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Ashley Williams

Empowering teams to build better devtools

Ashley Williams is a prominent figure in the tech industry, having an extensive background in open source, engineering, and community leadership.

With a BA in Philosophy & Neuroscience from Wesleyan University, Ashley has leveraged her diverse educational background to make significant contributions to various organizations.

Ashley is widely recognized for her role as a former member of the Rust Core team and the founder of the Rust Foundation, where she also served as the inaugural executive director.

Throughout her career, Ashley has been actively involved in diverse teams such as Rust crates.io, infrastructure, and community teams, the WebAssembly working group, as well as programs like RustBridge and Increasing Rust's Reach.

Known as the original author and lead maintainer of various popular developer tools within the Rust ecosystem, Ashley's contributions include projects like Cloudflare's wrangler, wasm-pack, and cargo-generate, among others.

Prior to her engagements with Rust, Ashley held key roles in organizations such as Node.js Community Committee, NodeTogether educational initiative, and the Node.js Foundation (now OpenJS Foundation) as the Individual Membership Director.

Ashley's professional journey has seen her work across renowned companies like npm, Mozilla, and Cloudflare, where she has left a lasting impact through her expertise and leadership.

Apart from her technical pursuits, Ashley's academic roots as a middle school science teacher in NYC reflect her commitment to education and building inclusive tech communities.

Highlights

Jul 23 · linkedin

Right now, reps from big cos and large foundations are getting ready to determine the implementation for the most impactful regulation on software to date: the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

This is almost certainly going to have a large economic impact on the industry, especially open source. A lot of effort was made "seemingly" in an effort to protect open source from original drafts of the CRA last year, and yet on reading, it's not clear to me that efforts have produced outcomes that will support small open source companies or independent maintainers.

Instead, it seems a lot of effort is being made (in some ways obviously) to protect open source foundations. The confusion around open source foundations and who they serve is an easy and common one to make- but if you follow the money, a 501c6 org is made to support it's members and rarely is it true that the members are comprised of independent maintainers. It's also worth nothing that thanks to deep inequities across the industry, small and medium-sized businesses rarely enjoy any meaningful amount of representation in your classic open source foundation.

While the ink is now dried on the formal wording of the CRA legislation, it's implementation is only about to get started. The Eclipse Foundation is hosting the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group - a working group that will be charged with formalizing the implementation of this regulation. While the membership of this group is reasonably diverse, I think it's worth noting that there is little to no representation of independent maintainers.

Starting with a kick off today (registration in comments), Tracy Hinds and I are kicking off a several months long feedback session w/a Github repo and live events, where we read through the CRA and discuss the implications with a variety of awesome maintainer guests such as Jordan Harband, Matteo Collina, Charlie Marsh, William Morgan, Seth Michael Larson and more.

It feels almost incoherent to say we need to "shift open source policy left" but I think for too long, open source foundations have been treated as a proxy for a constituency they simply do not represent. If you're excited about this, get in touch, sign up for the event, and participate on the repo! (again, links in comments)

Ashley Williams
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Austin, Texas, United States