I have moved this to its own topic so we can have a proper discussion on this. The governance currently has this:
No more than 2 Council Members can report to one person or company (including Institutional Partners) through employment or contracting work (including the reportee, i.e. the reportee + 1 is the max).
This was inspired by a condition in the ArviZ-NumFOCUS sponsorship agreement (which I assume is not too different than the PyMC one but I have only seen the ArviZ one):
A majority of the ArviZ Random Variables Council should not be employed by the same entity or share a common affiliation beyond that of the Project.
And both aim to be a safeguard to keep the project a community driven one. Given the current situation with PyMC Labs, we might want to ask NumFOCUS about guidance on how to manage this, but in general I think aiming to have enough representation on the council with no affiliation whatsoever to Labs is a good idea.
Regarding NumFOCUS contracting, we might want to be explicit on this too, but I don’t think it counts as when contracting for numfocus, we don’t really report to numfocus. What is to be done and how much is paid is decided by ourselves (as in pymc team/consensus among core contributors)