How can I help?

[Walther]

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to help.

It would be great to have a heading "How to help" with a list of different ways in which to contribute. This could include different perspectives, for example how to contribute as an individual vs as a company, how to contribute financially, how to contribute with time and effort (documentation, code, conversations, design, ...) and so on.

Optionally, this kind of a list could be made separately for both the the preparing-for-foundation work itself as well as post-foundation-launch time when the foundation is up and running.

Optionally, such a heading could also include a paragraph of explaining what kind of help is out of scope - what kind of external contributions the foundation is not looking for from people outside the main team.

This kind of a simple call-to-action could be great for encouraging people to contribute, and direct their attention to the right things the foundation wants to prioritize.

[nikomatsakis]

Really chuffed that folks are excited to help the Foundation and the Rust Project!

Let me start by saying that you already are helping, just by asking questions. We’ve found that these Q&A sessions have really helped us guide our thinking on how to present the documentation. We have more to say here but we’ll need to spend some time drafting an answer, so we won’t get to it during this Q&A window.

[nikomatsakis]

To build on our previous comment:

We agree that we should make it easy for people to figure out how to help. We feel that the best way to do this would be to avoid creating “foundation volunteers” vs “project volunteers”, and instead to just have the concept of “Rust volunteers”.

It may be helpful to consider an example. In an earlier question, we mentioned our plan to produce human readable by-laws and translate them into multiple languages. Instead of having the foundation solicit its own set of translators, we contacted the Rust Community team who agreed to organize and staff this effort. (Big shoutout in advance to all the people who will help with this, along with the people who do translation for Rust in general: you all are the best!)

This could include [..] how to contribute as an individual vs as a company, how to contribute financially [..]

Don’t worry, we’ll have a web page that makes it very obvious how companies can contribute financially. =) We’re not currently accepting donations from individuals, as we noted here.