Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - January 08, 2025

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Partial attendance record only.

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO / Diversity & Inclusion WG Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Rob Rowe, Cinepaint
Lee Kerley, Apple

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Agenda

Notes

OpenVDB Annual Review
- Rescheduled for future meeting
John: Recording enabled for this meeting since JF is not able to attend.
- There is a transcript functionality that does do that. It’s reasonably good. It’s a little bit verbose. There is an AI tool. That is that you can turn on as well. Larry: I think the couple of projects would like to use it, it would be better than the very sketchy notes we have now. Caril: I’ve used the Zoom transcription in the past, it does OK. John: If you’re interested in experimenting with it, we can follow up with the Lfx team, because I think we’re turning it on for a few projects.
- Alexander Schwank (chat): USDWG is happy to be guinea pig for AI meeting notes
- Michael Johnson (chat): I think DPEL would like to use the meeting notes stuff
Security thread model analysis for ASWF projects
- John: if you are interested in listening in to MaterialX and/or OpenEXR, Jonathan and Cary are your contacts.
Evolving our working groups program
- John: we put in a PR before the holidays, asked the group to review it. Any concerns in merging this PR? In encompasses what we talked about. We will vote offline to merge.
D&I Working Group Annual Review
- Slide Deck
- Rachel Rose and Carol Payne
- Mission Statement: “The goal of the Diversity & Inclusion Working Group at the Academy Software Foundation is to break down barriers to access and increase connection among participants in the Foundation’s projects, the larger community, and the VFX & Animation industry. The working group brings together software engineers/developers, marketing/communication professionals, students & educators, and anyone else passionate about Diversity & Inclusion.”
- D&I Working Group Focus Areas
  - Increase ASWF Diversity & Representation: ensure there is diverse leadership and membership across the Academy Software Foundation and its projects
  - External Outreach & Education: encourage high school and college students to pursue technical careers in the motion picture and media industries and provide them with opportunities to participate in open source projects and learn from experienced software engineers.
  - Member Guidance: Provide guidance and resources for Foundation members to educate their colleagues on open source and D&I topics.
- For today’s update…
  - What did we do?
  - How did we do?
  - What are our plans?
  - What input do you have?
- ASWF D&W Working Group 2024 Plans
  - Planning lunch for 2025 priorities happening in a couple of weeks, so won’t be presenting 2025 plans yet.
  - Plans for 2024 from December 2023
    - What was accomplished vs what was not. Some of the goals haven’t been achieved yet.
    - We will concentrate on what we achieved in 2024
- ASWF D&I Framework
  - Action: Guidance for Members
    - Explore whether providing an open source framework for DEI compiled form the best ideas of our member companies could be beneficial to our community. How can we help other companies large or small jump start their DEI programs.
  - In Progress:
    - Short Term Goal: Publish a D&I resource list as well as case studies regarding existing DEI initiatives. Pages across the internet into a curated list. A lot of progress on collecting resource list, next step is to come up with good way to present and organize list.
    - Planning: Source information and spec out what a fully open source Framework could look like. An ongoing process.
  - Getting Involved!
    - Join us in the #dei-open-framework channel in the ASWF Slack!
    - Meetings: continuing monthly in 2025, starting back up soon
- ASWF TAC Diversity
  - Action Increase ASWF Diversity & Representation
    - Won’t do a deep dive today
    - The ASWF is pushing to affect the issue of diversity and inclusion within VFX, animation, open source, and the ASWF.
    - We made a push to influence the makeup of the Governing Board. How do we do the same for the TAC over time to also reflect this important focus? TAC is very different than the Governing Board, so won’t be the same, a different entity with different goals.
    - Pipeline: our communities could be more diverse. For TAC, TSC reps?
    - Appointees: need ways to encourage diversity in appointees.
    - Making Space: how can we make space for more great leaders? Governing Board adopted term limits, alternates, and language on how to select and appoint representatives from member companies. Spent a lot of time talking in D&I WG, will schedule discussion with the TAC.
- Summer Learning Program
  - Summer 2024:
    - Open “Focus” year
    - 20 learners
    - Industry webinars
    - Structured Group Learning Time
    - Combo of FXPhD & Udeny
    - Had over 100 applicants, picked 20. Ended up with stellar group -Big Wins
    - Continue success from organizational transition of 2023
    - Prioritized Speaker Series, which made sense at that point in the program. Diverse speakers with great stories to tell.
    - Great, active cohort, active on Slack. Enjoyed being a mentor
  - Improvement Opportunities
    - Need to grow mentor pool to facilitate better matching, better experience if we can one-to-one match mentor to learner. Better if we can better match areas of interest. If you sign up for a mentor, you might not be a mentor for that year if interests don’t match up.
    - Need to standardize long-term, operational support from greater ASWF
    - Was challenging to grow to 20 learners, had to reach out to individuals to as to be a mentor. If we want to accept more, we have to be prepared to scale so learners have as good an experience.
    - Need to improve guest mentorship program
    - Did work last summer:
      - Swag store gift cards to send to learners, a lot less work than sending individual swag boxes
      - Standardize application forms
  - The program is working
  - Internship placements at Pixar, Disney Animation, Bolt Graphics
  - Job placements at Dreamworks, Google, Epic Games, Jellyfish Animation, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and more
  - Many learners continuing higher education in technical / entertainment focused areas of study
  - See blog post
  - Reached out to previous year to gather data
  - We are in the 5th year of the program
  - Thinking about sustainability / growth, how can we better integrate it to ASWF rather than just D&I WG, we don’t have direct answer but a couple of ideas
  - Similar to what we did with Dev Days, started off in D&I, but moved to TAC initiative. Not necessarily a TAC initiative, but should have same involvement as Dev Days
- Organizational Opportunities
  - Leadership transition
    - Founded in 2020 by Carol and Rachel, initially thought it was a 2 year commitment. We still love doing it, but in the spirit of diversity, want to get new people involved.
    - Rachel will step back in the spring, still be involved, but rotate someone in.
    - Eventually Carol will do the same
  - Strengthen SLP
    - Currently at 20 learners, what would it take to be at 30?
    - Thinking of it as a larger ASWF level program
  - Form bridge between D&I and Outreach group
    - Started out with very strong relationship, has gotten a bit quieter
    - Lots of aspects span the two group
  - Partner with AOUSD DEI Group
    - Discussions on accessibility
- Up Next: Initiatives
  - Planning in next two weeks, a lot of carry over from2024
  - SLP 2025
  - D&I Framework Initiative
    - A complicated, large project
  - TAC Diversity Initiative
  - International Science Fair Discovery
    - Wanted to get involved for a long time
    - Discovery work by Cary Philips a couple of years ago
    - Reach to High School students
    - Requires someone to start / lead initiative
      - Someone new who is not Carol / Rachel
    - Would like to make progress in 2025
    - May be working with Outreach group
- TAC Feedback
  - Are we focussed in the correct areas?
  - Where could we help your projects succeed?
  - Please encourage participation from your company!
    - Companies believe in this, have internal groups, we would like to collaborate
    - We have phases of more or less volunteers
      - We have new faces now that are really
  - Scott (chat): As an SLP mentor for the past few years: This has been a great experience. I highly recommend that if you are interested, then to volunteer. I think that D&I WG is probably one of the most important groups at the ASWF because it is a great resource to bring in new people to push the projects. And I want to thank Carol, Rachel, and all of the D&I volunteers for everything you’ve done.
  - Larry: what are your thoughts on D&I efforts via Dev Days? Not a D&I initiative per se, but lots of overlap in goals. How do they help each other? Rachel: Dev Days is about bringing in new people, which increases diversity. When looking at SLP applications, how do we advertise in the right place to get selection of people who wouldn’t normally apply. Would like to think about how this could look like for Dev Days. A bit different since we reach out to member companies, but how do we encourage diverse participation for all definitions of diversity. Larry: how does Dev Days pull people in, it’s awesome that SLP results in internships / placements, maybe think of Dev Days as the next step after SLP. Carol: we’ve don’e that, there have been a handful of previous SLP participants who have taken part in Dev Days. Goals are different, SLP is just intro to industry, no strings attached, different from Dev Days. But Outreach and D&I can tie in with Dev Days. Also want to get more people into Dev Days, relationships with colleges and universities.
  - David: want to echo what Scott wrote in chat, thank you for all your are doing and your initiatives. What you are doing is very important, we want to continue to encourage it. What you are proposing makes a lot of sense to me, in particular elevating the SLP into a ASWF event makes a lot of sense.
  - John: this has been impressive work. Some of the strongest D&I work we’ve seen across Linux Foundation. Larry: are other foundations having similar initiatives and finding success? Sometimes feels like we’re making guesses, is there a track record of something we should be copying / borrowing? John: “demonstratively works” can be subjective, hard to gauge the impact of “someone who got into the industry who wouldn’t have otherwise”. Initiatives that have had a lot of staying power, we’ve seen in CNCF. What we often see is a lot of enthusiasm around such an initiative, get people around a table, but eventually fizzles out. People put a lot of work in, but end up burning out. To us a good gauge is staying power. We’ve made a few connections with other projects doing D&I work, everyone is asking the same questions / doing similar things, can be helpful to help with networking of “leaders”. Carol / Rachel, don’t know if any of this would be helpful? Carol: we will always listen to other people and would like to talk to people doing the same work we are doing. We want to partner with AOUSD, that’s important to us, since there’s a lot of great D&I work out there, we try to keep our work scoped to ASWF / M&E industry, focussed on what we know. Can make interacting with other groups difficult. But some things such as mentorship programs can be good to learn. But can be hard to collaborate on specific projects, but we will share with AOUSD, share the same set of goals. We already have that connection and look forward to growing it. Rachel: we spend a lot of time talking to people not part of ASWF, leaning on LF to find more of those connections would be great. I feel that the organization is willing to put resources behind. Some times we have a hard time figuring out how to use those resources!
  - John: Open Source Summit NA CFP - highlighting the D&I track
  - David: attended LF member summit in the fall, conference that takes place every year where only the members of the LF attend. Topics are on deeper open source, lots of Open Source Program Office topics, but there’s D&I undercurrent to a lot of presentations. Could be a great place for D&I to present next year, or attend, you would find a lot of kindred spirits. You have a lot you have done that’s original to present, there would be an audience for that. Would be a way to connect with other foundations, you could build your own connections with other foundations. We can take that offline to present to LF Member Summit. John: Open Source Summit has entire D&I track, could be good to build networking for you.
Eric E: should we talk about Open Source Forum?
- David: yes. Prepping for Open Source Forum on Feb 13. We have a schedule. Forum is for our members and to “friends of the Foundation / would be members”. Building program as we speak. I think I presented here the anatomy of a studio slide? If I haven’t I will present it now. Hosted by Nick Cannon at Walt Disney Animation Studios, in discussion with Nick we were talking about if there was a graph representing a production pipeline in large VFX / Animation studios. If you know of such a chart, please let me know. Nick sent some notes, prepared a slide, represents different parts of a studio pipeline. Will build heat map with where our projects fit in this map, and where will the impact be of new technologies on the production pipeline. AI is one of the obvious technologies, which steps of the pipeline will be affected by it. Talking to different folks who have expertise in the area, present pipeline as it is today, and have an interactive session at the end where we will discuss how our projects and open source can come into the pipeline. NVIDIA has been heavily involved with this transition, may have presenters from NVIDIA to put the short presentation for AI opportunity.
- Emily: Registration is already open, since we’re keeping it to foundation, we will be sending registration codes later this week.
- Eric E: in terms of NVIDIA contributions, looking at how NVIDIA can help. 2 possible directions: think about existing open source / adjacent projects, recent work in neural texture compression and neural materials, where they’ve used sort of a combination of a differentiable shading language called slang, PyTorch and OptiX, some of that work is open source, or is going to be open source soon. And then what are the more forward looking GenAI applications, creating 3D models, animations… We could do a survey of existing projects, most of which are early days, not something you will use in a studio tomorrow. Let me know what’s useful, we don’t have to do it at Open Source Forum, we could do a TAC presentation.
- Eric R: we tend to be focussed on VFX and Animation, but live action now starting to have pipelines, assistant editors are operating as ATDs. At Netflix we have something that looks a lot like what a animation / vfx pipeline might look like. David: first draft is coming from Animation / VFX, but we want to expand into live action. It’s a good time to look at large studio pipelines and do this mapping, and looking at animation / vfx practices sleeping into live action. Also where are the opportunities for new open source projects, where our current and new members can work together.
- Larry: how would you like feedback on this diagram? Should they comment on the document?
- David: Document Link is editable Please look at it, you can even try to modify it and we can always go back in versions. Please send your feedback to me, and I will share it back. Larry: having everyone edit it may be chaos, but can just comment and have edits performed by David. David: all comments welcome, want to have a generic representation of a pipeline, not tied to a specific studio. Where are the opportunities for our projects in the future.
- Eric E: was talking to live action editor, in the edit room, they would sometimes reframe, push in, sometimes retime, use frame interpolation, tighten up dialog. It’s a “slippery slope”. Carol: it’s also true in the color world, expanding color decision making to other parts of the pipeline.
- David: will follow up on TAC list with more structured process to review this slide