AWSF TAC Meeting - October 9, 2019

Voting member attendance

  • Daniel Heckenberg - Chairperson, Animal Logic Pty Ltd
  • Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
  • Pilar Molina Lopez, Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
  • Michael O’Gorman, Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Henry Vera, Double Negative
  • Bill Ballew, DreamWorks Animation
  • Matt Kuhlenschmidt, Epic Games, Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
  • Sean McDuffee, Intel Corporation
  • Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
  • Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited
  • Eric Enderton, NVIDIA
  • Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
  • Michael Min, Netflix
  • Michael B. Johnson, Apple
  • Dave Fellows, Microsoft
  • Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO Representative
  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
  • Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative

Other Attendees

  • Patrick Hodoul (OCIO / Autodesk)
  • Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
  • Bernard Lefebvre (OCIO / Autodesk)
  • Robin Rowe
  • Doug Walker (OCIO / Autodesk)

Apologies

  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited

Agenda

  • Goals for TAC: Year 2 [0:00-0:10]
    • Summary (Daniel)
      • Progress on drawing guidance from member organizations and board
      • We should listen to the voices our of developer community and projects
    • Survey processes (Gordon)
      • Governing board hasn’t done a survey yet, so they have asked TAC to create a strawman proposal
      • Link to strawman proposal from Gordon
        • Restate goals for first year
        • Ask for level of satisfaction on various ASWF accomplishments
        • Ranking of goals for next year
      • Emily: Should the survey go to members only or to wider community? Gordon: might make sense to separate those audiences, could be a question at the start, or separate survey links? Emily: should have a single survey with a question “are you a member” at the start, and also “are you involved” (for people who are involved but not from member companies).
      • Larry: our analysis should try to boil down “one vote per member company” to make sure we deskew multiple answers from a single company? Gordon: try to avoid the “anonymous” answers from SIGGRAPH BoF. Maybe that’s why having separate links for members vs public at large would help with this? Larry: don’t want to be overly structured either. Disney has a single membership, but has multiple entities. Not clear how granular we want to be.
      • Emily: maybe this becomes two separate surveys, ask to share internally to our companies. But broader industry survey to see if there are gaps we need to be addressing. Our membership may not cover all aspects. Straw poll at SIGGRAPH BoF was attempt at getting feedback from outside our immediate circles.
      • Broader industry survey: open source use across the industry.
      • Daniel: we probably need to discuss this more via email, a few people seem to have expressed interest in this process. Quick discussion: what do we intend to do with this information. How do we show that we have taken on board the results of the surveys we have already done. We don’t want to keep asking people the same questions. Is it useful for us to produce some kind of “state of open source in the industry” document / summary. Similar to “state of DevOps” summary that goes out yearly.
      • Gordon: a lot of these questions we have not asked before. Make sure we capture all of the suggestions from previous surveys. Maybe the broader “state of the union of open source” needs to be a separate survey. We need to make sure that contributors view that they are “getting their money’s worth” of their efforts and contributions to ASWF. Although we may be repeating questions, knowing who is asking for what is important.
      • Larry: not clear we’ve gotten actionable feedback from SIGGRAPH survey. Daniel: also live polls during the summits. Gordon: do we have the results of those earlier polls? Larry: yes. But that data is 2 years old. Gordon: we only get one chance to ask for this data in the form we want. “Is this going to give us useful data to take action on”. Larry: we should ask to what extent they think they are filling their FTE commitments, andif not what are the blockers. Gordon: and what can we do to make it easier to contribute to ASWF.
      • Emily: how can we make the questions as specific as possible, ask specific questions so we have better insights / actionable data.
    • Diversity and Inclusion (Wave)
      • Foundation, TAC and projects
      • External orgs
        • CJANE
        • Women in film.org
        • Women in animation.org
        • Anita Borg / Grace Hopper conference
        • Phone calls to diverse industry members asking for recommends
        • Need to be careful about the message
        • Get a number of organizations, send to the TAC / governing board, “go look at these organizations, do you know anyone on their board / advisor lists, reach out and start a conversation”.
        • Michael Min: do we have an idea of what our message is supposed to be? Is there a specific objective, what are we trying to achieve? Wave: for now trying to identify relevant organizations who might have members / connections who could get involved in ASWF. We would like to get more voices, more points of view involved. Not prescriptive, but want to encourage “diversity of ideas”. Michael: are we trying to broaden the conversation, or trying to get more members / contributors from more diverse contributors? What would be the metrics? Wave: for now we should be looking at starting conversations. Example of ML-based software to look at gender roles in scripts at Disney. Maybe some of this is open sourced?
        • Wave: also can be helpful to look at membership of these organizations to establish links.
        • Emily: finding diverse contributors to open source is challenging, need to raise awareness. Could turn into a mentorship program. Are there goal in the TAC we want to set? Should each project have a woman on the TSC for instance?
        • Wave: gender is a good starting point, there are other “axis” to consider as well.
        • Pilar: should we be looking at quotas as well to set specific goals?
        • Emily: also putting together a list of relevant organizations, will send to TAC. Everyone should also add to the notes if they think of organizations.
      • Member orgs
      • Target setting
    • VFX Platform 2020 / Python 3
      • A big part of the day to day work in our facilities
  • Documentation [0:10-0:20]
    • Mission statements (Daniel)
      • Example
      • No response to mailing list email: how to interpret this?
      • Larry: had discussion in OpenEXR TSC, what’s the boundary between “mission statement” and “succinct description of project”. How do we tell people “what do we want to do?”
      • Daniel: every project has a description of what they are, some have “what we are not”, and that’s valuable as well. Goes partway towards informing what is a mission statement. There are different versions of these. Should we formalize this more, agree on language and terminology.
      • JF: how similar should ASWF projects be
      • Emily: have requested that projects have a link to ASWF, but there is benefit to having projects retain their own identity.
      • Daniel: there’s value in some standardization: ease of discovery, find information in consistent ways, quick start to get projects going, best practices. Infrastructure and tooling also sees value in standardization. This conversation has happened in various projects. There are many opportunities to add value, but we don’t want to be too prescriptive.
      • Michael Min: sat in on OCIO project TSC, questions of identifying personal vs institutional contributions.
      • Daniel: this would relate to governance documentation. Michael: discussion mentioned template projects to specify some mechanisms.
      • Daniel: need to ask questions of the board as to what they are actually looking for in terms of mission statements from projects.
      • Emily: sometimes the language is there but it is buried, so maybe just need more clarity / explicitness.
    • TSC FAQs (John)
      • PR
      • Josh: OpenTimelineIO has found this information useful when setting up a new project.
    • Project success metrics (John)
    • Template Project (JF)
      • Sample Project Repo
        • Making progress on this, may need to reorganize structure to make it either an “information repository” or an “actionable template” project.
      • Sample Windows Container Repo
        • Container builds are quite slow by default (takes a long time to pull container images from Docker Hub)
        • Could investigate storing container images on GitHub and/or Azure instead
      • CDash test dashboard
        • Should all ASWF projects that use CTest aggregate test results on CDash?
  • Security [0:20-0:30]
    • OpenEXR update (Cary, Kimball)
      • Secure Development Lifecycle (Dave)
        • Project reached out to Dave Hutchison at Foundry who joined las TSC call.
        • Gave thorough responses / indications on practical steps to approach security requirements for our industry.
        • Discussed how Foundry engaged with Google Fuzz group, support load. Discussed dynamics of security community.
        • From discussion after meeting we would benefit from taking more steps in OpenEXR context.
      • TAC mailing list thread
      • Establish working group?
        • Not clear that this can be extended across projects for now.
      • How do we propagate this information across projects?
      • Dave: may be worth having a separate discussion, has been working on some of these issues in context of OpenCue.
  • Technical Project updates [0:30-0:45]
    • OpenColorIO
      • Moved repo to ASWF GitHub org
      • CI back up and running
      • Challenge (could be discussed in FAQ): how to get CLA checks set up in GitHub, can be somewhat confusing.
      • Next thing: will be looking at getting GPU testing up and running, will be working with Sean Looper, will be using AWS GPU instances, should have some updates at next TAC meeting. Daniel: there’s also been interest for GPU testing from OpenVDB.
      • Sean: may not be able to join next OCIO TSC meeting due to travel schedule.
    • OpenCue
      • Working on static analysis, security requirements.
    • OpenTimelineIO
      • Good discussion with legal and ASWF for license questions, still work to be done before going forward
      • Doing some project proposals for schema enhancements
      • Discussions with Apple getting started, still working on contact at Avid
    • OpenVDB
    • OpenEXR
  • CI updates [0:45-0:55]
    • Working group
    • GPU (OCIO / LF Rel Eng)
    • Update on candidate projects?
  • Next meeting: 23 October 2019

    Action Items (AIs)

    Notes

    Chat