'Tis the season for people and communities to reflect and set goals- and the Rust team is no different. Last month, we published a blogpost about our accomplishments in 2017, and the teams have already begun brainstorming goals for next year.

Last year, the Rust team started a new tradition: defining a roadmap of goals for the upcoming year. We leveraged our RFC process to solicit community feedback. While we got a lot of awesome feedback on that RFC, we'd like to try something new in addition to the RFC process: a call for community blog posts for ideas of what the goals should be.

As open source software becomes more and more ubiquitous and popular, the Rust team is interested in exploring new and innovative ways to solicit community feedback and participation. We're commited to extending and improving our community organization and outreach- and this effort is just the first of what we hope to be many iterations of new kinds of community feedback mechanisms.

Starting today and running until the end of January we'd like to ask the community to write blogposts reflecting on Rust in 2017 and proposing goals and directions for Rust in 2018. These can take many forms:

A post on your personal or company blog

A Medium post

A GitHub gist

Or any other online writing platform you prefer.

We're looking for posts on many topics:

Ideas for community programs

Language features

Documentation improvements

Ecosystem needs

Tooling enhancements

Or anything else Rust related you hope for in 2018 :D

A great example of what we're looking for is this post, "Rust and the case for WebAssembly in 2018" by @mgattozzi or this post, "Rust in 2017" by Anonyfox.

You can write up these posts and email them to community@rust-lang.org or tweet them with the hashtag #Rust2018 . We'll aggregate any blog posts sent via email or with the hashtag in one big blog post here.

The Core team will be reading all of the submitted posts and using them to inform the initial roadmap RFC for 2018. Once the RFC is submitted, we'll open up the normal RFC process, though if you want, you are welcome to write a post and link to it on the GitHub discussion.

Preliminary Timeline

We hope to get a draft roadmap RFC posted in mid January, so blog posts written before then would be the most useful. We expect discussion and final comment period of that RFC to last through at least the end of January, though, so blog posts until then will also be considered for ideas.

Dates are likely to change, but this is a general overview of the upcoming process:

Jan 3 : call for posts!

: call for posts! throughout Jan : read current posts, draft roadmap RFC

: read current posts, draft roadmap RFC mid Jan : post roadmap RFC on GitHub

: post roadmap RFC on GitHub late Jan : evaluate roadmap based on RFC comments

: evaluate roadmap based on RFC comments late Jan - early Feb : final RFC comment period

: final RFC comment period Feb: assuming discussion has reached a steady state, and we've found consensus, accept final roadmap

So, as we kick off 2018, if you find yourself in a reflective mood and your mind drifts to the future of Rust, please write up your thoughts and share them! We're excited to hear where you want Rust to go this coming year!