In November 2021, a sudden “collective resignation announcement” from the Rust Moderation Team shocked the entire community. Because this resignation statement came so suddenly and the wording was rather harsh, the majority of programmers were “confused” after seeing this statement, but with the curiosity of eating melons, it was as if they were watching a political debate in the open source world. fight scene.
At the time, team member Andrew Gallant pointed out that the move was to protest that the Rust core team (Core team) was not accountable to anyone but himself . They did not disclose too many details in the announcement. However, according to Matthieu M, a member of the review team, on Reddit, the reason for the direct resignation of the review team was the festering conflict with the Rust core team for several months.
At this point, it was rumored that Ashley Williams, a female member of the core team, was using the CoC as a “weapon” against male contributors, but did not abide by it herself. So when the Rust leadership has clearly been infiltrated and corrupted by male-haters who seek power without improving the language and the ecosystem, the three white male members of the Rust review team (who are all very dedicated Rust programmers, and Rust core Team members on the contrary) decide to quit.
By July 2022, the Rust core team announced that controversial members of the team, Aidan Hobson Sayers and Ashley Williams, had left the team.
Just recently, the Rust community released an RFC on a new governance plan: to establish a Leadership Council to replace the original Core Team, which delegates most of its powers to the teams .
This RFC was contributed by @jntrnr (Core), @joshtriplett (Lang Team Lead), @khionu (Moderation), @Mark-Simulacrum (Core Project Director, Release Lead), @rylev (Core Project Director), @technetos ( Moderation) and @yaahc (Collaboration Project Director) are currently in the comment period for comments from Rust project members. The document must be approved by about 20 team leaders and the former core team, who need to step down voluntarily to support the new leadership created by the governance document.
The Rust project is made up of hundreds of people spread across the globe, organized into teams with varying permissions.
Historically, the core team has both identified important work that does not fall under the purview of the team, while also attempting to do it themselves. However, putting these two activities on the same team did not improve efficiency and instead led to burnout.
This RFC establishes a leadership committee focused on identifying and prioritizing work outside the purview of the team. The committee largely delegates this work rather than doing it itself. Committees also serve as coordination, organization, and accountability between teams, such as cross-team work, roadmaps, and the long-term success of projects.
This RFC also establishes oversight and accountability mechanisms for the committee as a whole, individual committee members, review teams, project teams, and project members.
Rust language team leader Josh Triplett said they wanted to address the underlying structural issues that led to the leadership crisis and end the chaos. To this end, the new governance model that is now formulated, he also jokingly compared writing the new governance model to writing a constitution.
“Therefore, there is a broad consensus within the project that we need to create a better formal governance structure that removes some of the ambiguity and conflict; and has mechanisms to deal with these issues and ensure that similar crises do not arise again. We don’t want to Let things get to that point again.”
Rust was born and evolved over the years at Mozilla, so the original Rust project governance structure evolved from Mozilla. Around 2016 or 2017, Triplett said, an exposure draft came out that established the governance of the Rust project. It created about six teams, including core, language, mod, library and cargo teams. But one of the problems with the old model was that the core team was not only responsible for overseeing problems that arose, but also for fixing them. “We can’t wear so many hats and do so many things…too many jobs to do at the same time unless you’re paid full-time.”
Triplett agrees that it’s too much work to put all of this work on one team. And pointed out that the old governance model “is not a very precise document”; and its rough division of power is one of the reasons for the governance crisis. He explained that the new governance plan outlines when the Rust project can create a new team, what to do when a team finishes its work and needs to wrap up, and how to reorganize teams within the project. It created a new top-level committee with representatives from each team. It also includes checks and balances like the US Constitution to deal with issues.
“It will be a peaceful transition,” Triplett said. They have been polishing the content of the new governance model for a long time, considering all possibilities, “not only considering the situation that we may cause conflicts in the future, but also the solutions to the problems that the project may encounter in the future.” Most team members have already informally reviewed and contributed ideas so far, so he hopes to get approval with only minor changes to the draft.
The text and pictures in this article are from the OSC open source community
This article is transferred from https://www.techug.com/post/the-internal-struggle-of-the-rust-team-ended-establishing-a-new-leadership-committee-deleg63209852f37dd513eb21/
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