---
title: "Statements by 2024 project director candidates"
date: 2024-10-31
url: https://hackmd.io/KBJVswOMRnyEg1EcDqr2dA
---

# Statements by 2024 project director candidates

## Prompt

We asked each candidate for the role of project director this question:

> As everyone on the council may not know you well (though of course many do), it'd be useful, I think, if you could write up a statement about your background, your interest in the role, your thoughts or philosophy about the role, what you would hope to achieve in that role, etc.

To the incumbents, we also asked:

> In your case, since you've been on the board, and have a good view of what the work of a PD is and probably what makes a good one, I actually think your statement could be helpful to the council not just in educating people about you, but in educating the members on how to make a good selection in general.
>
> One thing you may be able to tell us about is board balance. If there are particular perspectives or inclinations that you as incumbents are often bringing to the board that help to balance it and its decisions, then that's something we should know about and think carefully about in making selections.

What follows are the replies received, in the hope that in considering these statements, we may be better able to select project directors who will effectively represent the interests of the project on the board of the Rust Foundation.

## Mark Rousskov (simulacrum)

I've been contributing since 2016, with various roles on most areas of the project (compiler, infra, release, libs, lang, core+council, PD for the Foundation), primarily acting in what I would describe as a supporting role (e.g., reviews, code cleanup, etc.) in most of these areas/teams. With regards to the PD role, my primary interest is in continuing to maintain a trusted and steady voice on behalf of the Project and on behalf of the Foundation, helping bridge gaps in knowledge or insight across the breadth of both. That ties in closely with my philosophy for the role: focus on consistency of message and steady influence rather than putting too much pressure or emphasis on any single particular. On the other hand, when we *do* need to emphasize something, that contrasts all the more with the previous norm, and becomes more effective for it. In general the Project representatives contribute more during most board discussions than the corporate members, I think primarily because the Foundation *is* primarily steered to serve the interest's of the Project, just as an outside entity - and in many ways similar to the Project (in individual or at large), can struggle to identify how to best do so.

My goals for the next 2 years primarily center on continuing to formalize the relationship of the Project and Foundation, in particular around various Council programs (e.g. travel grants becoming permanent, small hardware/reimbursement grants for all Project members) moving from experiment to part of the stable budget of the Foundation. Beyond that, I'd like to see us write down what we expect from Project directors in more detail, especially as to overlap between Council decisions and PD decisions. This is likely to be difficult, but I believe we have enough data now to back up making a solid first pass.

I was also asked to write up some of what a PD does. In my opinion, this is not that different from any other team: we discuss as part of monthly Board meetings and typically ~biweekly (with staff) + monthly (with other PDs) meetings what is on the horizon for the Foundation and what we should do. For the most part, historically decisions at the Foundation are made with full consensus rather than by true vote, with adjustments in language of what we're agreeing to being the primary mechanism for influence. Where we have someone with strong reservations, it's not uncommon for that to just not come to a vote (failed or successful). PDs should be prepared to work in such an environment, or be prepared to invest significantly in pushing for changing it (which may or may not be possible).

## Ryan Levick (rylev)

### Short Bio

I've been involved in the Rust community ever since 2016. Since 2019 I've become more involved in the Rust Project itself where I've served on many teams including the Core team, Governance RFC, Compiler Perf, and more. Starting in 2022 I've served on the Rust Foundation Board. I currently work at [Fermyon](https://www.fermyon.com/).

My focus in my time in the Rust Project has largely been outside of technical concerns as I've noticed that the Project has an abundance of technical excellence, but it often struggles to find individuals interested in tackling non-technical problems often centered around human relationships.

### Interest and Philosophy of the Role

The Rust Foundation is a powerful tool for the Rust Project to use to help make the lives of Rust maintainers better. In order to yield this tool appropriately, the Rust Project must have strong representation on the Foundation Board. It's very easy for the Foundation to get caught up in the needs of its corporate donors, so the role of the Project Directors is to make sure the interest of the Project and its members are also well served.

My own personal interest stems from the intersection of corporate power in open source. I find it endlessly fascinating how well meaning corporate interests can still cause unforeseen harm if not properly steered. I enjoy representing Project interests in a setting where the other represents (however well meaning they may be) often have competing interests in mind. At the heart of this is the balance and tact required to ensure that the relationship between Project representatives and others on the Foundation Staff and Board never becomes antagonistic and always remains productive and professional.

### What I hope to achieve

In my tenure, I think the relationship between the Project and Foundation has improved immensely. However, we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that that relationship remains strong and resilient to changing board demographics. I hope to continue my work in improvement Project/Board communication, and to ensure that even more Foundation resources end up where it's most needed: in the hands of maintainers.

## David Wood (davidtwco)

I've been contributing to Rust since 2017, primarily to the compiler. I joined the compiler team's meta working group in 2019 to help define and document the compiler team's policies and processes. In the same year, I became a compiler team contributor and later full team member in 2021. I was elected as co-lead of the compiler team in 2023, where I've tried to understand and prioritise the challenges that the team face and [land and implement RFCs](https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3599-compiler-team-reorganisation.html) to resolve them. I've still got plenty of time left in my term as co-lead and lots that I'd like to get around to improving. Outside of the project, I contribute to Rust professionally at Arm - where I lead the Rust team - and previously at Huawei.

I accepted this nomination as I think the Rust Foundation is incredibly important to the continued success of Rust and that it is crucial that there is a mutual understanding of the Foundation's needs within the project and project's needs within the Foundation. My experience as a individual contributor and team lead makes me well-suited to facilitate that mutual understanding. As a representative of the project, I'd endeavour to be accessible and visible to project members, ensure that project members are informed of the work that the Foundation and Project Directors are doing (to the extent permitted by the Foundation's by-laws), and that the Foundation is aware of the views and needs of project members.

## Carol (Nichols || Goulding) (carols10cents)

I've been active in a variety of Rust leadership positions over the years, on various teams, as a co-author of TRPL, and as a conference organizer of Rust Belt Rust. I feel like I have a good sense of the Rust community, and I'm excited about the possibility of helping the Foundation help us by making decisions in the best interest of the community. I think the Rust Foundation is the best thing to happen to Rust in a long time, and it's the primary means of ensuring the stability, success, and independence of all things Rust-related. I would also hope to achieve more communication from the Foundation meetings to the community in more mediums more often, to help community members feel more informed, involved, and collaborative towards the Foundation.

## Dirkjan Ochtman (djc)

### Goals

I would like to help improve Rust, and I hope representing the Rust Project at the Rust Foundation is a good way for me to do so. Goals that stand out for me are improving sustainability both within the Rust Project and across the Rust ecosystem, and improving transparency in how the Project works in order to lower the barriers between the Project and other parts of the ecosystem.

### Background

I have a long history with open source. I was a member of the Mercurial "crew", a Python core committer, a member of the Apache CouchDB project and a Gentoo Linux developer. One way I've spent a lot of time over the years is by being curious about how projects functioned and trying to understand what was going in projects at large. I read php-internals (when it was still known as php-dev), the Subversion developer mailing list, python-dev and many other mailing lists and newsgroups.

One way I participated in the Mozilla project was trying to help educate Mozilla's developers about Mercurial, when they had just switched from CVS to Mercurial. I later helped the Python project transition from Subversion to Mercurial as well. One way I like to contribute to projects is by gathering lots of relevant context from diverse sources and making sure that this context is available where it's helpful.

While I am a current member of the Rust Project by way of being a rustup team member, I have not been a member of the Rust Project long, nor do I have a particular affiliation with one of the core teams (like lang, libs or the council). Instead, I relate to Rust (and the Project) both as a maintainer of several different pretty popular libraries (like chrono, rustls, indicatif, Hickory DNS and Quinn) and as the former CTO of a startup that used Rust. I have written two accepted RFCs and made several contributions to Cargo.

### Interest

I would like to help the Rust Project more, but have so far struggled to find a good fit in the existing structure. As a long time fan of the idea of having a foundation, and someone with a few years of experience as an engineering leader (both at a director level at a scale up and as a startup CTO), I think my experience might be relevant at the intersection of the Project and the Foundation.

### On Project Directors

One of the state goals for the role is to "represent the needs and interests of the Rust Project at large within the Rust Foundation board". I find the "at large" section of that sentence of particular interest and hope to be able to represent a broader view of the Rust Project within the context of the board.

I think Rust as-a-product could benefit from a more focused strategy on improving it, and would hope to help bring Project and Foundation together to execute on such an effort.