Vision Doc Action Plan

Summary and phases

Kickoff (March). The vision doc work begins by creating team infrastructure and authoring a blog post and survey. The survey will gather recommendations for interview subjects.

Selecting initial areas (March). For our initial round we'll select focus areas. The goal is to get a representative sample of interviews from each of those areas and to write up an initial set of observations to be shared with people at the All Hands. Each focus area has an assigned lead responsible for planning the interviewees and (later) doing the editing.

Interviews (April). We will conduct 20-30min interviews of subjects from each focus areas. Each interview should ideally be conducted by 2 people, one driving and one shadowing (taking notes, etc). Interviews will be recoverded if subject is willing.

Discussion and data collation (April, May). During interviews, we'll meet weekly to review obsevations from interviews done during this week and to move the data into a public github repo. As we discuss, we'll also [edit reports][] compiling notes and observations. The lead of each area will drive the editing process.

Week by week

Detailed plans

Select team membership

Team membership proposal.

Need to schedule a regular meeting.

Create infrastructure

• hackmd team
• rust-lang team: vision-doc-2025 (PR)
• repository: rust-lang/vision-doc-2025 (opened issue)

Proposed workflow for notes:

• Make hackmd team private (or make a private team)
• Take raw notes in there
• Extract data, cleaned up, and put it in the repository

Blog post and survey

• Author a blog post introducing the idea of the vision doc (blog post draft)
• Author a survey gathering data about potential interview subjects (survey draft questions)
• Discuss Data Ownership with Rust Foundation (– in progress, jackh726)
• Post blog post

Focus areas

We'll want to cover a number of focus areas over time. The initial goal is to select a set of interesting areas to collect data from prior to the All Hands in May.

Each area has an owner. The owner is responsible for selecting who to interview, arranging interview times, and either conducting the interview or finding someone to conduct it. They will later work on collating the data and writing up observations.

Proposed areas:

• Users/companies (nikomatsakis)
  • select some novice users and some experienced users
  • will also do some interviews with companies of various sizes
• Scientific computing) (jackh726)
• Global Rust communities (ernest k.)
  • South America / LATAM
  • Africa roundtable
  • China and Asia
• Rust project maintainers) (nadrieril)
• Interop? (jon baumann)

After the All Hands we will likely wish to do follow up in other areas. Possible areas:

• Crate maintainers
• Other interest and development communities (gamedev, AI, etc)

Conduct interviews

Interviews are expected to be about 20-30 minutes and are led by a member of the team. Goal is to have 2 people per interview, one driving and the other shadowing or observing. We'll record interviews if the subject agrees but otherwise just take notes (shadow can take notes).

To prepare, nikomatsakis has contacted UX researchers who agreed to do a brief training and watch us conduct an initial interview to provide feedback. They'll also teach us best practices and techniques for coding and analyzing data.

Discussion and data collation

During April we'll meet weekly to compare notes. We'll also move public data from private hackmds and into a central github repository. We'll start putting notes together as things solidify.

Edit reports

As we add data into the github repo, we'll also begin editing reports summarizing and making observations. These will be done in public as PRs to the repo and so forth.