ASWF TAC Meeting - May 6, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic (Linux Foundation)
David Morin (ASWF)
Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)
Mitch Prater (LAIKA)
Jeff Bradley (Dreamworks)

Apologies

Bill Ballew (Dreamworks), will be represented by Jeff Bradley

Agenda

Recording of TAC meetings [0:00-0:05]
- Vote in progress
Goals for TAC: Year 2 [0:05-0:10]
Google Summer of Code (Larry) [0:10-0:15]
- Larry: Google announced the assignments, we got the 3 we asked for, all excellent candidates. We did well for a first year, 3 students will be getting paid for full time work.
- Next steps in the court of the mentors in the individual projects. Between now and the end of May is the “getting to know you” period, may be superfluous for us since students have already been involved and understand the project since we did this in the phase where we required students to submit a PR to demonstrate their interest.
- Larry: encourage the projects to have the students start working right away if possible.
- Later in the summer the mentors will need to grade the students at halfway point and end of summer.
- Project leaders should send words of encouragement to students who didn’t get picked, there’s always next year, and contributions are always welcome.
- Brian: student proposals can be changed until June 1st, so should review in more details. OpenCue doing a full TSC review of project proposal.
- Larry: don’t have to stick exactly to what was proposed, mentor and students can work to rescope proposed.
- Mentors can be shuffled around until end of month.
ASWF response to COVID-19 (David) [0:15-0:25]
- David: COVID-19 has done lots of damage to the industry, and is changing the way we work. And it’s going to change the world we come back to when it’s over. What do we do about it?
- “COVID-19 mitigation plan” was the first name, but this is an opportunity to get ASWF to the next level. Presented proposal at last week’s Board Meeting, which is up for discussion.
- Goals prior to COVID-19 are being put on hold, and replaced with:
  - ASWF Phase 2:
  - Take care of our own
  - Take care of our community
  - Double down on our own mission
- Take care of our own: 6 month membership extension for all Foundation member companies.
- Take care of our own: Engage on planning for ASWF Phase 2
- Take care of our community: create the ASWF Fund to support open source projects
- Take care of our community: leverage Linux Foundation Community Bridge
- $50K seed funding + $100K matching funds
- TAC has fundamental role to play in defining the kind of projects that would receive grants from ASWF Fund
- Proposal is to start with a $10K grant per quarter
- Try to help people dealing with furloughs, scaling down in companies
- Continue to look into new projects such as USD, remote review / approval project, any other tools we may need in a post COVID-19 world
- Propose to discuss on board and TAC mailing lists.
- TAC members should look into the LF Community Bridge site
- Timeline: board has modified meeting schedule, goal is to have plan completed before June 30th.
- 2020 continues to be the year of Open Source, this is the opportunity to grow our footprint.
- The open source model proved resistant to COVID-19, now is the time to educate our industry to show the advantages of work in the “open source way”.
- Daniel: a few meetings back we surveyed how the changes to working process had impacted our projects. At that early stage we felt relatively lucky that most of our key contributors and participants had not been adversely affected. Is that still the case? Apparently so.
- Daniel: in other foundations, Community Bridge has been used to fund key contributors, so this could be used in situations where some of our key developers may have lost their primary source of income. For instance projects initially targeting Google SoC that didn’t make the GSoC “cut” could be funded this way. Either Interns or Core Developers.
- Daniel: a number of times we’ve discussed that some of our key projects have lacked core capabilities (Windows toolchain for instance), so this could be a good time to identify specific projects that could be tackled.
- Henry: when would this be announced publicly so we can start communicating with people? David: if we decide to go ahead with the fund, it will be announced publicly, we need specific criteria to decide how the funds will be allocated. For instance we could have a submission form, list the criteria we are expecting.
- Daniel: if for instance there was work not specifically for one of our project, but could make it a better candidate, or another tool that is valuable to the community, that could also be in scope.
- JF: should we reuse as much of the GSoC process as possible since it’s proven to work? David: possibly, but don’t want to be too restrictive. Larry: process was put in place in a different context, someone who is known to the community coming from a VFX facility may not require as much vetting.
- Larry: our core skills are being able to create good production software in an open source way, is one of the opportunities to think about where does this point us in terms of missing tools or workflows that someone needs to develop. Can we pool our resources to avoid duplication of effort. David: TAC is ideally positioned to focus on this question, we know all the tools and legacy in this industry, the “new world” is going to be a lot more distributed, we need a reinvention of our tools. Larry: Imageworks will have a day to cancel meetings / tickets and be able to work on projects they want to work on, and demo at the end of the day (“hackathon”), and some of the work sometimes ends up being useful to the company. Remote / distributed work could be a good theme for such an event.
SIGGRAPH and ASWF events (Emily) [0:25-0:35]
- SIGGRAPH, DigiPro and Pipeline Conference all going virtual.
- DigiPro CFP is due Friday, Pipeline Conference in June. One proposal from OpenColorIO.
- Do we keep our content as a full day / 2 days, perhaps adjacent to SIGGRAPH, or do we spread it out over multiple weeks, leading up to SIGGRAPH?
- Daniel: biggest factor for outside US is how to accommodate timezones.
- Michael Min: is that an argument for spreading vs grouping? Daniel: people interested in a topic can view the recording before the discussion moves on to the next topic. Simultaneity of discussion vs being able to extend to people in other timezones.
- Emily: we can also do a live version, and replay in a different timezone with the presenter available to answer questions.
- JT: some events have a Slack channel allowing answering of questions in different timezones.
- Emily: Slack integration seems to be a common theme / requirement.
- Daniel: how are the other side conferences are handling this? Emily: SIGGRAPH is still trying to figure it out. Eric: DigiPro is also having this conversation internally right now.
- Wave: attend Realtime Conference which went virtual. Emily: heard good feedback from that conference. We’re working with them to add an open source panel.
- Emily: is Digipro still considering a single day event? Eric: no decision made so far, still possible to try to do it in one day, but awkward due to timezones.
Diversity & Inclusion working group (Emily) [0:35-0:45]
- Tracker of people who want to participate https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kuTEhaq7ECJ4ASqGEFnfM0g_919AjYVzZPcpI_e14yc/edit#gid=0
- Emily: some candidates on the tracker, please ask colleagues who would be interested. Need to identify a potential chair who would lead the group.
- Emily: happy to reach out directly to suggested people.
- Emily: finding the right person who already has a strong open source background is difficult. This could serve to introduce people to open source.
- Larry: do we have a brief introduction to what we are looking for and what we are trying to accomplish so we can send this to people who might be interested? Emily: can put together such a brief / one slid, but will be up to the D&I group to decide on specific goals, and where they will want to focus.
Working Group Updates [0:45-0:50]
- CI Working Group
  - Good progress on bringing GPU build agents into production usage for OpenColorIO, which is the targeted first project. Turn prototype into something that delivers value to our projects.
  - Looking at the other long term goals: cross platform builds, support in a more consistent manner than we have so far, each project has taken different paths so far.
  - Michael: not much change since last week, but OCIO has fully moved to GitHub Actions, Andy from LF releng working on getting accounts set up with AWS, once that’s in place we can turn the prototype work into a production tool. JF to collaborate with OCIO, goal is to be up and running in 2 weeks at next CI meeting.
- USD Working Group
  - Scheduled meeting in 2 weeks.
  - Cory: cautiously heading back into the process. We had to put a proposal forward, do we need a TAC vote to accept this?
  - Daniel: we need a TAC sponsor, do we need a vote?
  - John: do we need a vote because the WG doesn’t exist yet? Don’t recall if the discussions got to that stage yet.
  - Cory: we’ll try to schedule the meeting for next Wednesday, and come back to the TAC the following week, but want to figure out if there’s an official “hurdle” for the TAC to approve. John: will go back to the process document. David: ASWF is committed to help USD as one of the very important projects in the industry, and wants to help if it can. We want to confirm what are the “goals and non goals”.
  - Daniel: will confer with Cory and John to clarify what was previously discussed / decided.
Technical Project updates [0:50-0:55]
- OpenShadingLanguage induction
- Chris: in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for proposed changes to the CLA by Pixar, most of the other steps have been completed. So waiting for CLA update before proposing “incubation stage”.
- Daniel: is this the same issue as for OpenTimelineIO? Larry: yes, same issue, there’s one sentence that may have implications on sibling companies owned by the same corporate parent. Legal folks are talking to each other to try to resolve it. Chris: as a result of this there may be an updated CLA that might trickle down to other projects. Larry: trying to get it right to avoid needing contributors to sign an updated CLA after the fact.
- Daniel: are you getting all the support you need from ASWF? Chris: yes, believe so, “the lawyers are talking to the lawyers”.
Update on candidate projects
Next meeting
- 20 May 2020

ASWF TAC Meeting - May 6, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat