Xarray sponsorship guidelines

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.

Start by reading this issue and the linked NumPy sponsorship guidelines, then review the community discussion and the referenced team meeting context. The work is done when Xarray maintainers agree on sponsorship thresholds and grace-period rules and publish the resulting guidance for website acknowledgements.