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.

This is the council's first year, so we are still figuring out the best way to do this. For this year, a short survey was sent out to all@ on June 24th, 2024, ran for two weeks, and we are now presenting aggregated results from the survey. Raw responses will not be shared beyond the leadership council, but the results below reflect sentiments shared in response to each question. We invite feedback and suggestions on actions to take on Zulip or through direct communication to council members.

We want to thank everyone for their feedback! It has been very valuable to hear what people are thinking. As always, if you have thoughts or concerns, please reach out to your council representative any time.

Survey results

We received 53 responses to the survey, representing roughly a 32% response rate (out of 163 current recipients of all@).

Do you feel that the Rust Leadership Council is serving its purpose effectively?

I am aware of the role that the Leadership Council plays in the governance of the Rust Project.

The Rust Project has a solid foundation of Project governance.

Areas that are going well

For the rest of the questions we group responses into rough categories. The number of those responses is also provided; note that some responses may have fallen into more than one of these categories.

• (5) Less drama
• (5) More public operations
• (5) Lack of clarity / knowledge about what it does
  • It's not obvious why this is a "going well" from the responses, but it was given in response to this question.
• (4) General/inspecific positivity.
• (2) Improved Foundation/project relations
• (2) Funding travel/get-togethers of team members
• (1) Clear representation of members of the Project
• (1) Turnover while retaining members

Areas that are not going well

• (15) Knowing what the council is doing
• (3) Not enough delegation of decisions
• (2) Finding people interested in being on the council / helping the council
• (1) What is the role of the project directors? Are they redundant given the council?
• (2) Too conservative in trying things / decisions/progress is made too slowly.
• (1) Worry over Foundation not trusting Project

Suggestions for things to do in the responses:

• (2) Addressing burnout
• (2) More social time between teams
• (2) More communication/accountability with/for the Foundation
• (2) Hiring people, particularly for non-technical roles
• (1) Helping expand the moderation team
• (1) Resolving the launching pad issues, e.g., through "Rust Society" work
• (1) Product management for language/compiler/libraries

Takeaways for future surveys

• We should structure the survey to specifically ask about high-level duties and/or enumerate areas of interest (e.g., numeric responses on key questions like openness and effectiveness)
• Consider linking published material/writing 1-year retrospective and that being linked from the survey as pre-reading.
• We should disambiguate between neutral and "not enough information/knowledge to answer" responses in multiple choice response answers.

Proposed action items

We don't have any concrete proposed actions at this time, though are interested in finding ways to have more visilibity for council activities, as that seems to be one of the key problems called out across all of the questions asked. How exactly to achieve this remains unclear though.

As mentioned earlier, we welcome input from the community on suggestions for both improving this process and for actions to change how the council operates.