The Rust team is happy to announce that we're running our Increasing Rust's Reach program again this year. Increasing Rust's Reach is one of several programs run by the project to grow Rust's community of project collaborators and leaders.

We’re looking for people inside and outside Rust’s current community from groups and backgrounds that are underrepresented in the Rust world and the technology world more generally. We want to partner with you to make Rust a more inclusive, approachable, and impactful project, while supporting your success on personal goals.

This program matches Rust team members from all parts of the project with individuals who are underrepresented in Rust's community and the tech industry for a partnership of three (3) months, from mid-May to mid-August. Each partnership agrees to a commitment of 3-5 hours per week collaborating on a Rust project.

By way of thanks for participating in the program, we offer a fully paid conference ticket, travel, and accommodations for every participant to a Rust Conference of their choice:

• May 26-27: RustFest Paris
• August 16-17: RustConf
• October: Rust Belt Rust

Learn more about the upcoming 2018 Rust Conferences here.

Last year we had 12 participants working on several projects, from contributing to foundational ecosystem libraries like Diesel, to discovery work on a new Rust website, to helping find developer experience and usability holes in the crates.io ecosystem. You can read more about previous participants' experiences on the brand new Increasing Rust's Reach website!

Many of the projects we have for this year build on the work that was accomplished last year. However, the primary focus of this year's project is the 2018 edition release; in particular, the domain working groups that we kicked off with our 2018 Roadmap.

We believe the 2018 edition is a great opportunity, not only to simply get new people involved in the Rust project, but to also demonstrate the huge impact that even newcomers to the project can make. Rust is committed to being a friendly and inclusive project that welcomes new contributors from all sorts of backgrounds—we actively want to be a project that you want to work on, and we're excited to learn about how we can do that better.

Applications for the program open today, and will run until April 20th. We will announce the recipients on April 30th, and the program will run from May 15th to August 17th. For more details on the timeline, check out the website.

We're super excited to get your applications! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the program committee at reach@rust-lang.org.