Kimball Thurston - Chairperson, Weta Digital Limited
Bill Roberts, Adobe
Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
Roy C Anthony, DNEG
Matthew Low, DreamWorks Animation
Christina Tempelaar-Lietz, Epic Games, Inc.
Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
Sean C McDuffee, Intel Corporation
Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
Daniel Heckenberg - Animal Logic Pty Ltd / Industry Representative
Eric Enderton, NVIDIA & Asset Repo Representative
Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
Michael Min, Netflix
Michael B. Johnson, Apple
Greg Denton, Microsoft
Sean O’Connell, Advanced Micro Devices
Mark Visser, Unity Technologies
Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
Carol Payne, OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative
Chris Kulla, Open Shading Language Representative
Jonathan Stone, MaterialX Representative
Observer member attendance
Alex Forsythe, AMPAS
Allan Johns, Method Studios
Gary Oberbrunner, OpenFX
Tom Cowland, OpenAssetIO
Erik Strauss, Review & Approval
Other Attendees
David Morin, ASWF
Michelle Martineau, LF
Andrew Grimberg, LF RelEng
John Mertic, LF
Emily Olin, LF
Sean Wallitsch, AWS
Doug Walker, OCIO / Autodesk
Lee Kerley, Sony Imageworks
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Sergio Rojas, Different Dimensions
Jason Scott, FuseFX / Rising Sun
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks
Darby Johnston
Mathieu Mazerolle, Foundry/OpenAssetIO
Apologies
Kimball Thurston, TAC Chair
Jonathan Stone, MaterialX
Carol Payne, OpenColorIO
Christina Tempelaar-Lietz, Epic Games
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Agenda
Larry: how to get warning controls off in ASWF SonarCloud for OSL, maybe since I’m not admin? Andrew: should be possible to grant policy rights, file a ticket at Linux Foundation Support
Budget Review
David: not ready for budget review
Larry: probably not a bad thing since we don’t have a lot of people today
John: working on Budget, infrastructure / IT budget, also looking at projects for 2023. Looking to have a finance committee meeting end of Sept, so can present to TAC after that.
David: discussion on Slack budget got us to “living within our means”, will be able to present where we are. Balanced budget, not dipping into our surplus. But will have more detailed update after budget committee meets.
David: any other agenda items the TAC would like to discuss today?
Larry: with SIGGRAPH / OSD are fresh on our mind, any feedback / suggestion for next time while memories are still fresh?
SIGGRAPH / OSD summary
Emily: thought it went pretty well, had more people than we expected on Day 1, smaller on Day 2. We are a lot of newer content on Day 1, less SIGGRAPH conflicts. Beers of a Feather, need to plan for more.
Hybrid style worked out well, people who were virtual were engaged, worked out pretty well, except perhaps for O3DE which was fully recorded. Maybe have more virtual background for next year. Open the floor around scheduling, what if we did it the day before 3D Pro, but how much more time to people want to give up?
Larry: suspect that part of the reason that Tuesday reason was lower may not be due to more conflicts / less popular talks, but after being attentive for the first day, I’ve spent the time I can spend on this and must spend time on SIGGRAPH. Maybe spreading across 2 days is not desirable? There was a lot of content, we would have made tough decisions to fit in a single day.
Wave: if there was a 45 minute version of your talk as a recording, then a 20 minute “quick version” live? I was there the whole first day, but only until 11 the second day due to other commitments.
Videos are on YouTube on the AcademySoftwareFoundation channel, there’s a playlist. Emily to rearrange order to make it clearer.
Larry: thanks to Emily and the LF staff, everything went off smoothly, venue was great, presentations went as well as you could expect for hybrid experience. Loved the venue for Beers of a Feather, people enjoyed the outdoor venue. Made for better conversation than other gatherings since you could drift away a bit and have a good conversation.
Emily: should we explore multiple tracks to fit in a single day. Picking between our content, instead of between us and SIGGRAPH.
Wave: if the videos go up pretty quickly, it’s less problematic to try to “jam in” the content. Larry: cuts are not fatal, everyone of the projects has regular meetings, some don’t have big news or updates. So could give a project update in a TSC meeting. Wave: used the videos as a way to share with others at the company an introduction to the project, what are they doing right now. The MaterialX / OSL was amazing, others were typically status reports.
Emily: we could still do those projects, but record TSCs before hand, but also not sustainable as we grow and get more projects / WGs. Wave: what was valuable was Q&A. Emily: lots of companies do recruitment, what if we made it a “open office” / mentorship day? Could serve a couple of purposes, but a space for people to come in and ask their questions. Michael: many papers and panels have pre-reads before the Q&A session, we could publish videos a week prior, people can watch the content and just show up for Q&A. That seemed to work pretty well, so you don’t have to limit yourself to the time to present. Eric: did you watch a lot of these videos? I saw zero! I have little time before SIGGRAPH to watch videos, so I didn’t think that worked? Michael: since we have more constrained topics, it might give people more opportunities? Could be an option as we scale.
John: because of uncertainties with venue, we put the schedule later than we would have wanted to this year. Schedule came together by us (LF), with other project communities, establish a program community with representation from different people, help vet broader talk, add topics the program committee feels are important, and of course takes off load from David / John / Emily. Different than what we’ve done in the past. Would this be interesting to TAC?
Erik: we could self program, don’t want to lose conversation around “tracks” allowing people to be more judicious about attending parts of the event that make sense to them. Might be easier to put together a committee and figure out what these “connections” / affinities are, allowing us to parallelize.
John: this is where a program committee can help, designing from the ground up, maybe soliciting talks from other folks. Don’t want to over bureaucratize, but this could help to get the right amount of ideas and influences.
David: would be good to get more of the community input into our events, not just OSD but also Open Source Forum in the Spring (likely at Academy Museum), how we balance the two, one meeting in the spring that is more member focussed, and OSD which is more community focussed. We established this at the beginning when we were smaller, but now it’s time to think about next year. Lots of interesting conversations to have, for instance the Academy Museum is a great venue for Open Source Forum, but we could change that. We can take advantage of the menu in other ways, there are larger spaces, so we could have a community-oriented event there. Feels like it’s the time to have a programming committee. Figure out how to work ahead of time.
Emily: perhaps Open Source Forum is where a programming committee could be a good place since we don’t necessarily need project updates, and bring external presenters. Could be a completely different mix, more of a “neutral” ground, not just ASWF projects, but could bring in external projects / presenters.
Doug Walker: having a BoF event has worked well for OCIO, 90 minute in depth session. What should be a balance between a BoF event and a more high level overview. Would it make sense for projects to have two sessions, a more in depth session, and a more 20 minute outward facing? BoF was in person at SIGGRAPH, were able to get a meeting space from Autodesk, had a good session, met new people who hadn’t been involved with the project before. Took the place of a traditional BoF session we used to have before Open Source Days.
Emily: we tried this a few years ago, had a meeting space but only a couple of projects asked for it, and this year no project asked for it. We can help coordinate, don’t know that every project will want to. High Level overview tends to work to keep the most account of people in the room. Doug: would recommend it for other projects, seems good for bringing new people into a project. David: had a last minute session with Moonray, being able to have more ad-hoc meetings seems helpful.
JF: organization for remote presenters seemed to work well. David: it’s more complicated to have mixed on prem and remote attendees, it will definitely keep going (“the way of the future”). One of our action items is how to reach out to SIGGRAPH in a post mortem kind of way and help them evolve their model so we can stay within SIGGRAPH with a hybrid in person / remote model. Need to make it more fluid though, but that’s the way going forward.
Eric: having a breakout session after a talk so you can “hang out in the hall”. Emily: yes, that’s a good idea. Larry: glad we made it easy for remote attendees, the experience in the room with remote presenters was a bit more of a mixed bag, didn’t always have great audio, ask someone else to manipulate the slides, less smooth than someone in person. Wouldn’t want to sit through a day of presentations where most of the presenters are remote. But for an occasional speaker who can’t travel is OK.
Emily: how was the experience as a remote attendee? Larry: were we all there / presenting? Gary: was remote presenter / attendee, as a remote attendee it was excellent, schedule was clear, could dip in and out. Most of the presentations went smoothly, whether in person or remote. Thought it was good.
Emily: did anyone go to anything else that would be worth replicating? Wave: NO! Larry: that’s a good endorsement! Wave: I hoped that some of the workshop / lab things would have examples we could use, but didn’t find anything.
David: anything at SIGGRAPH that was unexpected / inspiring your projects? Or was it all as expected? Larry: was great to hear more details about other projects “in my sphere but don’t have time to attend the TSC meetings”, even MaterialX which I try to keep an eye on. Great to hear what’s going on, a good way to get updated on everything and see the level of excitement about the project.
David: Any in person feature requests? Larry: SIGGRAPH used to be only direct communication channel, now there are many channels, so most people have opportunity to give feedback in multiple ways. So it’s a success.
Emily: was surprised at lack of questions on first day. Maybe it’s gotten too big, people intimidated by room size? So maybe a longer “coffee break” so people can ask questions in less formal setting? Larry: DigiPro is an example of a single track event, but they build in a bit longer breaks so you have time to talk to other people who are there about what you saw together, sometimes that spurs interesting side conversations. Schedule as so pack, we would quickly switch from one project to another. Maybe that’s part of the “hallway thing” we were talking about. Let people regroup? Emily: longer coffee / lunch break. Larry: maybe 15 minute break after every second talk? But that sacrifices time.
JF: could use more guidance about how much Q&A to expect. Emily: prepare some “softball questions” that could be used to seed the room if there are no questions.
David: any feedback about keynote with Steve May / USD? Eric: that seemed to go well. Emily: any topics you would have liked to see from outside our projects, or did you see a talk that would have been good to have at OSD? Would be good to know for Open Source Forum.
David: VES Awards / Sci-Tech awards within a week, so will likely have forum around that time.
Michael: since everyone is there for the conference, maybe a mini “pitch fest”, could make sense to spend 45 minutes for people who might want to be considered for ASWF, 5 minute pitch and see other projects where everyone is present. An “opportunity rich” moment. Larry: that’s a neat idea, a series of 5 minute lightning talks?
Eric: David had good version of this in his intro talk. David: but could be more meaningful if the actual presenters could do a 3 minute “trailer”. Emily: could be interesting to do virtually, a “teaser” released a week before SIGGRAPH / OSD. But also like the idea of the pitch session: new contributors, new ideas.
David: most projects have a vibrant set of presentations and plans for the future, generally speaking, what are the next steps for projects, any changes informed by SIGGRAPH?
Larry: Erik is trying to form a TSC around the R&A project. Erik: two big takeaways:
Paperwork iterating on legal details of the charter, hoping to wrap up in next day or so
Strategy for thinking what the TSC will be is interesting. Will have WGs focussed on individual project, TSC focussed on strategic output, evolution ot the 3 projects. Asking for volunteers to be considered for initial round of TSC membership, will rotate people in and out based on skills and priorities. What an architecture and platform looks like is first on the agenda as projects work on cleaning up their code. People on TSC should be comfortable with software design and architecture, first pass at trying to get people with the right backgrounds. But also trying to be open a broader diversity of experience in the TSC, reps from the 3 companies contributing code, but they operate mostly in the same sphere, so also looking for people from other communities than “large VFX facilities”.
David: R&A gathered a lot of interest with a new model to gather projects.
Larry: did you get direct feedback from people after the session, since it was the big unveiling? Erik: had lunch with Dave Smith at Spire, that day they were having a conversation with Autodesk with RV issues, so now can commit patches! Heard second hand that some companies have reached out for early access / how to contribute. Need to nudge interested parties sitting on the sideline to dive-in. Some companies had reached out to D-Neg looking to collaborate. Have to wrangle all those people together. David: if you need any help on the broader conversation of open source / ASWF, don’t hesitate to reach out. Erik: any way we can turn onlookers into contributors / members is good!
Eric: Any follow ups from exec board? David: yes, from joint TAC / Board strategy meeting, got into it with agenda to dig deeper into how to address Virtual Production. We talked about that, but the conversation got onto additional topic of resourcing / engineering / growing community without our existing companies. Was a learning that we think that it’s as important to grow the knowledge and important of open source in our existing companies as it is to look outside into adjacent topics like Virtual Production. We’ve been looking at what to do to grow within our existing community, what can we do to encourage the growth of software engineers without our companies that work on open source projects. Make it more prevalent and accepted to work on open source projects within our companies, suggestions on doing an open source award that would help highlight the people and the companies that are investing. Strategy meetings don’t necessarily have immediate outcomes, but that put the topic on our radar. A number of releases at SIGGRAPH on VP, OpenVPCal tool from Netflix, also Virtual Production Orchestration tool. Being a known place where companies can come to discuss those is what I have in mind, would be good to have one WG where these tools can be socialized within our foundation. It will happen naturally, it’s a bit early for open source in VP, have asked if people have looked at OpenVPCal, getting reactions that projects used to have in the beginning, “color in a LED video wall is our special sauce”, hearing those things mean we are at the right time, people think that new ways of working are differentiators, but some are not, especially when it’s common infrastructure. That’s a longer term discussion, there is no rush / pressure. These strategy sessions is what we try to do: put a topic that’s adjacent to our day to day activities to stimulate discussion. Will return the question to you, what did you take away from strategy session?
Larry: still digesting… Thought the meeting was very valuable, have to review in my head what conclusions I drew.
David: there was a Metaverse Forum update at SIGGRAPH, headed by Neal Stephenson, writer who invented the word. It was an excellent keynote, he has researched the topic deeply, up to NFTs, crypto, he had an hour long speech he had written. The session is recorded, will be available to SIGGRAPH attendees, Metaverse Standard organization is trying to make it publicly available. There was a whole day of presentations, Steve May and Guido presented, Natasha from Unity, each gave their opinion as to what the Metaverse should be. Good observations as to how the Internet started well, but may have been “turning not so good” in the last few years. How does the Metaverse avoid polarization, walled gardens… We are well positioned, the Metaverse Forum puts us in “Standards Organizations” together with SMPTE, IEEE… They now have 1500 companies, a hot topic, and going to present soon some practical efforts on interop.