For those of you who are fans of the original Ghostbusters movie, the phrase, "Who you gonna call? (Ghostbusters)," may be the first thing you think of but I want to focus on the line said by Dr. Peter Venkman, played by the one and only Bill Murray, "Cross the streams!" Originally the Ghostbusters were warned, "Don't cross the streams" — or they would have a total cataclysmic event — but at the end of the movie, to defeat Gozar, they needed to risk everything by crossing the streams, and it worked; Gozar was annihilated and the Ghostbusters (and NYC) survived. You may be thinking, "what does this have to do with the Rust Project or the Rust Foundation?" Don't worry, I got you!

As the Director of Outreach my job is twofold: providing both inreach into the Project and outreach to the larger tech community and users of Rust. As part of my inreach function I have the privilege to work with members of the Rust Project, sitting in on a variety of meetings to find the Project's needs and find opportunities for the Foundation to solve problems. I am working with the Project Directors and the Leadership Council as a liaison to the Foundation and as a resource for attracting funds for the Project to allocate via the Project Priorities Budget, and I will be working with Project leadership to retool the Project Grant Program so it can better serve the Project.

Along similar lines is the outreach component of my role — to work with the broader tech community to bring them to our table. Several popular open source projects have key parts built in Rust, including Valkey, bootc, Linkerd, and OpenEBS — which are all part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) housed at the Linux Foundation. These projects use Rust but may or may not have formal ties to the Project itself or to the Foundation. My goal is to go outside and find more projects like these and introduce them to people here so they can share their experiences coding in Rust and create not only a feedback loop as end users but build a relationship with the Project — potentially becoming members themselves of the Project and the Foundation. The more we can share how Rust is being used, and make the resources available to support that use, the better.

In fact, the Project has long done this kind of work, e.g. with its deep and productive collaborations with Rust for Linux and Bevy. I'm excited to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and to build on these successes.

All of this sounds great but how does it relate to "crossing the streams?" I'm excited to say that I have in fact crossed the streams and am now a member of the Rust Project's newly formed Content Team. That in turn has made me a member of the Rust Project itself! I'm grateful to TC and Pete LeVasseur for imagining this team, making it a reality, and then welcoming me on board. Our first journey into content creation is at RustConf where we are sitting down and interviewing people within the Project and our ecosystem to post on the Rust blog, YouTube, and other online venues. You can find the team's charter and read more about our goals here.

Being a part of this team was the icing on the cake for me. Being a member of the Content Team gives me the opportunity to contribute directly to the work of the Project while having "insider access" to the Project's ecosystem. We get to share not only "how the sausage is made", but we get to tell the stories of maintainers, contributors, and end users while showcasing how the work being done in the Project affects the future of the language and its widespread adoption across many industries.

The TL;DR (too late) is that by crossing the streams between my job at the Foundation and my volunteer work with the Rust Project Content Team I am hoping that we are setting ourselves up for success. To me success looks like developing a clearer understanding of the Foundation's role in supporting the Project, improving communication between the Project and the Foundation as we work together to generate and execute on solutions to obstacles facing the Project, and telling the stories of end users and other projects that are using Rust to advance the open source economy and ecosystem.

If you want to chat you can find me on Zulip!