12 February 2025

Attendees: Carol Payne, Kaitlin Pollock, Jennifer Cremer, Adelie Creek, Bill Ballew, Stephen Mackenzie, Lori Smallwood, Stephanie Doppler, Monique Bradshaw

Agenda:

• Plans and focus for 2025 (see slidedeck)

• AOUSD Collaboration — BOF at SIGGRAPH

• SLP Planning — 4-year application cycle, transition to LF

ASWF D&I Mission Statement Review

3 focus areas:

• increase D&I representation within ASWF

• external outreach and education

• member guidance

AOUSD Collaboration

The Alliance of OpenUSD (AOUSD) is a Linux Foundation organization focused on setting standards for the OpenUSD ecosystem. AOUSD recently formed its own DEI group, led by Lori Smallwood, who attended this meeting. Carol discussed potential collaboration with AOUSD, including a BOF at SIGGRAPH and other joint initiatives this year.

SIGGRAPH Outreach

Ferby expressed interest in leading the student volunteer SIGGRAPH outreach initiative.

SLP 2025 Planning

• The group discussed the diversity dimension for the 2025 SLP application pool and reviewed the pools from previous years:

  • Year 1: Women and women-identifying

  • Year 2: LGBTQIA+

  • Year 3: BIPOC and Latinx

  • Year 4: Open to anyone who identifies as belonging to an underrepresented group

• Carol proposed a recurring 4-year cycle, consisting of 3 years dedicated to focus groups followed by an open year. This structure would allow prospective applicants to anticipate their eligibility. For the 5th year of SLP in 2025, Karen suggested prioritizing “under-served gender identities, including and not limited to […]” to ensure more inclusive language.

  • The 4-year cycle and the year 5 focus group was agreed upon by group consensus.

• Transition to broader ASWF Support

  • During last year's annual Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) update, Rachel and Carol emphasized the need for a more structured placement for SLP within the ASWF. Benefits of this transition include:

    • More administrative support (e.g., scheduling, calendaring, swag store), reducing the burden on D&I volunteers.

    • Enhancing the mentee experience by enabling D&I to focus on mentorship rather than administrative tasks.

    • Increased legitimacy and appeal for prospective mentors.

  • With this transition, the SLP will remain under the D&I Working Group for leadership, while being formally integrated as a solid Foundation Initiative for stronger continuity and resources.

• 📢 Applications will open soon!

Next Meeting

• Guest Speaker: Andrew McNutt was originally scheduled to join this meeting but had to postpone. He will join us next time to discuss reusable visualization design with a focus on color!

• SLP Outreach: Outreach for SLP volunteering opportunities, as well as brainstorming outreach efforts, will be covered at the next meeting as well.

Action Items

• Reach out to Karen, Kaitlin, Carol, and/or Ferby with any interest in volunteering for the SLP, whether that be planning, application review, or mentoring!

12 March 2025

Attendees: Rachel Rose (Industrial Light & Magic), Kaitlin Pollock (DreamWorks), Stephanie Doppler (rez | NVIDIA), Lori Smallwood, Stephen Mackenzie, Munira Tayabji, Montana Adlington (Animal Logic), Bill Ballew (DreamWorks), Karen Ruggles (notes)

Agenda

1. SLP update (Karen Ruggles)

2. Quick review of Charter (Rachel Rose)

3. Brainstorm on growing the working group (Rachel Rose)

Summer Learning Program Update

• The application has launched and has a handful of applicants

• Some changes to the application and program have implemented this year

• Need to call for Reviewers in the near future

Quick Review of Charter

• Rachel shared the Charter for the Diversity & Inclusion Working Group. It is about 5 years old and may need updates.

• Please review and add comments, accuracy, for additions, edits, or general comments

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NTCi_L2at3kkVjUf4uUNRtplkfLGL2MJHeKoM_vh6Pg/edit?tab=t.0

Brainstorm on growing the Working Group

• Intro: what are ways we can grow, the ASWF is typically a technical entity but non-technical people can still be involved and create impact. The D&I Working Group is a good landing point for people who aren’t as technical

• Problems:

  • people feel intimidated

  • entry-level people feel contributing to ASWF Projects something their managers do

  • just knowing what project to go to--the https://landscape.aswf.io/ is helpful, but can be overwhelming

  • Many active ASWF contributors are very senior level contributors, it can be difficult to engage entry-level people without them feeling overwhelmed

• Lift and Shift existing ideas (ideas or other places that have done good things)

  • https://events.ringcentral.com/events/women-in-games-careers-development-and-networking-expo-march-2025-event-26b2f950-769d-4ef3-a8ce-610442c87422/registration

• Partner with affinity groups: does anyone have contacts here?

  • there is an existing Google Doc somewhere with collaborators and partners

  • WIA (we have had speakers/guests from here in the past)

  • SIGGRAPH (we have done this in the past)

  • Academy D&I (existing)

  • AOUSD (existing and active?)

  • Girls Who Code

  • America On Tech

  • Wigraph (from SIGGRAPH)

  • Google Summer of Code

• Things to do or think about during an ASWF Meeting

  • Meetings that are labeled for introductory

  • “this is for new people” Drop-in office hours for new comers or Open Coding Jams

  • Bring a friend Day to D&I meeting

  • Educate ASWF people on how to run a meeting to be more inclusion/less overwhelming for newcomers

    • saying hi to each person

    • stating that if you’re here just to listen and learn, type in chat something like

      • we could then formalize this response (with appropriate statement in meeting) to mean that someone will reach out to them or that if there are a few people who type , they can band together as a mini-cohort)

    • having people introduce themselves on camera or via chat

    • saying it’s ok to be off camera

    • also including all of this in the page where most people go to find the meeting link/invitation

• Things to do for Projects

  • get “good first issue”s tagged + pairing with a mentor

  • Make “good first issue” tags uniform across all ASWF projects

  • single landing page mind map for all “good first issue”s of all ASWF Projects (similar to https://landscape.aswf.io/ page?)

    • dovetail with Dev Days?

• Ambassadors - someone from D&I group “assigned” to each project and just looking to onboard people to the project

  • looking for barriers of entry (meetings, code repository, general understanding or clarity, etc )

  • Ambassador could be Tier 2 of SLP

• Video series

  • “intro to ASWF projects” videos

  • what to expect at the first ASWF meeting (have a statement on who you are)

  • How does ASWF operate

  • intro to common barrier breakers - CMake

  • Success stories on how new comers felt welcome and they found a great community

• Education space

  • partner with universities (what language can we use? what can the universities provide back to us in exchange for being listed as part of the program/partnership/etc)

  • International Science Fair (high school)

• Current ASWF member employees

  • bring in people on the hiring side

  • presentation at end of SLP - invite hiring folks, inquire what the hiring people would be interested in seeing

Action Items

1. 🤝 Share the Summer Learning Program application! https://forms.gle/ExrQnXjgEgk8aMn99

2. 👓 Review the Charter and comment: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NTCi_L2at3kkVjUf4uUNRtplkfLGL2MJHeKoM_vh6Pg/edit?tab=t.0

3. 📈 Share ideas on growing ASWF & ASWF D&I Working group in Slack

4. 🙋‍♂️Express interest in helping with one of the listed initiatives above!