Hi all,

In [1] I am adding institutional partners and sponsor logos to the numpy.org website. Sebastian made some good comments there, and I think it would be very helpful if we had some guidelines on how we acknowledge sponsorship.

Our governance doc has clear text on what an Institutional Partner is, see [2]. We don't have anything written down about sponsorship though. In my open PR I followed the example of Jupyter (see [3]), which lists Institutional Partners first, followed by Sponsors.

For sponsors I think we will want to define some minimum level of sponsorship for which we will put a logo somewhere (main page, or about page). Jupyter seems to just put everything together. Scikit-learn and NumFOCUS do the same on their front pages. NumFOCUS has tiered levels as well with different benefits, and displays the tiers at [4]. Page 17 of the NumFOCUS sponsorship brochure [5] spells out the sponsorship levels very clearly: from platinum at $100k to bronze at $10k, and a special level for "emerging leader" (startups) below that.

I think that following the NumFOCUS model would be the most straightforward thing to do, because (a) we're part of NumFOCUS, and (b) it's very well documented. And also fairest in a way - it gives some recognition proportionally to the contribution. My PR right now lists Moore, Sloan and Tidelift as the 3 sponsors. The first two contributed on the order of $500k each (spread out over 2-3 years), while Tidelift currently contributes $1000/month.

So I propose:
- acknowledging all active sponsorship (within the last 12 months) by logo placement on numpy.org
- acknowledging past sponsorship as well on numpy.org, but on a separate page and perhaps just as a listing rather than prominent logo placement
- adopting the NumFOCUS tiered sponsorship model
- listing institutional partners and sponsors in the same place, with partners first (following what Jupyter does).

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Ralf