Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - May 27, 2026
Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/aswf?view=list&projects=aswf
Voting Representative Attendees
Premier Member Representatives
- Alejandro Arango - Epic Games, Inc
- Andy Jones - Netflix, Inc.
- Chris Hall - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
- Christopher Moore - Skydance Animation, LLC
- Eric Enderton - NVIDIA Corporation
- Gordon Bradley - Autodesk
- Greg Denton - Microsoft Corporation
- Jonathan Gerber - LAIKA, LLC
- Kimball Thurston - Wētā FX Limited
- Larry Gritz - Sony Pictures Imageworks
- Mark Wiebe - Amazon Web Services, Inc.
- Matthew Low - DreamWorks Animation
- Michael Min - Adobe Inc.
- Michael B. Johnson - Apple Inc.
- Rebecca Bever - Walt Disney Animation Studios
- Scott Dyer - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- Sean Mcduffee - Intel Corporation
- Youngkwon Lim - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
Project Representatives
- Carol Payne - OpenColorIO Representative
- Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
- Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
- Daniel Greenstein - OpenImageIO Representative
- Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
- Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
- Karen Ruggles - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
- Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
- Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Industry Representatives
- Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society
Non-Voting Attendees
Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives
- Alexander Schwank - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
- Anton Dukhovnikov - rawtoaces Representative
- Daryll Strauss - Zero Trust Working Group Representative
- Eric Reinecke - OpenTimelineIO Representative
- Erik Strauss - Open Review Initiative Representative
- Gary Oberbrunner - OpenFX Representative
- Jean-Christophe Morin - Rez Representative
- John Mccarten - Rongotai Model Train Club (RMTC) Representative
- Jon Lanz - MoonRay Representative
- Josh Bainbridge - OpenQMC Representative
- Sebastian Herholz - Open Path Guiding Library (OpenPGL) Representative
- Stephen Mackenzie - Rez Representative
- Steven Shapiro - OpenAssetIO Representative
- Tommy Burnette - Dailies Notes Assistant Representative
LF Staff
- David Morin - Individual - No Account
- Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
- John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
- Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation
Other Attendees
- Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
- JT Nelson
- Cory Omand - Pixar
- Lorna Dumba - Framestore
Meeting Assets
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Agenda
- General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377
Notes
-
General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
- Now published on tac GitHub repo and in Best Practices section of TAC Web Site. We also published Cary’s security best practices. Projects can adopt these for their own needs. If you find any issues with TAC web site, please report / submit PO.
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
- Carol: “off the cuff” evaluation seems to say it went well, we’re still working on the stats / results. Any feedback to share now? Or let us know, for instance point out a really great contributor / contribution, or numbers of PRs.
- Karen (chat): I actually worked with a few folks who applied to SLP but did not get in and encouraged them to connect to DevDays and they said they met Larry at the in-person meet up so that’s a win.
- AGENDA TOPIC SLP 2026 #1306
- Karen: kicking off June 1st, we have 21 participants (usually we have 20). Volunteers will hear from us soon. Iterating with guest mentorship program, we are working on building that. Outreach team is working on graphics, for D&I presentation to the TAC we’ve talked about a “New Contributors Initiative”. A nice year of iteration for SLP. Please supporting of anyone showing up on Slack / meetings. We’ve had good feedback in the past about people feeling welcome / supported.
- Carol: thanks for all the work, seems like “well oiled machine” from outside. We have several people on the SLP leadership team who are former SLP participants.
- Karen: we want to build on the connection to ASWF / SLP, and potentially a long term contributor. Excited to see how the SLP Alum (up to 100 folks) integrates with ASWF.
- AGENDA TOPIC TAC Meeting Schedule Updates #1375
- Carol: Project updates: please let TAC know ahead of time if you can’t present so we have to make adjustments / reshuffle the schedule. Sometimes we get late cancellations, fitting in all our project / WG reviews can be tricky, and a cancellation can create a domino effect. But in general projects / WGs are good about this, but keep in mind the TAC schedule is pretty full. We’re thinking about ways to be more efficient.
- Cancel TAC meeting week of SIGGRAPH, we’ll have the leadership meeting at Open Source Days, for board and TAC members. There will be in person and zoom option. It’s not an “official” TAC meeting, but it will take its place. So OpenFX will have their project review bumped, so we’ll need to shuffle. You’ll hear from Yarille for rescheduling, please respond quickly.
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
-
AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377
- Document Link
- John: lots of different ways to track project status, LFX, GitHub stats. Larry has the contribution matrix, annual reviews to the TAC.
- How do we know if it’s going well for our projects? Is there something we need to worry about? Not a “pass/fail” exercise, but more “does the project have what it needs to be successful”.
- Lots of projects reporting lack of resources.
- Based on a discussion with Larry and Carol for an hour.
- Carol: LFX Insights has improved, but it’s not the full picture. Numbers for the project in isolation isn’t necessarily not the whole truth. Also number of PRs isn’t necessarily a good PR, depending on the life cycle of a project. How can we add to this in a framework that has more metrics. Some hard metrics, but also “soft” metrics, Slack channel activity, meeting attendance… These should be something a project lead should report on. We can use this as a framework / guidelines, but it’s not 100% prescriptive. Answers can be different per project. How can we help to projects know how they are doing and have a framework to think about this. We also need to feed this info up to governing board and member companies.
- Larry: We talked about changing the annual project report template to include a lot of this. If every project includes their roadmap, we can keep track of how much was addressed, and was it because they didn’t have the resources, or priorities shifted? We want to have this info in a consistent format.
- John: it’s not a pass/fail exercise, more like a way to access strengths / weaknesses. Not pitting two projects together, need to know how things are going overall.
- Carol: also want to evaluate projects on the right basis, so we can evaluate the foundation as a whole.
- Carol: wanted to have a moment to put in front of everybody. We’ve done revamps of the project review slide template, needs more work. But would like feedback on this document, and in turn feed the project review template.
- Any feedback as to whether this would be useful? Christopher: will definitely take a closer look and give feedback. Carol: it’s a lot all at once, we would appreciate async feedback, via comments, Slack…
- Larry: a lot of these are just taking stabs at what to measure, we may not know everything ahead of time. Maybe some measures turn out to not be correlated.
- JF: at what time would this need to be considered? Carol: ideally it would be a “continuous process”, not weekly, but maybe on a quarterly basis? We’re going to have to experiment and try. But ideally not a yearly thing, but in practice the yearly review process may be the forcing process. So you’ll want to be ready to think about these things before your annual review. Some things might be able to act on quicker, like meeting attendance. But a lot of these points are more relevant in the long term.
- Steven: looking at the criteria, might be useful to have maintainers to have some comments on the cadence of development. Some are driven by yearly VFX Platform platform, some may have more “casual”. Sometimes more activity indicates that the project has a lot of issues? So it’s not just volume of activity, it’s also the type of activity. Carol: 100%, can be hard to tease out from static metrics like number of PRS. For instance with OCIO you can tell that we do a yearly VFX Platform release, but that’s not necessarily exposed by the stats.
- Steven: projects in the platform are definitely encouraged to meet a release window to get their new features into the following year’s platform.