May Core Team Update

An update from the Core Team as of May 2021.

Author: steveklabnik

posts/inside-rust/2021-05-04-core-team-update.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Core Team Update: May 2021"
+author: Steve Klabnik
+team: The Core Team <https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core>
+---
+
+Hey everyone!  Back in August of last year, the core team wrote a blog post
+titled "[Laying the foundation for Rust's Future][future]." Every since then,
+the Core Team has been doing a tremendous amount of work to help get the
+foundation going, and prepare the project for the changes that have now
+occurred because of these events.
+
+But that also means we've been very quiet!  This sort of work has largely
+been focused inward, and not really something that's visible from the
+outside, even if you are on a Rust team.  However, thanks to these efforts,
+the Foundation now exists, and is starting to work on its mission.  That also
+means it's time for the core team to shift the focus of its work.
+
+Beyond the Foundation efforts, we've also had several initiatives underway
+that you may or may not know about:
+
+## The 2021 Roadmap
+
+The [2021 Roadmap] RFC was merged back in January.  This set the goals for
+the core team for this year.  This is a bit different from previous years,
+where we laid out goals for the entire project.  We decided this year to
+focus on Core, and give the teams the leeway to set their own goals, while we
+focused on overall organizational health.
+
+Later in the year, we'll be starting the process for next year as well. We're
+not actively thinking about this yet, but ideally, a yearly roadmap would be
+merged in December, rather than in January, so we want to make sure and begin
+early enough to get this shipped on time for 2022.
+
+## Team Charters
+
+As part of that work, we've begun the first steps of a process to give each
+team a formal charter.  Way back in [RFC 1068], the scope of the initial
+teams was laid out.  While that has served us well over the years, as teams
+were spun up, shut down, and changed, we haven't always done a good job of
+making it clear where the boundaries of responsibility lie in each team.
+Part of the magic in Rust's governance structure is that individual teams are
+given significant authority to do as they see fit, but that also means that
+we have to be concious about scope. We'll have more to report on this process
+as it continues to unfold, but the end goal is stated in the roadmap:
+
+> The Rust teams, in concert with the core team, will work to establish a
+> charter for each of the Rust teams over the course of the year, with an aim
+> for defining, particularly, the purpose and membership requirements.  Our
+> goal is that going into 2022, all active groups within the Rust project will
+> have well-defined charters and membership.
+
+Now is the time to redouble efforts here, and we are excited to work with all
+of the teams on nailing these charters down. As a start, we've been working with
+the Libs, Release, and Cargo teams for an initial pass at their charters. We've
+structured this to be largely team-driven; we're setting expectations and framing
+what charters should look like, but the teams work on what goes in them. As this
+progresses, we hope to learn more about the challenges involved so that we can
+improve our process and bring in more teams.
+
+It's worth pointing out explicitly that this work also includes the Core Team; we'll
+be creating a charter for ourselves as well. 
+
+## Audit of packages owned by the project
+
+As another example of something the core team has been working on, we've been
+doing work to clarify the status of a number of packages owned by the Rust team
+on crates.io. We are conducting a full audit of these packages, making sure that
+they're things that should be owned by the project, making sure that they have
+appropriate permissions, making sure that they have people taking care of them,
+all of that kind of thing. Historically, we've been fairly ad-hoc about this sort
+of thing, but as we grow, it is very imporant to be deliberate. An
+[RFC][crate-ownership-rfc] was just opened to create a policy here.
+
+## Thanks!
+
+So that's a quick summary of what we've been up to, and some of what we'll be
+doing in the immediate future. We plan on trying to communicate what Core is working 
+on more often in the future; 2020 was an extremely complex year for a variety of
+reasons, but we're feeling really positive about the future of Core and the
+Rust project generally. Thank you to the teams for all you've done for Rust.
+
+[future]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/08/18/laying-the-foundation-for-rusts-future.html
+[2021 Roadmap]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3037
+[RFC 1068]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1068-rust-governance.md
+[crate-ownership-rfc]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3119