Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - August 20, 2025

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

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative, OpenColorIO 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
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group 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
Michelle Roth - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Karen Ruggles, DeSales University
Alyssa Alexis, SIGGRAPH
Doug Walker, Autodesk / OCIO
Spencer Stephens
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks
Lee Kerley, Apple
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
John McCarten, Weta
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Josh Bainbridge, Framestore
Olga Avramenko, Imageworks / D&I
Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
Tommy Burnette, ILM / ML WG

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Agenda

General Updates
- Rename project lifecycle stage ‘Adopted’ to ‘Graduated’ #999
- Propose to remove vote for annual reviews #1016
- Dev Days - September 25th #1134

Notes

Open Source Days Poll - David
- what are your highlights?
- what could be improved?
- using a new polling system, woodclap.com used by Moment Factory, code OSD2025
- Can generate a wordcloud from entries and rankings
- List your highlights of Open Source Days and rank the listings of others
  - Single stream of content
  - Quality of presentations
  - The whole day
  - Good remote a/v quality
  - Seeing everyone in person / interactivity from presentations, zoom is too serialized for true interactions
  - Nice surrounding area to congregate and chat between presentations
  - Snacks
  - Lunch was a great idea
- CBB: what can we improve at open source days, rank the answers of others
  - Recordings of the BoFs (David: rules of SIGGRAPH)
  - Line to get into beers of a feather
  - Beers venue too small
  - More umbrellas / sun shade for Beers of a Feather
  - Not repeat material from DigiPro
    - Flow Presentation was a kind of repeat
    - Larry: we worked hard to make them distinct presentations!
    - David: we benefited from DigiPro presentation being a kind of rehearsal. But we need to differentiate our content compared to DigiPro
  - Hard to choose between Sunday Siggraph sessions and Open Source Days
    - SIGGRAPH courses (Physically Based Shading)
  - If you sat near the doors, the talking outside was distracting relative to the (reasonable) audio levels in the room
  - More time for BoFs
  - Beers of a Feather competed with Papers Fast Forward - Larry: not suggesting there is a better day
- Larry: the room was fairly full, but were any presentations where people couldn’t come in?
  - Emily: there were people in overflow room in the morning, but we closed it around noon.
  - Larry: seems the room size was perfect
  - Wave: every SIGGRAPH BoF room was too small! Larry: lots of complaints all week. But we did well.
  - David: it’s our missing to support our projects, we intend to continue to do it this way and support our BoFs.
  - Carol: for OCIO BoF there was some feedback that the room as “too big” and didn’t promote conversation, but rather have too much room than not enough. David: we can close some of the rows.
  - Passing microphones around is disruptive.
  - Wave: Access in/out from side doors was distracting, SIGGRAPH usually has only a single door in the back. So would be helpful to only have a single door. Larry: especially once the session starts.
  - Carol: a lot of this is controlled through volunteers. We have new folks through SLP, maybe they could help in a similar capacity.
  - Emily: we could try to recruit volunteers to help with registration and checkin. Carol: we can offer swag, we can’t offer the same benefits as SIGGRAPH, but can do other things.
- David: thank you for your feedback on Open Source Days!
- Larry: SIGGRAPH is composed of a lot of overlapping groups, the people who know about Open Source is a narrow slice of people involved with the studios. Not sure how much other people knew that OSD was happening without already being “on the inside”. Do we want more publicity? My son was a student volunteer, and talking to other volunteers, they had never heard of it.
  - Emily: should we bring back a BoF geared towards students to present careers. Carol: would prefer something like that, maybe a D&I BoF. D&I group has worked with student volunteers, but it was on Thursday, how do we get into these groups before so we can encourage them to come to OSD.
  - Emily: what are the groups? Is there a segment we are missing and would be beneficial for the foundation? Then we can do a better job of targeting them. Larry: students is where I had a direct data point, but people outside the narrow world of film studios in our projects, they may not know we have activities.
  - Karen taking over D&I leadership responsibilities, academia / students will be “top of mind”
General Updates
- Rename project lifecycle stage ‘Adopted’ to ‘Graduated’ #999
  - Larry: Orthogonal to whether the project is already “widely adopted” in the industry.
  - Carol: last time we argued if “graduated” is the right word. But we would like to move forward with this.
  - Eric: also can’t think of a different word.
- Propose to remove vote for annual reviews #1016
  - Larry: go on the assumption a project will renew at current stage, unless a problem is identified and the TAC needs to tackle it and help the project get back on track.
  - Carol: we wouldn’t vote unless a project needs to change stage. No vote needed to stay at a current stage.
  - Larry: assumes that TAC members feel they can call out if they feel project is at the wrong stage or if there are issues / areas that need to be remedied.
  - Larry: we will send these to LFX
- Carol: we are preferring LFX votes instead of “live in the room” votes, that’s been on purpose.
- John: any concerns? Alexander: no concerns, would be good to have this written down so it’s clear “when we do what”, for instance in person vs LFX votes. Carol: it’s our intention to be clearer about which we do, not sure when do we need to do an in person vote. Eric: what’s the motivation for online? Carol: for people who miss the meeting, also feel comfortable saying something different. Larry: motivation seems rushed to have a presentation / air an issue and have a vote right away 2 minutes before end of the meeting. Not enough time to consider the issue / do any research. Carol: we should put in documentation that for new projects we would have a TAC meeting after the presentation, and only then got to LFX vote to have time to discuss.
Larry: will send to the TAC channel links to spreadsheets about engineering contributions from their organizations
- build matrix with versions of projects in use, allows projects to know what they need to support
- engineering contribution matrix where we ask the member companies which projects are critical to you and which projects are you putting in substantial contributions
- Trying to see if these are in balance and if any projects are starved for resources. Spreadsheets haven’t been updated in a while, mostly from last year. So please have someone from your org or project update these so we can do an annual assessment.
- Read-only links, first tab of spreadsheet has editable links
  - Google Doc
  - contributionmatrix.aswf.io redirect
Dev Days 2025 - Olga
- We want to increase participation, targeting both junior and senior devs
- important that projects are fully set up before event
- issues must be labeled with Help Wanted so they show up on Clotributor web site
- issues must be open, unassigned and opened in the last year
- Look at the project guidelines page on Confluence
- Carol: LF Clotributor filter to ASWF
  - This is what we point people to if they want to find issues for Dev Days
  - Tagging with Help Wanted is the minimum to show up, can add other tags like Good First Issue. Clotributor doesn’t show every tag, only the ones it is familiar with. You can look at how projects are using tags. We’ve used Good First Issue to bring in new developers, but some people may not be new to Open Source but just new to your project, so just having Help Wanted is helpful.
  - There is a time limit, if you haven’t updated an issue in a year, it will drop off Clotributor to keep issues “fresh”.
  - OCIO has tons of older than 1yr issue, they would need to be refreshed.
  - Larry: are there recommended tags for the “good first issue for experience contributor”, not sure we have to have a uniform label across all projects? Carol: open to ideas, don’t want to enforce something across projects. We’d like to hear if something works well for a project. Larry: MaterialX doing a great job to “keep issues in the hopper”, they had the most contributors in the last Dev Days.
- Carol: reminder to tag issues with labels, and tag PRs with devdays25 label (this is documented in Confluence). At org level this allows us to track what PRs were submitted as part of Dev Days. We’ll do the work of separating Spring and Fall PRs.
- Any tricks for repos in order orgs like DPEL org? John: it should be, we’re careful to track every repo due to GitHub API issues. If not showing up, let us know and we may need to add manually. Matthew: OpenVDB also just moved to their own org. How often does it update? John: not sure, but seems to show up quickly? Carol: maybe 2 hours?
- Carol: curious about projects moving to own org? Matthew: for DPEL we thought every project might get its own DPEL, and clearly affiliated with DPEL. For OpenVDB they are adding NanoVDB, NerfVDB. Ken: that’s correct, also some of the projects are a staging ground and may have different governance. TSC focuses on core project, and have incubation platform for some of the other projects. Matthew: works from administrative standpoint, ASWF is an Enterprise in GitHub and can “own” multiple orgs, so billing / runners works. But there are corner cases like Clotributor. Carol: yes was concerned about discoverability. If we allow / encourage projects to move to their own org, still want to make sure captured by Clotributor. John: we also have many projects using Clotributor, and sometimes we hit GitHub API limits. Shouldn’t be an issue for ASWF, there are other foundations that have a lot more repos.
- Carol: DevDays is a month away, want everyone to be excited about it. Same approach as in the spring: if you are an ASWF project, you are participating in Dev Days, output depends on how easily people can be onboarded, and how much effort projects put into it. It can take resources to do these projects, if you need help reach out to us, we’ll be happy to help.
- Olga: please do ask if you have questions.
Eric: was there an announcement for OpenQMC vote? John: yes, the vote was approved, but we may have missed sending to Slack. Josh: thank you for the help, excited to be at the incubation stage? Carol: we have to find a new thing to ask Eric at every meeting
John: we will present OpenLensIO at next meeting.