Announcement: Ashley Williams joins the Core Team and taking lead of the Community Team

[erickt]

Announcement: Ashley Williams joining the Core Team and taking lead of the Community Team

I’m pleased to announce that Ashley Williams (@ag_dubs) will be taking over my role as the Community Team lead and my position on the Core Team since I will be soon going on paternity leave.

Ashley has already had a large impact on the Community Team. She has extensive experience in community education and organization. She joined the community team in July 2017, after spending the previous year reenergizing the RustBridge program; creating a new website and curriculum and running multiple events in multiple countries over the course of 12 months. Much of her skill in this area comes from her experience founding and leading the Nodetogether program for the Node.js community in 2016.

Outside of Rust, Ashley is also part of the Node.js and npm leadership. She sits on the Node.js Board of Directors and is on the Node.js Community Committee. She currently is employed as a services engineer at npm, the package manager for javascript. Notably, she successfully encouraged the company to begin using Rust, and spends at least part of her regular week writing production Rust. (To find out more- check out her talk from RustFest Kyiv 2017!)

As Community Team lead, Ashley hopes to grow the Community Team leadership structure and scope through better project management and tracking. As part of this, she intends to improve communication, transparency, and discovery both within the team and Rust leadership, as well as with the broader Rust community.

As a member of the Core Team, she will be focusing on bridging the JavaScript and Rust communities, including technical work to better integrate Rust with WebAssembly and npm, and improving Cargo by incorporating best practices from npm.

I’m thrilled to have her take over, and can’t wait to help her achieve her vision when I’m back from my leave.

[aturon]

Congrats, Ashley, and welcome! I’m really excited about working together more closely this year.

[nikomatsakis]

Welcome to Ashley! I think she’s going to do a great job heading up the community team, as she has done in so many other ways in and around the Rust ecosystem already. Every time that Ashley and I have sat down to discuss something, she’s brought fresh insights to the table and given me a lot to think about, and I know that she will be a valued member of the core team as well.

[withoutboats]

I’ve been a huge fan of Ashley’s work since I saw “If you wish you learn ES6/2015 from scratch, you must first invent the universe” several years ago, before either of us were deeply involved in Rust. The question she asks at the end of that talk - are we programming yet? - had a significant impact on my personal trajectory and influenced my decision to work on programming languages.

I feel very fortunate to consider her a friend now & am excited to get to work with her more closely on Rust projects. The harassment she has received in connection to her work is unacceptable and shameful.

[Manishearth]

Moderator note: It is not acceptable to discuss the suitability of a team addition here. If you have concerns, email the mods or the core team.

[skade]

Congratulations!

Happy to see a new lead in the team and in core!

[comex]

Moderator note: It is not acceptable to discuss the suitability of a team addition here. If you have concerns, email the mods or the core team.

I have no problem with the addition in question, but prohibiting public discussion of the matter is a bit much.

[aturon]

I want to provide clarification on a few points.

The Rust core team enthusiastically stands by the decision to bring Ashley into this new leadership role. Ashley has been an outstanding member of the Rust community and brings much needed leadership and community skills; we’re lucky to have her.

Some here and elsewhere have brought up history from the Node community, which was already well known to the core team. Ashley has already withstood enormous public scrutiny and (ongoing) harassment, and we are unwilling for Rust forums to become yet another venue for relitigating that history. I believe that this was also a factor in the moderation team’s decision to shut down hostile discussion here and elsewhere.

Please note that the moderation and core teams operate independently, to avoid conflicts of interest. If you have concerns, please direct them to rust-mods@rust-lang.org or directly to me at aturon@mozilla.com.

[wbrian]

I had no intention of replying further, even after the comments were deleted, out of respect for the moderators. However, you continue to imply that my comments in this thread constitute harassment, a point I strongly disagree with, while agreeing that actual harassment is 100% unacceptable.

Now that the comments are deleted, casual observers don’t have the benefit of making a reasonable determination themselves, and the narrative is now controlled by those who clearly disagree with me. In fact, the post I’m responding to is almost verbatim something you’ve already posted, edited to remove, and have now re-posted with the benefit of me not being able to address it since the rules were modified mid-thread.

My concerns are valid, and I am not the only person who shares these concerns. Dismissing them as harassment is the exact reason others are hesitant to speak up on the issue, and that’s wrong.

[Centril]

Congratulations to you Ashley!

[bascule]

Congratulations, Ashley!

[vitiral]

Congrats, and welcome!

[hjr3]

Congrats Ashley! Very well deserved.

[HadrienG]

From what I gather of private discussions, the mod team would prefer to avoid public debates about people, as such discussions are stressful to the persons invoked and involved, and easily degenerate into flame wars.

For private discussions, you can contact the core team, the community team, or the moderation team depending on the specifics of the question (see official addresses on the rust-lang.org website). Directly contacting Ashley and the other people involved is also an option if you want first-hand points of view on the events. Questions about Node.js events specifically will be best asked on the Node side, since that is where you are likely to find the least speculation and the most direct information.

[burntsushi]

[burntsushi]

Moderator note: In an effort to de-escalate, I’ve locked this thread to stop the trickle of unconstructive comments.