ASWF TAC Meeting - February 09, 2022

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Andrew Grimberg, LF Release Engineering
Alix Robinson, LF
David Morin, ASWF
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Allen Rose, Madison Square Garden Entertainment
Nick Porcino, Pixar Animation Studios
Mitch Prater, Laika
Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Doug Walker, Autodesk
Michael Dolan, OCIO
Joanna Anthony
Rachel Rose, ILM / D&I

Apologies

Agenda

D&I goals / initiatives for 2022
- Spent time planning 2022 initiatives
- Have bird’s eye view broken by quarter
- Q1: need to get GSoC application in, Carol taking point on this, other members to help check everything is in good order
- Deadline is Feb 21st.
- Ambassador program: Sergio and JT coming up with examples of what ambassadors can do for each TSC. Will have intro meetings with each TSC
- Want to beef up what we’ve been doing on the blog front, want to have 1-2 posts per quarter. Have list of potential topics, looking to post on Inclusive Meetings.
- For Q2 will be looking for volunteers from each TSC
- Focus on Summer Learning Program for people very early in their career, want to improve on last year.
- Last year we focussed on 1 dimension of diversity, looking at more dimensions for this year.
- Also for Q2, D&I landing page needs to be revamped so it’s not just “in our heads / Google drive”.
- Q3: executing on programs being organized in Q1/Q2, running GSoC and Summer Learning Program. It was a lot of work last year!
- Had a lot of success with career webinar programs last year, had a lot of attendees, and reposted on YouTube. Discussed whether we wanted to do more, but instead decided to repackage the ones we have, do a 5 min intro video, rework YouTube playlist. Will also offer Q&A sessions where individuals in the webinars will be available to answer questions from schools and organizations. So more about repackaging rather than producing brand new content, there’s still a lot of value in those.
- Q4: Bill Roberts had done presentations about the idea of being a place that can provide a D&I framework just like we provide OSS, a place for small and large companies to look for D&I infrastructure. We would like to try to drive this initiative. Identify a volunteer from D&I group to pull together thoughts and examples of these frameworks from organizations that are already ASWF members to see a repository we would want to maintain long term, just like we maintain code.
- Expect to hear from D&I around Ambassador program this quarter, will drop into meetings, asking questions on how to quickly describe a complicated project. Will put out call for mentors for Summer Learning Program, had many people from technical side participate last year. May want to “stick to our wheelhouse” of being a software organization a bit more, last year we didn’t put restrictions, but our resources are technical / ASWF focussed, so to provide the best experience to mentees, it makes sense to focus it more on the technical side.
- Kimball: we had talked about doing our own version of GSoC, is this related? Our own Internship program is not on this agenda, we don’t think we have the bandwidth this year to run both GSoC and our own Internship program. We want to focus on GSoC, but if we don’t get accepted, we’ll need to quickly pivot to our own program. We would like to do both next year, and we have ideas that don’t fit in the context of GSoC. Kimball: we should think about our own Internship program, may take a year to advertise. Carol: last year it came together at the last minute.
- Larry: if we get into GSoC and we have more excellent applicants than fit in the program, we could add an “ad hoc” student / project, rather than a whole Internship program. Carol: yes, that makes sense and is possible.
- Rachel: working on GSoC application, it’s a bit of a pain, but getting close. There are a couple of general questions, drafting answers but will share with TAC on a Google Doc. Will submit a PR to TAC repo with a README explaining the process, requirements to be a mentee with us (“submitting a PR” as a pre-requisite, shows basic familiarity with the process). Discussion on #diversity about hurdle of CLAs. Want to make it as easy as possible for mentees to apply.
- List of projects with responses for project ideas. It’s not too late yet, but getting very close to the deadline. Can also share project proposals from last time. Let me know if we missed your proposal.
  - Rust WG
  - OSL
  - OpenEXR
  - OCIO
  - OpenVDB
- It is a non trivial amount of work to run a GSoC project!
- Once we get application submitted, will tackle all the administrative aspects of running a GSoC project, will help shoulder the burden from the technical mentors, and use it as a way to build a more inclusive community with the mentees, help get them involved in other areas of the ASWF.
Kimball: Carol will be new TSC chair for OCIO, will ask for an update for next time.
- Doug: thanks to Michael for doing a great job representing the OCIO TAC!
- Larry: the project is very impressive, especially if you look back at where it was, now it’s possibly the leading project we have in terms of tackling all aspects really well.
- Next TAC meeting at HPA
Project / WG review topics (brainstorm)
- What are good ideas for project reviews? Is the CII badge still relevant for instance?
Project / WG updates:
- OpenEXR / Cary
  - Not sure if last release was before last TAC meeting, 3.1.4 with misc fixes, it’s been quiet since then.
- OCIO / Carol
  - TSC chair is now Carol, Doug staying on a Chief Architect. Third role in charter is ACES rep, Sean Cooper, will have updates about that soon.
  - General PRs and ongoing tasks, will be planning priorities for this year.
  - 2 project ideas for GSoC, should be good projects for qualified applicants
  - Doug: will have presentation at HPA tech conference in 2 weeks
- OpenCue / Brian
  - Missed a TSC meeting
  - Continue to design user system, progress on Python installers
  - Discussed GSoC but opting out due to lack of bandwidth
  - Still need to kickstart discussion on getting tech writer help
- OSL / Chris
  - Contribution from Intel changing the way renderers communicate with OSL, better approach through LLVM
- MaterialX / Jonathan
  - Vulkan support with Autodesk: Vulkan to work with rasterization and ray tracing. Want to improve interaction with OSL and OCIO. Creating a test render application, trying to make it work across all platforms. Improving Windows build process. Discussion with OCIO for better integration.
  - For GSoC, excited to work with it, but we already have a 12 week intern to develop an open source graph editor for MaterialX, so mentor time taken up with that. But would like to do GSoC next year.
  - Larry: last time we did GSoC, we had a channel for students to communicate, so your MaterialX intern should be able to communicate with GSoC interns. Jonathan: yes, that would be great. Carol: yes, that will be simple, there will be a channel on Slack where they can ask questions. May also be some additional community activities that MaterialX intern would be invited to.
- OTIO / Josh:
  - Getting ready to move repo to ASWF organization, pre-signing the new CLA to have overlap when the switch happens. Going a bit slowly but moving forward.
  - Will have 2 of 4 TSC members out for a few weeks, so things may be a bit slow.
  - Had good contributions, change to schema to allow for clips and timelines that are muted / disabled, that’s something that’s important for NLEs and we didn’t have support for that. Autodesk also proposing another schema enhancement soon.
- OpenVDB / Ken
  - Discussions about what’s coming down the pipe. Looking promising for Mathematica bindings, so all the OpenVDB functionality will be exposed in Mathematica. Some of the developers originally from Wolfram.
  - New techniques for surfacing fluid particles, many ways to surface point clouds, but ILM and DNeg have techniques they want to contribute.
  - Contribution from Dreamworks on how to blend level sets. Current technique is based on Union booleans, new technique avoids sharp edges.
  - Also still working on VDB command line tool.
  - Targeting OpenVDB 10 for SIGGRAPH
- Assets: Eric
  - STeM 2: time to stand up repos and S3 buckets to hold TBs of EXR files. Andrew from LF RelEng is helping. ASC was imaging some kind of click through license, collecting usage info. We’re taking a more OSS licensing approach, conversations still going on.
  - Working on web pages and a logo (incorporates a film reel, cloud and slash-star from ASWF, star also suggests globing / universal nature). Looking at different variations of the logo.
  - David: can we announce at the forum? Eric: yes, that’s the goal. David: it’s the right time to announce it.
- Rust WG: Scott
  - Someone starting to create Rust bindings on top of OTIO C API.
  - Kimball: where are we with OpenEXR? Scott: still need to clean up our OpenEXR repo, and work on the CI. Some progress but still needs work.
- USD WG: Nick
  - https://wiki.aswf.io/display/WGUSD/Presentations
  - Working Groups are doing great work
  - Asset WG is progressing
  - Lots of activity, all WGs added to calendar, so meeting links are now all public
  - David: for the Camera WG, will have a number of camera vendors at forum, perhaps presenting an update on that WG would be good? Nick: yes, we’ve been making a lot of discoveries. Thanks to Joseph Goldstone for making a lot of good work.
- CI WG
  - DCC package components from Jeff Bradley: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xWExH2VMsXpb7XTDDKkQbl9Lpei9-zES-qml9lel0ME/edit
  - updated mission statement: CI WG Revised Mission Statement
  - Kimball: can do a review after the OCIO review next meeting.
Open Source Forum update / discussion: TAC segment
- David: Open Source Forum on March 10, a month from now. At the heart of it is the TAC presentation. Wanted to talk about it today, presented the overview of the Forum at the last TAC presentation. In person at Academy Museum, VES awards happening in person 2 days before, some overlap for in-person, will be online as well. TAC presentation is the center of it all, will have our own members in the room (please register at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m_N2cMCsOsbKbIbFPR7Qk4gSqb2qRKjlDnQeaXNK7G0/edit# code ASWFOSF2022). Presentation is 1h, so at most 5 minutes per project / WG. May not present every project / WG, want to focus on what represents our activity in the last 6 months and is forward looking, also doing this for non-member company representatives, this update is as much for them as for ourselves. At the end of the hour, we’ve hopefully given a tremendous update on what we’ve done, pointing to our future plans, and demonstrate the value of joining ASWF. Draft document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fzt9uBCD9DljAjPPZueQhxW4vu3jnvUje0WSyeqaIKI/edit?usp=sharing
- Will review draft at next TAC meeting. There will be a slide template, currently in progress.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1k_RK_nvUQrrwK86APFLN2ABdO5dVzIvgcT6Ptqz0R0M/edit?usp=sharing

** ASWF TAC Meeting - February 09, 2022**

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

ASWF TAC Meeting - February 09, 2022