This post covers the Rust Foundation board meeting that happened on March 10, 2026. Read the full March minutes on the Foundation's site. Highlights include:

• Sid Askary of Futurewei joined to discuss a proposal to create an AI-focused research initiative within the Rust Foundation. He shared an early draft and took questions from the board. The board will revisit the proposal in future meetings as it develops.
• The Symposium project applied to join the RIL, and the board voted to accept the application. The board also took the opportunity to recommend that some of the discussion topics be turned into a blog post clarifying some aspects of what sorts of projects would be excellent candidates for the RIL, and the staff has now done so!
• The board discussed some early ideas the Foundation staff have had regarding ways to make the operation of crates.io more sustainable, in line with the OpenSSF statement the Rust Foundation signed on to in Sept 2025. No final decisions about what to implement were made, and the staff will be continuing to discuss and refine the ideas with relevant parts of the Rust Project in the coming months.
• The board discussed ways to include Gold members in the board meetings while there aren't sufficient numbers to warrant a voting seat.
• The board discussed some early ideas on how a Rust Ecosystem Fund could work to make it easier for companies to support the important crates they use. No decisions were made aside from agreeing that this is a topic worthwhile of further investigation by the Foundation staff.
• The Processing Foundation was approved as an associate member of the Foundation.
• Teor joined the C++ Interop Initiative as a contractor.
• Canonical joined as a Gold member!
• The Rust Foundation joined the DataDog Open Source Program, giving us a observability platform to monitor and act on infrastructure events.
• The security and infrastructure team have been working to address typosquating attacks on crates.io, alongside help from the crates.io team, security response and secure code working groups.
• The interop initiative has been identifying high-priority use cases to focus attention on.
• A re-brand of the RustConf website for the 2026 conference has been completed (and since launched).