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.