This is the seventh blog post in the series started December 2024 where us Rust Foundation Project Directors share the highlights from previous months’ Rust Foundation Board meeting(s). We aimed for a steady monthly cadence with this series, and reality had other plans. So here’s a catch-up edition covering the Board’s July, August, and October meetings. (No September meeting — RustConf.) Luckily, we have three new Project Directors, and David Wood has volunteered to help with these posts, so we hope to have a regular cadence again going forward.

The July meeting’s highlights include:

• Alexandru Radovici, the Silver Member board representative, is in the early stages of putting together a Rust in Industry Working Group to foster discussion among Member companies using Rust.
• Tina Krauss started in her position as Program Manager! In this position, Tina is involved in several key marketing, communications, and event-related initiatives. As one of her first projects, Tina is helping drive progress towards the Rust Foundation’s training initiatives; exploration into a Rust Foundation training course is now officially underway thanks to her project management work (more updates to be shared soon). Welcome, Tina! See the Foundation’s announcement for more details.
• Bec presented a high-level summary of themes submitted from people in the Rust Project in response to a survey about what the Foundation’s strategy should be for the next three years. More details will be coming as the Foundation gets further along in the process of creating the strategy.
• Trusted Publishing on crates.io was launched, as implemented mainly by Tobias Bienek and Marco Ieni of the Foundation with help from community members.

The August meeting’s highlights include:

• The Foundation was concerned about recent layoffs involving Rust project members, and asked for the board’s approval and ideas to start exploring ways the Foundation could help.
• Arm has increased their membership in the Foundation to the Platinum level!
• Lori Lorusso joined as the new Director of Outreach!
• This was Paul Lenz’s last board meeting, as he retired in September from his position as Director of Finance and Funding.
• The board approved the creation of the Rust Innovation Lab with rustls as the first project!

The October meeting’s highlights include:

• A joint statement on sustainable stewardship was published, in tandem with OpenSSF, the Python Software Foundation, the OpenJS Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation and others. It focused on the need for sustainable funding models for package repositories.
• Two phishing and one malware attack on crates.io were prevented by the Foundation’s engineers.
• The board approved the Foundation starting the development of a Maintainer Fund in collaboration with the Leadership Council.
• Technical papers were prepared for the upcoming WG21 meeting (the C++ standards committee) to advance C++ interop.
• Recruitment started for an Infrastructure Engineer to replace Jan David Nose.
• Development has started on a mechanism to surface vulnerabilities on crates.io.
• The Foundation will be discussing their prospective 2026-28 strategy at their offsite in Edinburgh in late October.

We’ll be back with an update after the December board meeting!