Project Director Update — March 2026

Contributed by Project Directors Carol Nichols and David Wood.

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! You can learn more about Symposium joining the RIL here.
• 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! Director of Outreach Lori Lorusso shared the news live onstage at Open Source SecurityCon, colocated with KubeCon Europe.
• The Rust Foundation joined the Datadog Open Source Program, giving us an observability platform to monitor and act on infrastructure events. Learn more about this news here.
• 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).
• The RustConf schedule has been published, and tickets are now on sale! We hope to see you there in September. The Rust Foundation is providing travel grants for active Rust project members attending RustConf 2026. The funds are intended to cover travel, hotel, and conference tickets for those who otherwise cannot afford to attend. Please see the travel spending policy and application form for details. Grants are awarded to eligible project members on a first come first serve basis.
• Finally, the Rust Foundation is hosting a Rust Team Health Summit prior to RustConf. The last one was held in 2024, and the Foundation is happy to be able to support the Project by hosting one this year. Learn more here.