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John: annual election for TAC chair and renewing Industry Representative coming up, we’ll probably discuss this at the next meeting.
John: have had to push back some of the project reviews. OpenVDB was scheduled this week, but pushed back to next meeting, which had ripple effect. If anyone is “more ready” to present, you can asked to be bumped up in the list. Kimble: OpenEXR hasn’t really started working on its presentation yet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MgZa3b2PAapAQevGhSjLde7vl-ViGXhyJsC3S8B0ol8/edit#gid=0
John: don’t over think it! Joshua: planning OTIO presentation, overview of how the project is going, here are concrete requests of the TAC membership on how to help. Should we formally ask to move from incubated to adopted level? Does that project need to be tied to project review? John: it can be, or it can be done separately. If you think you are ready at the time, would make sense to do it, but doesn’t have to be. Also happy to review any slides if you want.
Kimball: graduation doesn’t need to be tied to project review, unless you are ready for it.
Potential Hackathon for 2023
John: a way to help drive some interest in the project, would it make sense to run some form of a hackathon? These things can go a lot of different ways, what has been success / feedback around hackathons, has your project done them, have they been a success / disaster? Would your project lean well towards doing one of these? Trying to gather data points. Likely each project would need to decide what it would look like for themselves.
Larry: 2 sets of questions, the ones you just addressed, it’s hard, the project need to do a lot of work, a list of tasks that can be done by new people in a day. Also can the companies we work with make it so a wide swath of people can contribute to the projects, get cleared in advance, without knowing in advance what they are going to work on. Could be difficult in a number of organizations. But trying to make this possible could be a reason to run a hackathon. CLA could be one of many hurdles, depends a lot on the organization. Some organizations haven’t contributed to a particular project, degree of difficult varies between organizations. Not a reason not to do it, in fact could be a reason TO do it.
Kimball: asking organizations to add a lot of people to ASWF projects via EasyCLA. It can take some time.
John: if a project wanted to set aside a “hackathon”, is that something that would be generally accepted that someone could step away for a day to do something like this? Kimball: depends on when that period of time is, in my case, it could be acceptable, but depends on when. On the eve of a big film release / delivery, that could be an issue. Would companies have an issue if it’s a constrained set of projects, only ASWF projects for instance? Larry: any project I’ve gotten through the clearance at all, I can decide afterwards who can contribute what, but can anyone in the company contribute to a project that no one has contributed to before? Would require some process… Even with the CLAs signed, sometimes every patch has to be reviewed. For me, the project is “a new project”, and it took a while to get this process streamlined.
John: if we give enough lead time, and if we have interested organizations, we could seed it. Larry: if we plan this for summer time, it should be possible to make it work. Kimball: what about member vendors, would that be possible? Gordon: have tried lots of hackathons at different scale / levels, have tried different levels of engagement, challenges based on timezones, personalities… Need organization and coordination, some people can self organize, others want more structure. Don’t know how much a hackathon would change velocity of a project. Maybe across the teams there are a few things here and there that would work? Top level guess is that people are just doing it, we have engagement across several projects, it’s just happening. Would have to poll some of the things to get more info.
Joshua: could take various libraries and tech and add support in other projects for these libraries. Either a commercial product or an open source project, for instance “add OCIO support to a product / project”, doesn’t require CLA. Gordon: I really like this angle, “do something cool” with the projects. Could get a bunch of sample code / demos / integrations. That could be fun.
Kimball: is there something we can do with Open Review Initiative to glue 2 or more projects together, but this can be more general.
Gordon: is there a case study of another community that’s done this, how did it get organized, how successful it was. John: lots of communities have run successful hackathons, but hard to find parallel datapoint, it can done in so many ways. Would be more interesting if it had been done in this industry, and don’t know of anything specific. There’s the technology / code aspect, but also the culture component. Would be curious if there’s been precedents in this industry.
Kimball: don’t know anything in this industry. Individual companies do some internally. If you look back 20/25 years, some activities around switching from IRIX to Linux.
John: sounds like there’s interest, there may be a long path towards integrating in schedule and legal aspects. Also look not only at contributions to projects, but also integration into other projects / connectors to ASWF projects.