AWSF TAC Meeting - August 28, 2019

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic (Linux Foundation)
Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
Andrew Grimberg (Linux Foundation Release Engineering)
Joshua Minor (OTIO)
Jordan Soles (Rodeo FX)
Doug Walker (Autodesk / OCIO)

Apologies

Eric Enderton (NVIDIA)

Agenda

Governing Board Update [0:00-0:05]
- BOF videos from SIGGRAPH now on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZw_4upNTdoGjQfvim_5MhA
- Some of the requests from SIGGRAPH meetings conveyed to the Governing Board
- Finalizing goals for the first year, David Morin’s term ends end of September
- Still have change to make TAC goals from first year
- Asked about financing for GPU testing: funds can be made available for setup and experimentation, but should follow up on offers from member companies for free or subsidized resources. Can take advantage of resources from external providers since they can be linked to Azure Pipelines CI.
- Cary: Request for clear mission statement from projects (from Rob Bredow): each project should have a clear statement of scope, what it is, what it’s not, what are the boundaries. Could be included in documentation project.
Goals for TAC: Year 2 [0:05-0:15]
- Ongoing
  - Previous CI and TAC calls:
- Member survey (Gordon)
  - Gordon pointed out the importance of serving the needs of our members. Surveys to augment our representative structures, kicked off process with John to find ways to gather this data (augment free form survey data from SIGGRAPH). Also make these processes less ambiguous, also ask members to consider “relative value” when submitting lists of priorities (the $100 test).
- Security. Working Group?
  - Making space for a working group by moving CI working group to a every 4 week cadence. Is anyone interested in starting up this process?
  - Kimball: started conversations with Daniel at Foundry
- Kimball: Graduation of “senior” projects
- Cary: need to make progress on Diversity and Inclusion. Explicit targets and metrics.
- Larry: now that we have several projects in and more coming in, may be time to work on social aspects, normalizing the idea that people in studios should be contributing to the projects as part of their normal work. Daniel: Governing Board indicating that in the second year we should be more formal about drawing on engineering commitments of member companies. Larry: make sure that members are fulfilling their obligations, and normalizing the idea of not just fulfilling commitments, but also cutting the red tape to contribution. Could start to identify the barriers to contribution, even casual contributions (few line bug fixes) can be very difficult to clear / get approved. Cary: broadening the community base in our projects would help this as well, avoid “single points of failure”. Need to make sure that people aren’t scared of contributing by the legal hurdles. Daniel: another opportunity for a survey to figure out what are the obstacles to contribution. In the OSS Maintainers meeting at SIGGRAPH some of these topics were discussed, as well as how to reach out to a wider base of contributors (students for instance), but also trying to “unlock” experts in studios using these projects.
Documentation [0:15-0:20]
- aswf.io updates
  - John: working on a landscape view of projects in our industry, trying to revive opensourcevfx.org web site
  - Emily: updates to aswf.io web site, adding to project documentation practices. Added more community content, need a section for CI, each project will have a separate page, currently just links to the project site, but will have specific pages linking to mailing list, repository.
  - Some of the project web sites need updates, there isn’t a good central place to get to all our projects. Would Confluence be a solution, or should we stick to GitHub as the single source of truth? Here’s an example: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/ which aggregates the status of a number of related projects. Hyper Ledger is similar to ASWF as an organization.
  - Will be creating some assets on GitHub: logos, slides…
- CI (JF)
- Projects (graduation requirement?)
  - From OSS Maintainers meeting: we should make use of a documentation system / documentation quality requirement a criterion for project graduation. Some aspects are covered by CII requirements. Michael: OCIO has documentation, but project has changed rapidly, so hard to keep it up to date. Should demonstrate a “pattern” of documentation improvement. Kimball: do we mean something like Doxygen / ReadTheDocs / Sphinx for technical documentation? Larry: really likes ReadTheDocs / Sphinx, folds nicely into our CI philosophy, docs live within the source tree, system will rebuild the documentation on a commit. Also looks esthetically pleasing. Andrew: LF uses ReadTheDocs across multiple projects they manage, including internal RelEng documentation. Can do cross-project linking. Henry: it’s a good idea to indicate a level of expectation of documentation for our projects, reasonably up to date documentation. We have expectations of code quality, that should extend to documentation. Not sure if we want to prescribe a particular documentation system, should cover technical doc, user doc, and contributor doc.
  - Mission statements, roadmaps for projects, needed to keep projects healthy. Do projects feel they currently have a clear mission statement, both used internally, and externally discoverable? Or should we work explicitly on that.
  - Cary: OpenEXR started a discussion about gather reference images, could use some photos for reference images, what would we use those for? Would be used for calibration, which sounds useful, but is OpenEXR the right home for this, and is this within scope of the project. So brought up the discussion of project scope. Also question of splitting off imath, would OpenEXR become a “two headed beast” if it ends up managing two separate projects? Again goes to defining scope and mission.
  - Josh: OTIO spoke about this internally, what is the scope of the project within Pixar, what does and doesn’t get open sourced. Wrote down a project “elevator pitch” rather than a “mission statement”, more “what is the project” rather than “what should the project be”. Have pushed back on some requests (media playback for instance), but project scope may grow over time, hopefully in a controlled manner.
Technical Project updates [0:20-0:40]
- OpenCue
  - No representative
- OpenColorIO
  - Michael: refining licensing on project, waiting for approvals from Autodesk. Waiting for some license sign off from Governing Board. Last steps before applying for graduation vote. John: should hopefully happen next week.
- OpenTimelineIO
  - Josh: John has been helping form TSC, first meeting last week. 2 people from Pixar, one from Netflix. Next meeting tomorrow, people from Autodesk and Dreamworks interested. Looking for active contributors. Switched mailing list and Slack channel to ASWF infrastructure, going through the list. For the Technical Charter, looking at subtle differences between the other project charters, looking for guidance from other projects as to what required those changes. Larry: some of the differences are probably not that meaningful, but the result of haggling between legal departments and various contributors.
  - Got into some discussion with Avid asking for more involvement.
- OpenEXR
  - Cary: release “waiting in the weeks”, discussions on Boost issues, should now have builds on every platform. Also trying to resolve some license questions, a pull request was issued against document discussing patent requirements, but probably shouldn’t hold up the release. Should allow finishing off remaining items for CII badge, and should be able to propose graduation within next couple of weeks.
- OpenVDB
  - No representatives
CI updates [0:40-0:50]
- Working group. 4 weekly cadence.
Update on candidate projects
Next meeting
- 11 September 2019

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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