What has been done in the last years, lessons learned, discussion topics. Not a ton of slides, keeping it high level to leave room for discussions and questions. If there are questions on specific items, you can ask them during the presentation, but let time for Q&A.
D&I has 3 main focus areas:
Increase ASWF diversity and representation
Guidance for Members
Student Education
These 3 points are what we use to decide what to focus group activities on, looking at whether an opportunity is right for D&I WG at a high level
WG 2022 plan had a lot of items (timeline). Great to have a plan, helped to go into the year with ideas on the table, assigned to quarters. But things change, so want to discuss what changed and why, what the realities are.
Things that happened on time:
Google Summer of Code Application
Governing Board Succession Plan (wasn’t on the original plan)
Summer Learning Program Organization
Summer Learning Program Execution
Things that didn’t happen:
Google Summer of Code Organization / Execution
For many reasons
Things that pushed:
Ambassador Program
Blog
…
ASWF Contributor Demographics
Didn’t poll this info from this year, info was from earlier in D&I WG
Demographics aren’t at the level of diversity we would want it to be. Was a motivator to find ways to bring more diversity so we better reflect the community we want to reflect.
Worked with the Board to come up with the ASWF Board Succession Plan
Governing Board was very much behind this
Went to the Board stating we wanted to see more diversity, find ways to have more space within the Board, becoming more open. We have great people on the board, we want them to be there, how do we open up more space
Effort to identity a plan to for what succession on the Board looks like:
Term limit plan
Process for how the plan phases in
Alternates: every person on the board needs to have a “second” who attends the meetings but doesn’t have voting rights. Opens up opportunities for more people, and hopefully will see benefits over time.
David: the effort was very successful, triggering the discussion on the Board after initial presentation, we need to do something about lack of diversity. First real action that our organization faced out of the D&I WG that was targeted at members of the Board. As was described, the result of the WG were specific actions that have been taken. Out of 20 Board members, we now have 16 alternates, and we have already rotated 6 Board members, target to rotate 25% of the Board each year to keep consistency / not having everyone rotate at once. At first was a bit worried, had put a lot of time together with this group before the creation of ASWF, a lot of mindshare was developed about goals, the Board we had at the beginning of the year was strongly linked to original group, was worried about losing continuity. Was reassured that this wasn’t going to be an issue, and they were right. We are losing a bit of people with experience who were there at the beginning, but information is being transferred, and new people are coming in with energy that wasn’t there before. They tend to be younger and more diverse, on purpose, and bring more energy. There are more questions to be answered, less to be taken for granted from the past. Want to take advantage of this new energy to take ASWF to the next level.
Rachel: we have other ideas on how we can do similar sorts of things within the organization, how to bring new voices in well thought out ways.
Carol: ASWF D&I Landing Page
ASWF: Guidance for Members. Redo of landing page. Current is fine, links to webinar series, links to mailing list and Slack.
We are now a solid group with recurring activities, we need a stronger landing page. Have input from some great people on the WG, will be working with Emily to make changes to this. Looking for comments, additions.
Want to add things like:
Calendars
Who we are / what we do
Links to activities
Make it a “home” for the group
We are at a point where just word of mouth is no longer enough, need to put resources to make it happen.
Kimball: kickoff to D&I framework? Carol: yes, making progress towards that. Rachel: less about making a pretty page, more about how to collect the information, present it to the community, surface information that can’t be found right now.
Summer Learning Program
Goal of Student Education
Have spoken about it in the TAC several times
Wanted to talk about how it’s going
Summer 202:
Focus: BIPOC/Latinx (In 2021, focus was women and non-binary people)
19 Students
More technically focussed (last year was more artistic focus)
At least one job offer! 1 person now employed at Dreamworks, second year in a row we got a job offer. Not necessarily the goal of the program, but a good conclusion.
Combo fo FxPHD & Udemy (last year was Gnomon, more artistic focus), worked well, except a few stumbling blocks with access to the platforms at the right time
Students who are very early in their career
Trying to give them resources so they can contribute
3 pillars
Learning : access to online learning platform, no strings attached, free access to these platforms
Mentorship: from ASWF community or outside, weekly meetings, provide career advice
Community
Community Slack channel just for the participants so they can communicate
Swag! Very popular
Agree we want to do this again next year
General Stats
Group is healthy!
Monthly meeting attendance typically around 25, not always the same group of people. Some brand new people who haven’t attended ASWF meetings before. Mix of more technical people and people who haven’t had opportunity to contribute since they aren’t developers.
Active Slack channel
Successful second year of the Summer Learning Program, pretty unique to our organization
Up Next: Initiatives
Landing Page Redesign
National Science Faire Outreach
How do we want to engage, based on research by Cary Philips
Looking to engage with younger demographics / high schools, working on how to set up outreach
SLP 3.0 - Focus on Neurodiversity
Starting earlier, wanted to let the TAC be aware of this focus
On top of a lot of people’s minds in our industry, reaching out to a couple of folks we know who have contacts in this area, recognizing that none of us have much experience in this area.
SLP can’t be the same every year, working on what that means.
Ambassador Program
Have been thinking about this for a bit, but will discuss ways for others to contribute in a bit
JT: here’s the doc I’m modifying from one of our local Pasadena docs that is an at-a-glance overview of ASWF projects to assist in quick and easy introductions and onboarding:
John: this feels like the same as https://tac.aswf.io/engagement/ If there are differences - I would love to get them put into that page to make things easier
JT: main difference are the blurbs in the Ambassador doc is at-a-glance style which is a type of lean documentation for onboarding which the engagement page lacks. I was not aware of that engagement page, nice…
Possible Hackathon?
Came out of Open Source Days at SIGGRAPH
Encourage project participation in a more entry level
Up Next: Function
Formation of a “TSC”
May be time for a more formal structure
Bring some of the elements of project structure
Developer of key volunteers in the group
Minimize challenges with publishing D&I blog articles - Lean more on RAZ?
Love the idea of publishing writing around D&I, great way to educate our members and community
Sometimes people don’t feel comfortable around asking questions, or sometimes “don’t know you don’t know”
Have been struggling with getting writing done, since it’s not tied to a key objective, no clear deadlines. Also contributors to the group care about these topics, they may not be comfortable writing in public about it.
RAZ PR is our PR agency, so leverage that. Rachel: we’ve done a couple of articles with RAZ PR, it’s been great, we come up with a topic that’s of interest to our community, someone writes up, and then engage with RAZ. But maybe engage earlier, help collate what we’re trying to get out there from a PR perspective.
David: definitely part of what we are doing with RAZ PR, good time as we start planning for FY 2023, including setting our goals with RAZ. Bring up a couple of pieces we would like to do in collaboration with them.
Ways to measure success & accountability
How do we measure improvement, and how to talk about that, internally and within ASWF.
TAC Feedback
Are we focussed in the correct areas?
Where could we help your projects succeed?
Kimball: I think the SLP was great, focus for next year sounds great. How do we just focus on education, but also continuing education?
Carol: we have talked about it. This is a tough area, we really like the SLP being an intro the industry, no strings attached. We require no experience, no prior knowledge, where that gets tough is that a lot of our projects are not entry level, they are difficult to get onboarded into, SLP doesn’t line up with ongoing impact on our projects. My current thinking is that a better entry to long term growth and our projects may be more along Hackatons, and a program that develops out of that. Getting new contributors onboarded to projects, finding holes in our onboarding documentation is important. We want to eventually have a stepping stone to get from every early beginners (high school), to SLP, and eventually to contributor, and recognize there’s a missing piece between SLP and Contributor. Rachel: had hoped GSoC would have been a piece of that, still trying to find that space. We are finding people from our SLP showing up at TSC meetings, but they don’t have technical skills yet to contribute. Hope is that people getting jobs in our community will soon have opportunities to become contributors, have had a positive association with ASWF, helping them get into the industry.
What was the open source framework project that got pushed? Carol: project proposed by Bill Roberts at Adobe, a project different than traditional code project, instead of code, it would be a framework for how to approach D&I at your company. For instance, a small VFX studio, 10 to 20 people, would like to start some D&I initiatives, but can’t hire a D&I person. Want to have a place where you can get started, contributions from member companies. This is a large undertaking, still want to do it, but trying to take more “bite sized” approaches to getting there.
Rachel: have had a lot of people interested in something like that, as well as people saying they have done work internally at their company and would be happy to contribute to something like that. Easier said than done, such as legal aspects.
David: thinking about “TSC” idea, what could be an equivalent to code that other TSCs have. Could it be something that could be turned into a measurable asset, something that’s developed by D&I TSC that’s the “Code” (of conduct), and can be adopted. In terms of measurement, it could be how many external companies adopt the charter or parts of it, and could be very beneficial to our industry to “coagulate” the best practices we are already doing. Perhaps be a bit more intentional about finding the elements that are common to all, and then offering that to anyone openly, just like we offer our code.
Carol: the framework project is a bit more long term, we don’t think the right thing to do for the D&I WG is to become an actual project, there should be some middle ground between the current, temporary informal structure of a WG, and the long term structure of a Project / TSC. Try to figure out what it could look like, how it should be called. WG is meant to be spun up and address a specific issue, once the problem is addressed, the WG should be spun down. Don’t see D&I that way. Naming things is hard, don’t care so much about how it’s named.
Michael: the USD WG is sort of not a TSC that we can graduate into, but an equivalent of a WG that could be the equivalent of a TSC. We have lots of exception cases already.
John: in the WG description, we threw in the concept of a long term WG: Long term working group Initially we wanted to put a limit on scope, eventually there’s a 3 way fork in the road:
Accomplished goals, shutdown (Python3)
We’ve built a code project, time to become a Project
USD: ongoing piece of work that will continue to happen, there could be an event down the road, but doesn’t have a defined, finite end.
John: so designating as a long term WG is an option, we can also go down the path of establishing a formal legal charter, we tend not to do that for a WG, but for something that is meant to be long term, could spin up a LLC for instance, not a lot of overhead, and there are advantages around IP for instance. Rachel: yes, that captures what we do in WGs.
Larry: the CI WG solved the “CI” issue early on, now we are addressing ongoing infrastructure issues, so that’s another precedent of a long term WG.
Rachel: We are co chairs but not experts in D&I, sometimes we need to put together a survey, would like to present more information to our members, right now we search the internet, try to find an expert. Would be great to have a place for all that expertise.
David: you’ve done an amazing job on the D&I WG, TAC is very supportive. You can go ahead and pick the direction you want, if a charter needs to be written / adjusted, that would be a good thing. Thank you!
Carol: eventually Rachel and I will tenure out, and that’s when we know we’ve done our jobs!
ASWF + games industry / GDC
In USD WG, good response from games community, spun up a new supporting WG with 180 members, great companies coming to present. Games Industry really interested in USD and related projects such as MaterialX
Some members going to a GDC in Canada, question came up, what is ASWF thinking about in Games industry in general. Is this something we want to push on / engage with, something like GDC in March, should ASWF be present at to get more companies involved?
Summits submissions open until Oct 7, 2022, midnight
David: in general, answer would be yes, want to consider these opportunities. Our mission is to bring tech from the motion picture business, grow them for our own purposes, but also bring them to the broader media industry. We have agreement with Pixar to help with USD in any way we can, even though USD is not an ASWF project. We want to continue this investment in USD, want to consider these opportunities, coming in from our home base of motion picture industry, so definitely part of our mission.
Kimball: tend to agree.
Esteban: could figure out how to collaborate with O3DE Foundation, part of LF, building an open source game engine. David: some interaction, they presented at Open Source Days, and we are presenting at their conference in Austin, Texas in 2 weeks, David will present back after the conference. https://o3d.foundation/
Esteban: Happy to help in that collaboration if needed, I was part of O3DE and was a co-chair of a SIG
Nick: unfortunately deadline for GDC 2023 is this week
For other groups, could be an opportunity to benefit from USD pushing forward, when we are in those conversations and communities, we can highlight other projects as well. Could be a win-win. David: please bring those presentation opportunities to myself and Emily so we can help schedule and eventually promote it and give it the visibility it needs.
Reminder: next CIWG will go over silver level badge in detail