ASWF TAC Meeting - August 26, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Emily Olin, Linux Foundation
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Ashley Whetter, Python 3 Working Group / DNeg
Carol Payne, Netflix, Diversity+Inclusion WG
Rachel Rose, ILM, Diversity+Inclusion WG
Andrew Grimberg, Linux Foundation Release Engineering
Jeff Bradley, DreamWorks
Mathieu Mazerolle, Foundry
David Aguilar, Walt Disney Animation

Apologies

Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative

Agenda

Welcome new voting member: Laurent Ruel, Unity Technologies
- Laurent currently on leave, so will be introduced at next meeting.
OpenSourceDays, SIGGRAPH updates (Emily)
- 700 registrants, 495 unique attendees over the course of 2 days
- Unique attendee counts per session is available
- 75% of registrants had never attended ASWF events
- Majority were engineers working in VFX / animation
- Majority had 10+ years experience
- OpenEXR / OpenVDB / OpenColorIO were projects with majority of attendee experience
- All videos are on YouTube
- OTIO had to reschedule, will be in the next week or 2. No need for new registration.
- SIGGRAPH: both bofs both had over 300 attendees,
- OpenSource Days ahead of SIGGRAPH? We might want to do it after SIGGRAPH to use SIGGRAPH to bring people to OpenSource Days
- A lot of educators and students participating SIGGRAPH events, and had people from education reach out (University of Florida Open Source Club)
- Good leads for mentorship programs, identify where we would have needs
- Put together intro slide deck in D&I group to reach out to schools
- Feel free to share feedback on Open Source Days with Emily
- Larry: agreed with having general sessions at SIGGRAPH first, has been a busy last few weeks for everyone, maybe we could change having exactly the same meeting at SIGGRAPH and OSD to avoid confusion.
- Cary: would have wished for more discussion / questions, missing the sense of “everyone in the room”. Curious how the other sessions went? Did other sessions seem quiet?
- Emily: across the board the chats / Q&As were fairly quiet, even at SIGGRAPH BoF it was fairly quiet. May want to “seed the chat”, also Zoom Webinar vs Zoom Meeting format, ASWF used Zoom Webinar, SIGGRAPH had Zoom Meeting which required more moderation. General BoF opened the Zoom meeting early and had informal chat between attendees before the meeting. Also D&I panel had more interactivity due to less structured nature of the event.
- Some of the attendees we had were very new, perhaps we should have a separate “state of the union” meeting for projects once or twice a year? So we could plan individual events, with more engagement of the community. Not so difficult to set up, Emily can help coordinate.
- Daniel: everyone realized that Slack is a good way to pick up these conversations, in some cases there was good flow from sessions into Slack channels. Would be a good idea to welcome new attendees in Slack channels.
- Larry: all of the Slack channels picked up new members after the meetings, also a thread about Slack archiving / limited retention of Slack free.
- Emily: 80 new members, more than half of all messages are direct messages. Not a lot of technical discussions on the mailing lists, immediacy of Slack helps.
Governing Board updates (David)
- David summarized Open Source Days for governing board
- Taking some of the ideas and requests for project activity, and how do we take those beyond “that’s a good idea”?
  - Working group for Collaborative Remote Review? (extension of “Media Player”)
  - Datasets for testing and/or machine learning
Vote: OpenTimelineIO Incubation review
- Deferred to next meeting
Vote: Diversity & Inclusion WG endorsement
- Charter README.md
- Rose: Charter similar to what was presented in previous meetings, targeting high school and college age students. Internal goals: leadership and projects, how to improve diversity. Third goal: how to help member companies and individuals get education around D&I and how to make things more inviting.
- Carol: split into goals and deliverables, came up with some deliverables:
  - Mentorships and partnerships with schools and universities
  - Set D&I goals internally at AWSF
  - D&I ambassador per project to take part in D&I activities
  - Blog and landing page for D&I WG
  - First 1-2 years as schedule / target
- Daniel: D&I WG has a long term schedule
- Daniel moves motion to endorse adoption of WG charter
  - All Ayes, no abstains or nays, unanimous endorsement
- Rachel: successful presentations at OSD and SIGGRAPH, received a lot of emails, especially from educators interested in combining forces. Also interest from SIGGRAPH itself which has its own D&I initiatives. In the process of going through and responding to emails, looking at potential partnerships. Emily looking at the LF mentorship platform, Community Bridge. Emily: now is a good time to capitalize on recent interest.
- John: a lot of this is driven by interest generated at OSD, also have universities looking at associate membership. Some overlap with Larry’s work on GSoC, CommunityBridge is used by many LF projects, but also use GSoC. We should set up a meeting to help identify leaders to drive the membership program, can reuse experience with other LF projects. Can send Doodle poll to figure out best time for such a discussion.
- Carol: would this initiative be run through D&I group, in partnership with all the member projects? John: it’s up to this group / TAC to decide how they want to go about it. Is mentorship mostly focussed around D&I, or broader scope? Has been done both ways across LF projects. Emily: some of this will depend on how many volunteers show interest from projects, and who wants to do the work. Carol: D&I would like to take a leadership role in this, can set up a call with John to figure out how the program runs, and help guide the projects through mentorship. Rachel: no matter how it gets run, there should be a component of the D&I group in it. Even if a mentorship program isn’t solely focussed on D&I, it can still help with D&I objectives as long as those objectives are taken into consideration.
- Daniel: timing is excellent since GSoC projects are wrapping up, we’ve learned a lot through those, and have been a test case for a very structured kind of mentorship, all projects have had a very positive experience. We have a lot of momentum going forward.
- Brian: OpenCue had great experience with GSoC, would love to be involved with mentorship initiative.
Working Group Updates
- CI
  - Charter README.md
    - Somewhat retroactive but good to codify
    - CI WG should get is own repo
    - Already has Slack channel, but no separate mailing list
    - Daniel moving to endorse, JF seconds. All ayes, no abstains or nays, CI WG charter adopted.
  - Didn’t have meeting last week because of overlap with OSD presentation
  - Targeting SIGGRAPH for successful run of GPU build for OCIO: made it just in time
  - Michael: got a successful build setup using AWS CodeBuild. Commits to Master Branch will target GPU builds, was a bit tricky to figure out how to run without X server, but recent commits added EGL headless rendering.
  - Michael: would need to be able to run this in context of PRs, but secrets management is problematic. Andrew: common request, GitHub working on this.
  - Daniel: to be followed up in CI working group.
- Diversity & Inclusion
  - Covered above
- Python 3
  - Ashley: quiet meeting this week due to SIGGRAPH, working on trying to get statements from DCC vendors about Python 3 status. Stuck in feedback loop of vendors not wanting to drop Python 2.7 as long as customers demand it, and studios aren’t going to move to Python 3 as long as Python 2.7 is supported in DCCs.
  - Daniel: is there anything the TAC or projects can help with this standoff?
  - Ashley: SideFX / Foundry / Autodesk are involved, would be useful to have contacts with other vendors to get specific statements from them.
  - VES Tech Committee informal Python 3 survey
- USD
  - Cory: Wiki has been announced to usd-interest mailing list
  - Will review content added at next meeting
  - Interesting discussion on “pseudo standardization” of schemas, initially wasn’t a stated goal of the WG, but there seems to be some desire for this. Asking the USD team what they would like to see the USD WG do in that regard. Make sure that there are no competing standardization efforts.
  - Looking at some non-VFX interest in USD: civil engineering, VR
  - Some discussion on standardization of USD itself, looking at VFX Platform BoF discussion on USD, whether it should be included or not. Having internal discussion about that.
Follow ups
- Git branch names (Kimball)
  - TAC will discuss choice made by OpenEXR and discuss whether that should be recommended for other ASWF projects.
  - Cary: settled on “dev” and “release”, was supposed to roll out earlier this week but ran into issues. “Release” will be the default branch which people will get when they clone by default, “dev” will be where PRs are merged, previously called “master”.
  - Andrew: GitHub now allows setting a default name at the organization level, it’s still set to default of “master”, in the future will switch to default of “main”
  - David: took a look a discussion between core developers, everyone agreed on “main”, so it is a bit odd to not go with what everyone has agreed to.
  - Daniel: probably need to be further discussed
- Slack archiving (JF)
  - Actively harvest useful messages into other locations
  - Or pay for full archiving
  - Larry: is price per user means any user show has ever posted?
  - John: based on active user during period of time, Slack will compute active users within last month (not clear if it’s people posting or just login in). So could have a large increase in your bill if many new users join.
  - Michael: are there any considerations between LF / ASWF for archival of communications, and SoX-like legal requirements?
  - John: outside of more official action by a board, LF doesn’t know that there are requirements to record anything.
  - Wave: what kind of money are we looking at? Daniel: we should look at usage over last 6 months, and see how much this would cost in a paid model. Of course we wouldn’t want to direct messages.
  - John: current cost would be $1928 for this month, 426 members. So possibly $30K budget.
  - Emily: we probably don’t want important conversations to get buried in Slack history anyway.
  - Larry: Slack is not permanent. John: this is not the first foundation to deal with free vs paid Slack. Cost is always an issue, Slack can be a challenging tool for finding important conversations, the searching tools are not as good as with a mailing list. Slack tends to be good for instant / interactive conversations, otherwise mailing lists or GitHub Issues may be more appropriate. Depends on how projects like to collaborate.
  - Could look at other alternatives such as Mattermost, but it’s a different tool, with several costs associated with transition.
  - Andy: LF is currently investigating Matrix as an offer for all projects, including bridging into Slack. JT: these bridges can be quite useful.
Mentoring (John)
Technical Project updates
Update on candidate projects
Next meeting
- Sept 9, 2020

ASWF TAC Meeting - August 26, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat