ASWF TAC Meeting - April 22, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic (Linux Foundation)
Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
Patrick Hodoul (Autodesk / OCIO)
Dan Bailey (ILM/OpenVDB)
Andrew Grimberg (LF RelEng)
Andy Biar (Warner Brothers)
Nick Porcino
JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)

Apologies

Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative

Agenda

Recording of TAC and TSC meetings (Daniel) [0:00-0:05]
- Everyone should be aware that meetings are now being recorded, do we feel this is good with respect to transparency / full access to our discussion, or is it better to stick to written notes where some editing / redaction is possible.
- Josh: is the motivation to allow better access to people who couldn’t access the meeting? John: there is no requirement that meetings need to be recorded, but it is important to stress transparency. CNCF / Kubernetes records their meetings. Good for people considering engaging to see what the community looks like. Also TAC meetings are open to the public and are thus on “public record”. But it is not a hard requirements for projects to do this, but it is seen as a “best practice”. Daniel: can help to make a TAC meeting more approachable.
- Has anyone watched those recordings? They aren’t easily found right now. Eric: we may want to way costs vs benefits. Some projects actually put their recordings on YouTube.
- Written notes provides “temporal compression” compared to having to watch the whole thing. Some members are expressing concerns over privacy, or self censorship.
- Could someone request recordings specifically when they can’t attend?
- Andrew: projects that don’t record only have meeting notes, projects require “immutable minutes” for auditing purposes. But there have been cases where members have gone back to the recordings to help clarify what was captured in the minutes, in some projects the minutes are very sparse and don’t capture the discussions that lead to an actual decision. So you can understand more what the discussions that lead to the decision.
- Daniel: perhaps the recording should be done, but access shouldn’t be automatic “to the world”, access should be on request.
- Daniel: TAC meetings been recorded for the last 2 or 3 meetings but not published. What about TSC meetings? John: unsure, some of the TSCs are using different Zoom rooms, so no clear answer right now.
- Daniel: we should have a vote on the topic, we should defer that vote to the next meeting so we can discuss over email.
Agenda automation via GitHub (John) [0:05-0:10]
- Pull Request
- John: Some other communities such as Node.JS are doing this. GitHub actions brings some really interesting integrations, allowing GitHub Issues to be used to track progress on issues and automate the collection of these Issues to automatically generate agenda.
- Not a hard requirement of course, seeing if there’s interest. Can tweak deadline for when agenda gets closed off.
- Trying to reduce the amount of operational / admin work.
- Any project could use this process as well for their TSC. Could be added to the aswf-sample-project template project.
- Chris: since OSL is just getting started, would definitely be interested in taking a look at that workflow. Started on the assumptions that Google Docs may be a simpler way to manage these documents, but even a single Google Doc is annoying from a formatting point of view.
- John: happy to work with OSL on this.
- Chris: hopefully the process is not too complicated / intricate so it doesn’t introduce an additional maintenance burden. John: toolchain is design to be simple, you just set your meeting frequency, and the interval before a meeting for generating the meeting agenda. Creates it as a single GitHub Issue that collectively contains the meeting agenda and all the linked Issues as meeting items. Output from GitHub Issues is Markdown, so can add automatic headers for instance.
- Daniel: a project using GitHub Issues for tracking / reporting, this could work quite well. Less clear if this works for the TAC? Larry: this is the other way around, don’t want to clutter the Issues list on code projects with discussion items, should only be for the code. Prefer a live Google Doc for OSL, archive to Markdown only once every couple of months.
- John: depends on how projects want to operate. In Javascript projects their process is driven by GitHub Issues and PRs, so it makes sense for these projects, and helps with transparency, but it can indeed add clutter. We want to make sure we provide tools that potentially make projects easier to work with, but no obligation to use those. Still worth documenting in the sample project as options to use for new projects.
- Daniel: would it be possible to point at a project that is already using this system as an example? John: will provide an example. Daniel: open to try this on the TAC repo as an example for the projects.
- Larry: if we have contacts at GitHub, it would be interesting to engage with their engineers / product people to help provide explicit tools to manage project agendas instead of “hijacking” the Issues / PR projects.
- Chris: what about using the GitHub Wiki for the project? John: LF has great contacts with GitHub, so happy to engage with them with workflow ideas.
Project Admins (Daniel, Dan) [0:10-0:15]
- OpenVDB TSC voted to grant Dan Bailey as Project Admin
  - Other projects could follow if they feel the need
  - Dan: process has gone fine, not clear if he has Admin rights yet. Andrew: please put in LF releng support ticket. Dan: will do.
- Feedback on process
Google Summer of Code Update (Larry) [0:15-0:25]
- Larry: ASWF got a total of 3 slots, better than the 1-2 we were told to expect, but less than the 5 we were hoping for
- Will need to boil down 5 top choices down to 3, short deadline on April 30th, but when students apply to multiple projects / organizations, they may accept the first organization that offers the slot, so best to do this ASAP to avoid losing students we really want to get.
ASWF Sample Project (JF) [0:25-0:30]
- Looking for a co-reviewer: Daniel happy to be a co-reviewer. Anyone else from the other projects? Kimball: happy to do it as well. JF to open ticket with lf releng.
- Daniel: we need to make it clear what are the processes we’ve been deciding on, we need to update some of our early documents, especially what is on the external web site. Working with Emily to update that documentation. Emily: anything on the website is easy to fix, I can update within a day.
OpenShadingLanguage adoption Update (Chris) [0:30-0:35]
- Chris: working away at the onboarding process, moving forward smoothly? Larry: the big copyright notice PR was done, license scan was performed. Transferred a couple of domains to ASWF, a bit of delay to CLAs, Pixar rep brought up a legal issue, waiting for the lawyers to decide that the current language is still the right one. Moving quickly on everything. Minimal CLA, identical to the one in the ASWF template, and which is being used by OCIO which was already cleared by Sony / Imageworks legal, would rather avoid having to get that changed, but want to make sure other organizations aren’t prevented from submitting code.
OpenEXR Update (Cary)
- We’re hoping for two GSoC students, one to work on the Imath library and one to do some compression benchmarks. -> will likely only be one.
- We’re planning a 2.5 release shortly, bug fixes and small features.
- John Mertic is having the LF design group mock up some options for a new OpenEXR logo.
Diversity & Inclusion Update (Emily)
- Several names were submitted
- Current contact spreadsheet
- Need to identify a potential chair to lead the effort: ideally the chair person would act as a TSC chair, but with a shorter time commitment.
SIGGRAPH (Emily)
- Would like to propose that our Open Source Day is done as a virtual event, either before or after SIGGRAPH. Conference Center in DC may be repurposed for COVID response. Likely that the conference will be cancelled or very low turnout, and overall cost will be lower as well. If SIGGRAPH does go forward in person we can still do some events (TAC BoF for instance), but no individual project BoFs, which would be held during our own virtual event.
- Looking for feedback from people who have attended other virtual events.
- Daniel: may not be able to fly internationally. Larry: hard to imagine getting on a plane in that timeframe, so makes sense to try to put together the best virtual event we can.
- Daniel: there have been a lot of events which have switched to virtual, any positive or negative feedback? Wave: did a big face to face event with the team, pre-recording keynote event and uploading it to a central server for others to watch and then being on Slack while others watched, seemed to go well. So a mix of Zoom / interactive sessions and pre-recorded presentations can be helpful.
- Bill: feedback that having a Slack channel to continue the discussion after the presentation helps. Wave: having separate threads per talk also helps to keep track. And can ask questions after the fact. Kimball: also helps for people in different timezones.
- Emily: looking at last year, most people didn’t stay for the whole day, will people dedicate a whole day / few hours in the day, or should it be broken up into chunks?
- Wave: his talk was pre-recorded, but then agreed on a time for as many people to “press play” at the same time. Or could be streamed at a specific time? But schedule defined “communal chat time”.
- Emily: event team has been putting together a look at available platforms.
- Daniel: mitigates the technical risk.
- Emily: great for the talks, but more difficult for BoFs which are supposed to be more interactive. Wave: Slack or Discord could work well for that. Nick: prefers Slack, the most annoying events are on Twitch due to visual distractions of the platform.
- Eric: IEEE VR conference had issues with Zoom for video distribution. Nick: was really difficult to cross reference between the recording and the Twitch stream. Wave: put the pre-recorded sessions on Box, and everyone had pre downloaded it.
- Daniel: what’s the best place to discuss this? We should make some time on the next TAC meeting.
- Eric: a big decision is to keep it co-located in time, or moving before or after, Digipro is struggling with this question. Emily: by doing it before or after we gain more flexibility, but can’t benefit from being on the SIGGRAPH schedule. Sean: are there other opportunities for tie-in with SIGGRAPH? Emily: if we do BoF at SIGGRAPH we can use that to promote an event after SIGGRAPH. Will get in touch with ACM to figure out what’s the best way to coordinate. Opportunities to cross promote with Digipro, Pipeline Conference.
- Daniel: looks like we have a clear endorsement of the plan to go virtual.
Update on candidate projects
- Now that things are settling into some kind of normalcy, we need to keep track of this.
- Have been staying in contact with Res, no specific update for now.
CI Process: actively working on GPU support, OCIO has moved to GitHub Actions.
Meeting of USD working group should happen in May.
Next meeting

ASWF TAC Meeting - April 22, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat