Hi Denis,
I don’t want to speak for the other reps. So this will just be about me.
Attendance
With regards to my attendance, the actual number of meetings I attended was 9, not 7.
Although not listed in the TSC minutes, I was in attendance for the meetings that took place on 1/20 and 2/17, as well as those that took place in 2021 where myself and the other newly elected community reps were allowed to observe.
The reason my attendance for those sessions is not listed is my own fault. I didn’t understand that I was supposed to add myself to the Meeting agenda, as I was just learning the ropes of being a commitee member. Stupid on my part in retrospect, but that’s what happened.
Affiliation
With this one, you are correct. In two meetings, 10/13 and 11/15, when we added our names to the attendee list, I listed my affiliation as Brett Aldrich | Robosoft, when it should have been Brett Aldrich | Community Rep. To be honest I don’t remember doing it. If one looks at the attendee list, it’s common for those seats affiliated with corporate positions to list the company they work for, and I think I was just operating on autopilot when I did so.
But, like I said, you are correct, I should not have done that. @Katherine_Scott , is it possible for us to amend the 10/13 and 11/15 meeting minutes to correct this error?
Performance
Anyways, now that the housekeeping items have been dealth with, let’s get into the “What have you done for me lately?” question, and hopefully soothe some of your disappointment, at least with me.
It took me a few meetings just to get the hang of things in the TSC. This also included work where I researched the charter that governs the activities of the community reps.
At the same time, and continuing until the present, I’ve reached out privately to respected members of the community for their input. My purpose for doing so, was to solicit ideas and also potentially build coalitions around important issues. These were private conversations, so I will not list who I spoke to, or the topics of those conversations, but they did take place and I feel like I gained a much better understanding of the community along the way.
For those who have come forward in this discussion as data points. Thank you both, I appreciate the corraboration as neither of you had any obligation to mention it.
I’d also like to take a second to thank all those that I reached out to who did get back to me. Not everyone did;) I very much appreciate their time and willingness to contribute to the community by interacting with me.
Other conversations also took place with various industry folks regarding a project that I know you (Denis) are aware of, and that ultimately didn’t come together, privately dubbed Project Hercules.
For those who have never heard of Project Herucles, here are some items that give an idea of what I was trying to accomplish…
It was going to be awesome (I still love this project).
We were, (and still will someday) going to integrate Nav2, MoveIt2, SMACC2, and ros2_control and push the limits of robotic applications in general, and particularly for ROS2.
But, it ultimately didn’t come together for a variety of reasons, some technical, some funding related, my personal shortcomings, blah blah blah.
Over the summer, we put out the Summertime Dance Party series of examples shown here and here, which in my opinion have set the bar for demonstrations, with the available source code, for robot applications using Nav2 specifically and ROS2 generally.
If you read the first post, you can see that I did attempt to get the community involved, which also ultimately didn’t happen to the degree I wanted it to. C’est la vie.
And then of course there have been the efforts dedicated to the SMACC WG…
https://discourse.ros.org/t/proposal-for-smacc-wg/27331
https://github.com/robosoft-ai/SMACC_WG
https://discourse.ros.org/t/ros-2-tsc-meeting-minutes-for-5-19-2022/25864
From your post, I imagine you feel that the activites involving Project Hercules, The Summertime Dance Party, and the SMACC WG, are in my “self-interest or for the own project/product”
And, personally I don’t agree.
In my view SMACC is an open source library and it’s contributing to the broader community with demonstrations, which are sorely needed. Along with the source code that others can build upon for their own demos. If the projects had instead been something involving SMACC alone, such as when we instrumented the library with LTTng, or if we had just linted the library, or done simple performance tests or something, then I agree that the “contribution to the community” would be more questionable.
But the creation of robotic applications is inherently integrative, as can be seen especially with Project Hercules, but also with the Summertime Dance Party, that involve other ROS2 packages, namely Nav2, but others as well.
Yes, there are related commercial products related to SMACC, namely the SMACC Viewer and SMACC2 Run Time Analyzer, but both are (and will) remain free for individual and academic users.
And ultimately, I feel that the creation of demonstrations with SMACC, is inline with the spirit of my campaign promises.
With regards to efforts that were reflected in TSC activities specifically,
I think the item that I am most proud of, was being one of the sponsors of Foxglove to the TSC. I think the contributions by @amacneil and @jhurliman so far have been outstanding and it appears that the MCAP format is really showing itself to be a significant improvement over the previous ROS2 bag default implementation.
I’ve also been involved in the discussions and votes regarding the ROS2 default DDS implementation as well as REP-2008 and REP-2014 mentioned by Victor before.
What’s Next
And this finally brings us to what I believe will be my last meeting as a representative on 12/15.
My intention is to bring the following items up for discussion…
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There exists a problem with implementing dual arm applications in ROS2. This is a problem that has been brought up earlier. It brings up interesting technical questions involving SMACC2, MoveIt2, ros2_control and ROS2 action remapping. @AndyZe and @bmagyar have been very helpful so far, and I plan on pinging them shortly. @destogl you are welcome to help out with this if you’d like.
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I’d like to also bring up for discussion the proposal that we modify the TSC membership requirements for key robot hardware manufacturers in order to get wider participation in the TSC. Early names I would like to include would be Clearpath, UR, Panda Robotics, Robotiq, Shadow Robotics, Luxonis and a few others I’m leaving out.
If it could be done, I think it would facilitate future efforts similar to what I wanted to accomplish with Project Hercules. Integrative projects with a lot of different components, and therefore drivers, gazebo models, etc. -
I’d also like to bring up for discussion, the idea that community representatives, be given access to the analytics of the discourse.ros.org website. This would be an expansion of community represenative role as currently defined in the charter, but I think it would be an appropriate one reflecting the fact that (at least in my opinion) the community largely exists through ros.discourse.org and that most of the TSC discussions that I’ve taken part in have focused on more technical (but still important) issues like default DDS implementation selections, etc.
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Anyways, as a voter and member of the community, you’re entitled to your views. Hopefully, at least with respect to me, some of what I’ve written here will change your mind. I recognize that your criticism of the community reps is not personal. Overall, I think your post is a valid one, and I believe that the community has the right to have high expectations for their elected community representatives.