A common question that we get is "what precisely does the Rust community team do?" and probably the member you are currently speaking to has no straight answer to you. That has a reason: the team does a lot of things and any individual often just does a couple of them. Many of the projects that come out of this are then taken on by individual teams and are not necessarily visible as community team action. An important part is to discuss our and others ideas and support each other in our endeavours.
Still, where there's no information, misconceptions arise, in all directions: either that the team doesn't do anything at all or that the teams size and work is way exaggerated.
So, I recently accidentally wrote a pretty exhausive list, which I'd like to extend and republish here. A lot of what we do is all over the place and in a DIY fashion, so we learn a lot of skills on the go. If you have experience with any of these - please get involved!
Perhaps the oldest piece of community documentation is the Rust community calendar, created by Erick and maintained to this date. Ping us to get access. We regularly check if recurring events are still on.
We read and engage in the comment sections. First of all, we believe that the project should be engaged into discussions about it. Hat tip to Sri Ramkrishna for giving a whole talk about that subject: Swimming with chum in shark infested water. This engagement must be complex and assertive.
Second, it is a great source of information about our project. We take appropriate action by either documenting these issues for the project or by getting people into a discussion with the people that are an expert in their subject.
We come up with creative solutions to worldwide community issues, including marketing, funding, growth. (shiver) The interesting thing about doing these in a FOSS project is that they need to low- or zero-cost and time effective, which means many standard solutions don't apply.
Marketing happens often in the sense that we think about how to get meaningful information out to people. A good example is that if you find us at a conference, you might also find one of edunhams handy postcard with important links next to it.
We help Rust projects at promotion. A recent example is rust-bios survey for a grant application. Instead of having individuals promote themselves, we use our experience to help out, without requiring a formal request.
This isn't always done by the community team, but we do make sure that people can have a meeting with the core or other teams to talk about specific subjects. This mostly involves both finding interesting people to speak to, but also encouraging community members that it is definitely okay to try to get some of the other teams time.
Standards are the Rust production user meetings, but there have also been meetings on other subjects, like graphics or embedded systems.
This is also a bit of a fuzzy thing, but it is important to see problems coming early. In the best of situations, this allows us to start discussion problems without having someone take the effort to approach us.
The community team also runs the yearly community survey, which helps here.
We are constantly on the lookout for people that create learning material and encourage them to share it with the wider community. While these projects are not necessarily direct community team work, many of us have such projects. We also encourage translations of existing material.
We set up and curate a project wide YouTube Channel. This gives people a one stop place to find video content, mostly meetup and conference talks.
We come up, implement and educate on running community aspects, both on- and offline. For example, Rust Berlin implemented the "Hack & Learn" very early on. In this format, we meet to work on our projects instead of listening to a talk. We inform interested people about how to set up a meeting and encourage them to create their own community action. Here, confusingly, lot's of the work is educating people on how little is neede to get a meetup going.
The same goes for conferences, where we have a lot of experience in running fair, cheap and accessible conferences, knowledge which we happily share.
We also help out other communities at that. This comes directly from our [initial goals]: "Coordination with other technology communities, regardless of language. We should be encouraging cross-polination between Rust and other languages, in both directions."
This might be the most subtle thing we do, as it's rarely much more then a couple of words or a link. Projects like Rust often suffer from the problem that people don't feel qualified to be involved in certain things. Often, that happens because they feel to "rookie", but also because they feel a certain team is a closed group. This can be easily fixed by setting these misconceptions right. Also, we encouraged a group of people to run a RustBridge.
Another surprisingly huge part of our work is what Manish called the "switchboard". We make sure the right people get in touch. This is often as easy as knowing two people in the same city and introducing them. While the action is easy, it needs a good knowledge of the community.
It allows us to recommend our community-team@rust-lang.org email address as a starting point for all your questions about Rust. The service here is that instead of potential newcomers figuring out who they should speak to, we do the research for them.
We do keep an inventory of things we use for promotion. This is currently rather small (table blankets with a Rust logo), but in general, it is our job. An outstanding issue is figuring out who owns all the accounts.
Two conferences (RustFest and Rust Belt Rust) are run by community team members. They also serve as an example to see what can be done with conferences. RustFest and Rust Belt Rust both share a workshop component, but in different fashions. Both are very affortable. RustFest also wants to innovate on accessibility standards and can be approached if you search consultation.
We'd like to set community standards here.
This is mostly the usual "fly around and talk at conferences" fare. Sometimes, we have stands on most conferences. The interesting part of FOSS evangelism, though, is that we don't want to sell you a support contract later. We're genuinely interested in you!
We recommend people to try Rust, mostly by showing curious people what we have by showing them the way to the right material. We love assessing solutions, so sometimes, we also inform about other options.
As any other team, the community team criticises the project internally. These are often very specific topics that make no sense without a lot of contest, so this happens on the backchannel. Rust internally has a great culture of taking criticism seriously, even if not all issues can be resolved right away.
We communicate with projects and groups outside of the Rust project. This is of utmost importance, as cross-pollination improves your work and we don't need to come up with solutions for everything ourselves. We keep relationships with other community management organisations, such as the OpenTechSchool.
Also, we always search for new cooperations.
This is just a rough guide of what we all do. One of the most interesting aspects of being engaged in the community is that you never know what's coming up next. It is also a creative work and rarely well plannable.
There’s high interest in Rust and make sure the things people like about the Rust community are preserved.
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