Project Director Update — January & February 2026

March 25, 2026/Carol Nichols

Cross-posted from Carol Nichols and David Wood’s post on the Inside Rust Blog.

This month, we have a combo board-meeting update to share covering the January and February Meetings. Thanks for your patience!

As a reminder, the Project Directors are an elected group that represent the Rust Project on the board of the Rust Foundation, and are responsible for the Rust Project’s relationship with the Foundation.

January

Read the full minutes for the January meeting on the Foundation’s site.

Starting this year, the format of board meetings has changed to emphasise discussion, which has been a great! As part of that, our regular updates are provided in a separate executive briefing, but fret not, we’ll include those updates here even if they aren’t in the meeting minutes:

  • Funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency, a new Infra Engineer has started on the 19th January. Learn more about Ubiratan Soares in this blog post.
  • Foundation staff attended a variety of events at EU Open Source Week, including: Code & Compliance, EU OSS Awards, EU Policy Summit, FOSDEM, Google Foundations Meet-up, OFE EU roundtable
    • These events are a great opportunity for the staff to collaborate with their peers at other foundations on policy changes affecting open source projects and developers
  • RustConf CFP was open through February 16. Sponsorship opportunities are also live
  • There was a great turnout and receiption for Rust Global in Tokyo and there are ongoing discussions with Rust Tokyo organizers to explore other opportunities in the region. Recordings have since been published
  • The Foundation’s engineering team made lots of progress on their projects:
    • cargo-capslock has been developed to perform both static and runtime capability analysis on Rust binaries
    • The vulnerability surfacing to crates.io RFC has been officially accepted
      • The security tab implementation continues with reviews and feedback, providing more and more improvements before going live.
    • crates.io‘s frontend is being migrated from EmberJS to Svelte
    • A plan of action is being developed for the interop initiative in 2026, focusing, in part, on a continued pursuit of a memory-safe subset for C++ to establish a win for long-term interoperability, which is end-to-end memory safety between the two languages
      • Also, as part of a defined project goal, we will continue in earnest mapping the interop problem space that will likely consist of issues in Rust, C++ or both languages
    • The Infra team supported the docs-rs team to move all their metrics, dashboards and alerts from the deprecated self-hosted monitoring solution to Datadog, which is more reliable, secure and offers a better developer experience
    • An end-of-year review is being prepared for the work around TUF and signing
    • As part of our STF funding goals, major changes to the docs.rs environment to take greater advantage of in-kind infrastructure have been made
  • AWS generously donated more credits to the Rust Project, giving us breathing room for 2026
  • A new travel grant request form was created to streamline the process for project members
  • The board discussed the eligibility requirements for the Rust Innovation Lab, agreeing to work asynchronously to have concrete guidelines written prior to the next meeting
  • The board reviewed the outline of the proposed structure for a yet-to-be-named End User Group within the Foundation
    • This is intended to create a stronger reciprocal relationship between the industry/commercial users of Rust, the Rust Foundation, and the Project; aid Rust adoption; and spur innovation in tooling for industrial users

February

Read the full February minutes on the Foundation’s site

The section below covers the Rust Foundation board meeting that happened on February 10, 2026. Highlights include:

  • Alexandru Radovici was re-elected as the Silver Member board representative. Congrats, Alexandru!
  • The board discussed clarifications on what would make a project a great fit for being accepted into the Rust Innovation Lab. This discussion continued via email and resulted in improvements to the documents in the RIL repo that we plan to do a dedicated blog post about soon!
  • The Foundation’s engineering team have made progress on their efforts:
  • The Foundation held interviews with team leads in the project to learn about their concerns and needs
  • RustConf’s CFP was open through February 16th and sponsorship opportunities are live. Early-bird registration and a website re-launch, and speaker announcements coming later in March!

We’ll be back soon with the update from the March meeting, which took place on March 10, 2026!

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Carol Nichols