Hello and welcome to the inaugural Rust Foundation Project Director update! I’m Carol Nichols, I’m one of the authors on The Rust Programming Language book and a member of the crates.io team, and I was recently selected by the Leadership Council to represent the Rust Project on the board of the Rust Foundation.

One of my personal goals for my term as a Project Director is to communicate more and in different ways with the Rust Project and the wider Rust community about what it’s like being a Project Director and what the Rust Foundation is working on. This update post is one experiment along those lines.

In this post, you’ll find the highlights, from my perspective, of last month’s board meeting now that the minutes have been posted publicly. I might cover other topics in the future, and I hope to encourage other Project Directors to write as well, but recapping Foundation Board meetings is where I’ve decided to start.

The full board meeting minutes are posted on the Foundation’s website after the following month’s board meeting where the minutes are approved. The meeting on November 12, 2024, was the first board meeting I attended, and here’s what I thought were the most interesting parts.

The Foundation staff gave the board updates on their recent work:

• Bec Rumbul, in the Executive Director update, covered that the reworked Trademark Policy draft was in public comment. The Foundation is pursuing funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund and Alpha-Omega. The Foundation is monitoring the situation with a few Linux maintainers’ permissions being removed due to US sanctions: there’s no similar situation involving Rust at this time but Bec is preparing for the possibility.
• Joel Marcey gave the Infrastructure/Technology update: Foundation employees are working on reducing Rust’s CI costs, and there was progress on a number of other technical initiatives.
• Paul Lenz’s Finance and Grants update included a draft 2025 budget, and a proposal for spending $10,000 on a trial of an internship program which the board voted to approve.
• Gracie Gregory gave a Communications update that included the securing of a venue for RustConf 2025 that will be publicly announced soon, and that the Foundation’s new website was almost ready to launch.

Ryan Levick gave the Project Director update, which included discussion of the Project Goals Initiative working to define the Project’s priorities for the near future.

The main item of business in the meeting was discussion of DARPA’s Translating All C To Rust (aka TRACTOR) program and the Rust Foundation’s possible involvement in the evaluation portion of the contest. Us Project Directors have some questions and thoughts surrounding this contest, and we’re continuing these discussions with the rest of the board and the DARPA representative. No final decisions have been made; more details will be presented for the board’s approval in early 2025.

That’s it for this month’s update! If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email all of the project directors via project-directors at rust-lang.org or join us in the #foundation channel on the Rust Zulip. Have a great holiday season; I’ll post again in 2025!