.

The "Foundation Conversation"

This blog post announces the start of the “Foundation Conversation”. This is a week-long period in which we have planned a number of forums and opportunities where folks can ask questions about the Foundation and get answers from the Core team. It includes both text-based “question-and-answer” (Q&A) periods as well as live broadcasts. We’re also going to be coming to the Rust team’s meetings to have discussions. We hope that this will help us to share our vision for the Foundation and to get the community excited about what’s to come.

A secondary goal for the Foundation Conversation is to help us develop the Foundation FAQ. Most FAQs get written before anyone has ever really asked a question, but we really wanted to write a FAQ that responds honestly to the questions that people have. We’ve currently got a draft of the FAQ which is based both on questions we thought people would ask and questions that were raised by Rust team members thus far, but we would like to extend it to include questions raised by people in the broader community. That’s where you come in!

How to join the conversation

There are many ways to participate in the Foundation Conversation:

• Read the draft FAQ we’ve been working on. It contains the answers to some of the questions that we have been asked thus far.
• Fill out our survey. This survey is designed to help us understand how the Rust community is feeling about the Foundation.
• Ask questions during the Community Q&A periods. We’ve scheduled a number of 3 hour periods during which the foundation-faq-2020 repo will be open for anyone to ask questions. There will be members of the core team around during those periods to answer those questions as best we can.
• Watch our Live Broadcasts. We’ve scheduled live broadcasts this week where members of the core team will be answering and discussing some of the questions that have come up thus far. These will be posted to YouTube later.

Read on for more details.

The foundation-faq-2020 repository

We have chosen to coordinate the Foundation Conversation using a GitHub repository called foundation-faq-2020. This repository contains the draft FAQ we’ve written so far, along with a series of issues representing the questions that people have. Last week we opened the repository for Rust team members, so you can see that we’ve already had quite a few questions raised (and answered). Once a new issue is opened, someone from the core team will come along and post an answer, and then label the question as “answered”.

We have scheduled a number of 3 hour periods in which the repository will be open for anyone to open new issues. Outside of these slots, the repository is generally “read only” unless you are a member of a Rust team. We are calling these slots the “Community Q&A” sessions, since it is a time for the broader community to open questions and get answers.

We’ve tried to stagger the times for the “Community Q&A” periods to be accessible from all time zones. During each slot, members of the core team will be standing by to monitor new questions and post answers. In some cases, if the question is complex, we may hold off on answering right away and instead take time to draft the response and post it later.

Here are the times that we’ve scheduled for folks to pose questions.

Live broadcasts

In addition to the repository, we’ve scheduled two “live broadcasts”. These sessions will feature members of the core team discussing and responding to some of the questions that have been asked thus far. Naturally, even if you can’t catch the live broadcast, the video will be available for streaming afterwards. Here is the schedule for these broadcasts:

These will be hosted on our YouTube channel.

We’re very excited about the progress on the Rust foundation and we’re looking forward to hearing from all of you.