Update sponsor and institutional partner benefits

[OriolAbril]

We need to update https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#institutional-partners-and-funding to reflect the reality.

Here is what it currenly says:

Tier 1 = an institution with at least one Institutional Council Member

    Acknowledged on the PyMC websites, in talks and T-shirts.
    Ability to acknowledge their own funding sources on the PyMC websites, in talks and T-shirts.
    Unlimited participation in the annual Institutional Partners Workshop, held during the (planned) annual PyMC Project Retreat. This allows the Institutional Partner to invite as many of their own employees and funding sources and collaborators as they want, even if they are not project Contributors or Council Members.
    Ability to influence the project through the participation of their Council Member.
    Council Members are invited to the bi-annual PyMC Developer Meeting.

Tier 2 = an institution with at least one Institutional Contributor

    Same benefits as Tier 1 level Partners, but:
    Only Institutional Contributors are invited to the Institutional Partners Workshop and bi-annual PyMC Developer Meeting

Acknowledged on the PyMC websites, in talks and T-shirts. Ability to acknowledge their own funding sources on the PyMC websites, in talks and T-shirts.

IMO the first part makes sense and I think we are doing it (we need to add CZI I think though), the 2nd we are not doing and if we keep it we should do it for pymc organized talks like sprint webinars and such, the t-shirt thing makes no sense and should be removed.

To allow for acknowledging their own funding sources we could add something similar to ArviZ: logos on homepage like we do already and longer description in dedicated page.

Unlimited participation in the annual Institutional Partners Workshop, held during the (planned) annual PyMC Project Retreat. This allows the Institutional Partner to invite as many of their own employees and funding sources and collaborators as they want, even if they are not project Contributors or Council Members. Council Members are invited to the bi-annual PyMC Developer Meeting.

This is not happening (at least not yearly) and I think it is probably best to remove it or add a note (if it were to happen)

Ability to influence the project through the participation of their Council Member.

Happening and in line with the rest of the governance imo (i.e. the limit to 2 council members from the same company).

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In addition we should add things like

• Ability to directly add people hired to work on pymc as recurrent contributors, see 2nd paragraph in https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#recurring-contributor-membership
• Ability to advertise their services on the website, like https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc/issues/5675
• Ability to have a dedicated tag on pymc examples to highlight their pymc usage and services case studies. Provided the whole team finds the notebook interesting to be added. We already have https://www.pymc.io/projects/examples/en/latest/case_studies/binning.html that mentions pymc labs for example
• Anything else we are currently doing and I am not aware of? Note: once we update this I will actively oppose doing things not listed here unless we first update this
• others?

cc @fonnesbeck @twiecki @canyon289 @reshamas

[twiecki]

All great points! We should definitely add CZI. I'll think a bit if there are other things but it looks pretty comprehensive to me.

[canyon289]

If people are hired to help we could list them in their own category as well I suppose to differentiate and make it simpler to remove when the folks move onto other projects.

Overall this makes sense to me

[OriolAbril]

If people are hired to help we could list them in their own category as well I suppose to differentiate and make it simpler to remove when the folks move onto other projects.

We could add/start doing this, right now and with the proposal above they would not be listed anywhere. Recurrent contributors are added to slack but are not publicly listed anywhere to prevent them being perceived as members of the PyMC team (which we agreed should be only core contributors)

[reshamas]

@OriolAbril What if there is a more complicated set-up of:

• Labs paid person
• Devs: partial grant support for Data Umbrella and sprint
• Devs: some volunteer time for open source and Data Umbrella and sprint

[OriolAbril]

I might be missing something, but I am not sure this is relevant here.

The main way to add people to slack is for them to be nominated by other contributors as described here. This is only about skipping this step for people hired by tier 1 (or both tier 1 and 2) institutional partners to work on pymc.

We already skip this nomination step before adding someone to slack for people hired by the pymc project itself like GSoD technical writers or GSoC interns and it is already included in the governance too. But imo in general the main process for people to join slack (and hopefully then join the team too) is the nomination process described in the first paragraph, the 2nd is more an exception.

As a side note, if someone were hired by a company that is not an instutitional partner to work on pymc it should not take long for them to be nominated too to both recurrent first and core eventually making their employer an institutional partner in the process.