Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - June 10, 2026

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/aswf?view=list&projects=aswf

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

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

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 - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Robin - Cinepaint
Alyssa Alexis - SIGGRAPH
Bill Ballew - DreamWorks
Olga Avramenko - Sony Imageworks / Digital Note Taking Assistant

Meeting Assets

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
- OSD: Project Fast Forward #1385
Annual Review: OpenImageIO #509

Notes

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
  - Olga: Dev Days May 2026 Report
  - Report Slides
  - Dev Days by the Numbers
    - All 16 ASWF projects were open to Dev Days contributors
      - 9 projects had PRs
      - 52 PRs
      - 36 merged as of 6/10/2026
      - MaterialX had 9+6, OpenCue 8+2, Rez 6+1
      - Shout out to MaterialX!
    - Dev Days 2023-2026
      - 2023 - 2024 - May 2025 - Sept 2025 - May 2026
      - Projects worked on: 5 / 7 / 10 / 10 / 9
      - Individuals: 51/ 47 / …
      - Numbers are trending upwards
      - 2024 had higher numbers, but we were concentrating on a single event in the year, now we have 2 per year
    - Feedback form
      - 14 responses, 9 from contributors
      - 4 people had previously participated in previous Dev Days, so we have return contributors
      - Comments were very positive, “you guys are doing great!”
      - Logistics got 5s
      - Some comments about issue finding Confluence page
      - Some people unable to join Slack through the general link, they had to be invited in. Needs looking into.
    - Feedback - AI tools
      - “Did you use a coding assistant, agent or other AI tools”?
        
        7 said so, others said “some”
        
        3 used Claude, 2 Cursor, 1 Gemini
    - 13 said they would participate again
    - Looking at participating in DNA, OSL, OIIO, OpenEXR, MaterialX, OpenEXR, OCIo, OIIO, Moonray…
  - Feedback - Socials
    - In person:
      - Vancouver
      - NYC
      - SF Bay Area
      - Delhi
      - Anywhere in Italy
  - Key takeaways
    - Successes
      - Steady numbers
      - Improved documentation and recorded sessions for participants
      - Improved project documentation and issue labels
      - “Word of mouth” and DevDays brand seems to bring in more contributors
    - Room for Improvements
      - Feedback form sent quickly, but response rate is still low, maybe make it “compulsory”?
      - Room for improvement of organizational framework and documentation
      - Returning contributor documentation / communication / “good second issue” has not been addressed
- Q&A
  - Larry: was watching for results of coding assistants, what would the quality be like. For the projects I paid attention to, they were widely used, but quality was as high as ever. And didn’t get the feeling that these were “drive by PRs”, everyone seemed to be on top of it. I was relieved to see this, some non-ASWF projects I look at are deluged with bad PRs / issues, so I’m thankful about that. Anyone have ideas along those lines?
  - Cary: OpenEXR has had uptick in “random” contributions from people we haven’t heard of before. A couple of contributions not related to DevDays, I pinged one person who hadn’t heard about DevDays. Interesting perspective from project point of view, not sure if it’s a DevDays contribution or not. Carol: for most projects our PR level is low enough so we can assess based on timing? Cary: doesn’t necessarily matter. Carol: indeed, doesn’t mind if we “overcount”. Cary: yes, we roll out the red carpet for contributions. Carol: didn’t do as much as we wanted on OCIO, no DevDays contributors this year. Hopefully in the fall.
  - Olga: Question to the TAC: numbers are the same whether we do it once or twice a year, what about every 3 months? Every month? Even if contribution goes down, having it more frequently could work? Carol: If we add more, maybe should be more focussed, like focussing on docs, testing, bug bash… or we could add more general DevDays. Olga: I had someone who didn’t take part in DevDays, “I’ll have to wait until next one”, even though they can contribute at any time! Hopefully not wait so long. Emily: coming from someone new? Maybe every 3 months we don’t necessarily have a “formal” registration, just have “newbie days”? Managing registration, follow up is a lot of work. John: like “new contributors office hours”. Carol: would like to get off this “train”. How do we figure out how to get people to understand they can contribute at any time. Olga: we don’t want to lose the “brand”. If we just have new contributors office hours, we don’t have the “DevDays brand”. Carol: maybe we can figure out a way. Emily: maybe one big DevDays a year for everybody, and then have more ongoing support for new contributors.
  - Jonathan: agree with Cary, DevDays had more “permeable” borders this year, finishing before DevDays. We’ve succeeded in making a continuous process, I like the “punctuation marks” of DevDays (especially inside studios), but want to encourage new contributors.
  - Cary: nothing actually happened on that day, no questions, no chat, just PRs. Every project is different, but there seemed to be nothing sacred about this day. Also should we take people who contributed this week and solicit them for the next DevDays, or maybe even assign them an issue, “second time contributor”, which is what we need, we want more than one shot contributors. Reach out from project could be good.
  - Larry: I also noticed the same thing as Cary, lot of activity with PRs, but a lot fewer ahead of time contacts / active questions. Noticed that on other projects.
  - Carol: maybe our docs are getting better! Cary: first time we did this I got a lot of questions since our web site didn’t build! Carol: Dev Days team has done a lot of work to make the project smoother, but still want people to engage. Maybe just say Hello!
  - JF: maybe we need to emphasize that contributors can have “real time” access to senior industry people via Slack
  - Carol: we are working on trying to get more engagement / followup. What we really want is the “second contribution”. Have been thinking about ways to do that.
  - Emily: LF has new Meetup tool which could be used, and help for social activities for instance? Or maybe have people in Bay Area who want to hold their own Dev Days?
  - Larry: for the frequency, we don’t want to go too frequent for the organizers, but could have a compromise where we reserve a big push once / twice a year, but maybe “first monday of the month” we can be more readily available. The first once or twice a project participates, they find and fix the “broken glass on the floor”, but afterwards it’s not any more than tagging a few “good first issues”, watch Slack and PRs. It’s not a big burden, the hard work is for the organizers.
  - Cary: like office hours, we could commit to “fixing a bug” on Zoom / live (Larry: or Twitch!). Could be a good experience, showing people what our process is. It’s not exactly DevDays, but it’s similar. Carol: we had discussed this a bit before for SLP, it would be valuable. It’s like Office Hours, but works even if people don’t have hours. Cary: let’s definitely do this for SLP, since SLP will give you an audience.
  - Michael: for the feedback on AI agents, I just asked Claude about the MCP for OIIO, and there is none. People using agents will be asking about these things, but ASWF isn’t providing these integrations. Asked Claude “what would an MCP server for OIIO look like?”. There’s an opportunity to take part in that integration and reach out to the community using agentic tools. And perhaps get more contributors this way. We need to look into these integrations to bring people in.
  - Larry: what if we had an ASWF repo of “skills”? A skill file for each project, and a skill file for building every project. Building is a good example of “fuzzy” instructions that agents are good at. Michael: we can make it an opportunity to ask people to help us integrate. Carol: being more thoughtful in future DevDays on the types of issues. Most of use have our AGENTS.md in our projects, but there’s more that can be done.
  - Olga: about returning contributors, if they contributed, it would really help if projects reached out to them, try to encourage them to come to the TSC meetings, do they want a second issue…
  - Jonathan: I’m a fan of three.js, I’ve watched their repo for a long time. They name contributors in the Release Notes, GitHub flags that, that helps with engagement. We did that in MaterialX, it helps give people a sense that they are a part of the project when they have an avatar at the bottom of the release notes. We thank contributors in other ways, but this is an easy one. Larry: is there a “magic incantation”? Jonathan: if you mention their GitHub handle in the releasenotes, GitHub will add their avatar. Carol: we do this in OCIO. Jonathan: hadn’t seen this as much in our projects, good to know OCIO does this. Larry: my generator uses the actual name, so it was missing the automatic support / avatars. Will use that. Carol: it’s fun when people pop up in the release notes.
- Open Source Days
  - Emily: Bill Ballew, CTO at Dreamworks, will be keynote
  - Virtual Town Halls in September
  - BoFs: 2 tracks since we have so many, both on the 20th at the JW Marriot, side by side rooms
  - Will start charging a registration fee to provide a quality experience, $50 (tshirt, lunch, beers of a feather), $20 for students. Free if you work for member company, board members. Let me know if you need a code. Will also help people who can’t afford it.
  - Program Committee: thank you, had 50 submissions to CFP, schedule is now on web site. web site
  - If you want to do a BoF, I need description by EOD today. Once I have them all, will work on timing, but we need to send them to SIGGGRAPH. Can do last minute edits, but want to submit those as a batch.
  - Sponsorship opportunities available if your company is interested. Also new BoF sponsorship opportunity
  - Will try to chunk USD presentations.
  - Also if your project has major news you want announced through ASWF channels, let us know.
  - Carol: registration is live now!
- OSD: Project Fast Forward #1385
  - Carol: a node to “Papers Fast Forward”, I will give that presentation. I need your help. Quick description of project, something cool that got done last year. How do we give people who come to OSD who don’t have all the context an idea of what we do. They may not even know some of the projects exist. We have an opportunity to do this at OSD. For each project lead I need:
    - 2/3 sentence description of project ELI5 style, as understandable as it can be
    - a representative image of the project, not the logo
    - 1 or 2 cool things your project did in last year, ELI5 style
  - We have 21 projects / WGs in a 20 minute presentation, so 1 minute each.
  - WGs may look a bit different, may group a couple of WGs on a slide
Annual Review: OpenImageIO #509
- Miscommunication, OIIO was not aware they were supposed to present today. Carol: we’ll figure out why this happened. We’ve done shuffling in the back end, so possible that notifications didn’t happen.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- TAC Industry Representative Election #1291
Annual Review: Dailies Notes Assistant (DNA) #1040
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377
2026 TAC Priorities #1208