ASWF TAC Meeting - 27 July, 2022

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

David Morin, ASWF
Naomi Washington, LF
Deb Giles, LF
Sean Wallitsch, AWS
Doug Walker, OCIO / Autodesk
Allen Rose, Madison Square Garden
Nick Porcino, Pixar Animation Studios
Erik Straus, Review & Approval WG
Lee Kerley, Sony Imageworks
Alok Hota, Intel
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Sergio Rojas, Different Dimensions
Michael Carroll, Intel
Jason Scott, FuseFX / Rising Sun
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain

Apologies

Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Larry Gritz, Sony Imageworks

Agenda

SIGGRAPH / Open Source Days
- David: we are having our OSD well on track, lots of back and forth with SIGGRAPH due to rules changes, unclear how many people will attend SIGGRAPH in person, some companies dedicated to sending group of people, others have backed away.
- OSD: covered to have room at Fairmount Waterfront with in person, also covering with Zoom for remote attendance, with recording of sessions.
- Agenda is pretty much set, a few open slots as of this morning, will get to it when we review agenda.
- Should we look at schedule and look in order? Kimball: yes, that makes sense.
- Need to have Experience Plus badge to attend in person, we’ve agreed to check at the door. Jonathan: what about remote attendance? Deb: our virtual streaming event is not being promoted publicly, so won’t be checking badges there.
- Wave: seems fair to have “their rules” for on prem, but our rules for remote / streaming?
- Keynotes: decided to merge ASWF and USD keynotes due to availability
  - Summary of the year, summary at Open Source Forum, stats, growth, activity. Highlight of new projects. Steve May will join for panel discussion, update on USD, friendly support for each other, ASWF supports everything USD is doing to the best of our abilities, Steve will acknowledge work of USD WGs.
  - USD WG: how is that going? Do we have someone on the call? Nick: we have an outline, all sub committee members lined up to contribute report on their activities, and call to action as to why you would like to join regular meetings. Not clear that we have a presenter in the room, uncertainty about COVID protocol, nervous about being in the room. Deb: following SIGGRAPH Health and Safety rules, doesn’t seem to be much. Recommending but not requiring masks. Need to be fully vaccinated to get into Canada, but SIGGRAPH won’t be checking vaccination status. Nick: some people may be uncomfortable with small room filled to capacity. Not as rigorous as some of us would expect. David: if everyone is virtual, will need someone to host locally, be ready to pick up in case connection goes down, be able to run the meeting from the room in that case. Kimball: can click buttons on a presentation if needed.
  - How large is the room and how well ventilated is it? 70-100 people capacity, hotel banquet room, only information so far. Wave: will have CO2 sensor, can tell what the load will be. Deb: ballroom size in a hotel, 75 sets in the front for theater, 75 seats around tables at the back (150 total). Planning for around 75 in person. Haven’t heard specifically about ventilation improvements from Fairmount Waterfront hotel.
  - MaterialX (Jonathan): merging with OSL as a single event so we can have talks that overlap, Larry will gives his pure OSL update to close out event. 9 speakers, big line up, will use the full 80 minutes for the talk + Q&A. Things are going well, working with visual theme of chess set contributed to ASWF to connect the talks. Encouraging teams that aren’t speaking to also contribute renders, will have lots of interesting images. Lucas Film has asked to present and attend SIGGRAPH remotely, so will be following this requirement. Will be leading the event remotely, and other Lucasfilm speakers will be speaking remotely. So would like a tech rehearsal to figure out how the mechanics will work, and how to handle any technical downtime. With 9 presenters, will likely be at least one person with tech issues. Larry Gritz and Chris Kulla will be live, but won’t be able to take on those duties. So could use some assistance to know the parameters and practice before the event. David: do we have a provision for a tech rehearsal? Deb: can’t do anything in person, don’t get the space ahead of time, just using Zoom meetings, so can just use Zoom Meetings. Jonathan: parameters of event last year was very different than what I had access to, as soon as we got into the meeting, we were immediately live. Had never seen the moderation platform before, didn’t know how to handle feedback from attendees. So it was a challenge I’d like to avoid this year, don’t need the live part to be present, but would like to rehearse the handling of comments. May not expect lots of online comments since we’re not advertising that part, but more how to interface with in-room crew. Jonathan: last year we had lots of virtual questions so had to cut them off. Will there be a facility for remote attendees to ask questions? If it’s not supported, then it’s a non issue, last year we had so many online questions. Nick: the questions pile up quickly in Discord and Zoom channels for the BoFs that have already been posted. People are asking questions in too many places. Carol: there will not be a lot of virtual attendees, right? Deb: we’re not promoting it, it’s not on the web site, we’re not sharing it through SIGGRAPH, it’s only for community members not attending in person, but not sharing it publicly. Jonathan: historical for OSDs, Lucasfilm has done a lot of promotion, on Twitter channels for instance, should we not do it this year? Should we be intentionally quiet? Deb: we are walking in a grey area with this virtual element. Can still promote the in person event? David: online is for our own community, so could be promoted internally, but don’t want to put it publicly. Wave: historically I’ve promoted this internally at Apple via Slack, consider those to be ASWF community? Would be great if we could get where to point people, if they have to get a personal registration. Tell people what to do, obviously for people not at SIGGRAPH. Carol: we don’t have a virtual option this year, only for presenters, that’s the approach I’m taking, it’s unfortunate, but we’ll be able to share the recordings afterwards. Jonathan, makes sense, but the big downside is that we’ve cancelled our BoF to concentrate on this event, this is where we’re placing our effort to publicize the project. David: we’re working in a grey zone, for the people who need the update and are part of our community. We’ve been asked by SIGGRAPH to “not ask too many questions”… Wave: if we can say something the lines in private channels, “if you have questions you want to ask, submit them here”, and the speaker can address those in the talk. And point to where recordings will land. Kimball: Slack channels are also community. Wave: have lots of people working with me are peripherally paying attention to what we do and would like to answer questions. Cary: for OpenEXR, planning a very brief / cursory update, and mostly looking for a discussion of a few critical topics that we would want feedback from community. Will flesh out at TSC meeting, reach out to some people to encourage to participate to get discussion and guidance from the community, not planning a significant project update. Jonathan: puts us in a difficult place, would not feel comfortable recommending that people show up live. David: it is valid to have member of community to attend virtually. SIGGRAPH model is a bit out of sync with current situation, they have changed from not allowing recording. Have to have our community participating in OSDs, that’s the message I will give at SIGGRAPH. Carol: it’s a really confusing message for us, don’t know whether I can share this with people, how do we define our community. Would like to invite people around the world who use OCIO but don’t necessarily participate in ASWF. So I’m more confused than before! David: recognize we’re in a moment of ambiguity, we don’t have clear answers. What we need to do is balance this, not going to put Zoom /virtual registration links on our page, don’t want to challenge the SIGGRAPH rules. How do we define “members of our community”? “People who are important to our projects”, but don’t want to advertise publicly. Use our Slack channels to reach the people who have been working with us and would like to see the update, but we’re not there to challenge SIGGRAPH, we want to work with them. We all have to adapt to post pandemic world, same thing for the conferences. Eric: consider our Slack channels are publicly viewable? David: we consider it our community, so it’s OK to post on our Slack channels. JF: could we have an agreed sentence about not reposting to public forums (Twitter…). Jonathan: also need a backchannel communication with event team in case issues come up, would still be valuable to have a Zoom practice, not just for Q&A, prevent things from breaking the way they did last year. Deb: team is traveling next week, but can set up an identical meeting we’ll be using. And can set up a Slack channel we can use to chat. Will also have phone number to phone / text me, will be the onside contact. David: there will be a slack channel for OSD speakers for out of band communication. There will be a chat in the Zoom, may not be usable if there are too many people, someone will keep and eye and see if there are questions to be extracted from it. Deb: will try to set up a meeting / rehearsal. Jonathan: MaterialX TSC has a meeting next week, if we want to steal this time, it would be worth it. Next Tuesday at 10:00 PDT. David: instead of doing a meeting per group, would it make sense to set up a rehearsal at the time of this TAC meeting, next time on Wednesday? Carol: people can jump in and out? Seems to make sense. Jonathan: yes, next wednesday would work, can get some of the speakers to show up. Deb: this time, next wednesday, will send Zoom info. Eric: sounds like it will be useful to have someone wrangling virtual questions. David: yes. A moderator in the chat, Michelle Martineau could be a likely candidate to track the chat room and communicating with us on the Slack channel. For those of you not at Open Source Forum, everyone will be on standard Zoom, will see presenters in the room on the large screen, will ask everyone to mute and communicate through chat.
  - Naomi: We can have 500 participants on our zoom account
  - DPEL (Eric): plan to be there in person, if someone else in DPEL TSC who is going to be there in person let me know. Wave: plan to be there as well, can handle Q&A channel. Blog post press release for launch of DPEL goes out the same day, ASC also putting out its press release about STeM 2. Also AWS Noah character, rigged with hair, Intel volumetric cloud library, ALab2 likely at the last minute. Large range of assets on first day.
  - OpenAssetIO: no one on the call, but announcement of project
  - R&W WG: Erik: mix of speakers on site and remote, covered if there are issues. First pass of deck is done, will do second pass this week. Tied in with Emily’s team around PR and formation of group, in good shape.
  - OCIO: Carol: Doug and I will be in person, Thomas will be remote. Survey was posted for comments / questions. Have gotten some responses to prompt in case there aren’t a lot of in person questions.
  - D&I WG: Carol: are little less ready, but should be fine. Trying to get a couple of people to talk about some topics so it’s not just Rachel and I. Mike Ford in person. Friday celebration of Summer Learning Program has been posted to Slack, Google Drive will have slide decks and resumes. Join us live if you can.
  - Beers of a Feather: registration required
  - Private event for the Board, won’t appear on schedule when we publish, right? Deb: no, it won’t.
  - Keynote with Nick Cannon: Linux for professional workstations
  - CI + Rust: JF: 20/20 split between Rust and CI, Scott will be onsite, CI will not. JF: will plan to have mostly a presentation to fill 20 minutes in case there aren’t questions
  - OTIO: Joshua: entirely virtually, intro part, guest presenters will pre-record their segments to stick to schedule. Slightly nervous about not having anyone on prem, would be great to have someone to help, hopefully everything will have been figured out by the second day.
  - OpenEXR: Kimball will be in the room, Larry as well, everyone else will be remote. Planning a very brief update from Kimball, and then our plan is to seed a discussion with topics, a bit behind in our planning, TSC meeting is tomorrow, so it will be primary topic. David: will you have questions for your community for them to answer? Kimball: have a set of questions to seed. Will figure out a communication strategy to get questions out there: Slack, individual solicitations… Some notes: tolerance for extending file format, new compression schemes that would break backwards compatibility, memory layout issues that were contemplated with iMath, PyEXR project which is in use but unaffiliated with out project and dead, grasping for a strategy to reign it in.
  - OpenCue: no representatives present
  - OpenVDB: Ken: will be there in person, unclear if (other person) will be in person or not. 2 part presentation + Q&A. 10 year anniversary at SIGGRAPH, cover the history, the present (version 9), Mathematic bindings, new VDB tool. Future: NVIDIA is making an announcement related to OpenVDB and will be talking about it.
  - Open #D Engine: Royal O’Brien from LF presenting remotely
  - Closing Remarks
  - TAC Meeting (5PM). Deb: can we publish TAC meeting publicly? Kimball: meeting is usually public, don’t need to close it off. Will be hybrid, same setup as the rest of the event but with a separate link.
  - 2 open sessions: 1 on Monday, 1 on Tuesday, if you know a non ASWF project who would like to present, let us know.
  - Don’t recall seeing registration for Beers of a Feather? Link in notes.
  - Naomi: if you can suggest additional projects by Friday, that would be good. Also would need a title + abstracts, need that as well.
  - Carol: didn’t catch that title + abstract was needed.