We have never intended to keep the RustFest organizing team a small, tight-knit group. Ever since the very first conference organizers have come and gone, and with them new locations popped up: we have always managed to inspire someone with our events to want to give back to their own local communities by bringing the global Rust community to town. All this time our goals remained the same: teach and to empower, to leave every community RustFest touched in a better shape, ideally with the ability and means of organizing larger events. Of course, RustFest also benefited, as occasionally these folks we have worked with have decided to stick around longer, and are (or have been, for extended periods) part of the wider RustFest organizing team today.

After having had run five wonderful events, and having almost doubled RustFest in size since the very first Berlin event it was time for us to take a short break. At last year’s Rome event we have decided to take a step back and regroup: the idea was to organize all our learnings in a way that we could use them to support an even wider variety of global (or globally local) events. On the other hand, organizing two events a year — especially in such a nomadic manner, when no two events took place in the same location, or the same country, even! — is hard, and we could already see some cracks showing.

We want to keep RustFest a high-quality community festival, a celebration of the Rust programming language and its wonderful (and wonderfully diverse) community. But we also want to further contribute to this diversity ourselves, by empowering various other communities and supporting a variety of event formats that are emerging all around the globe. 2018 saw the first ever Rust conference take place in Moscow, Russia. With Uruguay and China getting their own conferences soon, one can anticipate this trend to continue. Supporting local initiatives and organizers is incredibly important when one is trying to foster a truly global community.

This brings us to today’s announcement of the Call for Events (a.k.a Call for Event Organizing Teams) form:

The above form is built in cooperation with the Events Subteam of Rust Project’s Community team (which team itself includes many of the RustFest organizers themselves), and has two main goals:

We at RustFest still haven’t decided on where will our next event take place this fall. As with every RustFest we are looking for an enthusiastic and determined local team who will work with us as we set out to bring RustFest to their hood. If this is something of interest to you and some of your fellow community members, please let us know by filling out this form. Even if you are not necessarily looking into organizing a RustFest-style conference, or maybe you are perfectly capable of organizing your event without any cooperation from our side, you might consider sharing with us the event, format or plans you had in mind so we are able to better support you. This support could be raising awareness, sharing sponsor contacts, best practices or anything that the Rust Events team or RustFest’s team and their network could assist you with in making an amazing event for your local (or the international) Rust community.

It also doesn’t matter if your plans happen to be vague still, or if you have just decided that you will do something by reading the above: please by all means, get in touch via this form. This form is not intended as a filter or selection form, there are no “winners” and “losers”. The form is just the first step that allows us set up an ongoing conversation between us and the submitters’ teams for ensuring a vibrant, diverse, event-filled future for the language and community we all know and love.