Xarray sponsorship guidelines

[shoyer]

At what level of support should Xarray acknowledge sponsors on our website?

I would like to surface this for open discussion because there are potential sponsoring organizations with conflicts of interest with members of Xarray's leadership team (e.g., Earthmover, which employs @jhamman, @rabernat and @dcherian).

My suggestion is to use NumPy's guidelines, with an adjustment down to 1/3 of the thresholds to account for the smaller size of the project:

• $10,000/yr for unrestricted financial contributions (e.g., donations)
• $20,000/yr for financial contributions for a particular purpose (e.g., grants)
• $30,000/yr for in-kind contributions (e.g., time for employees to contribute)
• 2 person-months/yr of paid work time for one or more Xarray maintainers or regular contributors to any Xarray team or activity

The NumPy guidelines also include a grace period of a minimum of 6 months for acknowledging support. I would suggest increasing this to a minimum of 1 year for Xarray.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback from members of the community, either in this issue or on the next team meeting.

[rabernat]

Big 👍 to open discussion.

I'd note that the COI possibility exists for any core team member whose employer could conceivably sponsor Xarray, not just Earthmover.

[max-sixty]

LGTM!

[dcherian]

These sound good to me.

2 person-months/yr of paid work time for one or more Xarray maintainers or regular contributors to any Xarray team or activity

One comment here is that a number of maintainers here may be low-key supported by academic institutions. In my experience, 1 month/year is about the threshold for "slush fund" money that might be put toward something like Xarray maintenance. I have received such support in the past (maybe @kmuehlbauer or @keewis can chime in too). It'd be nice to lower the barrier here to encourage that sort of behaviour.

Are we going to have different tiers of acknowledgment? If so I'd support a separate tier for the "1 person-month/yr of paid work time for maintainer".