Analyzing the Impact of Different Funding and Governance Models on an OSS Project’s Success

Abstract

With the rise of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, many people have started to develop projects to improve the blockchain. These projects ranged from improving the security of crypto to facilitating the exchange of different cryptocurrencies. To further improve a project, developers often use Open-Source Software (OSS), a computer software that allows the public to use and modify a project. GitHub is an extremely popular platform where developers share OSS and can be used to find how commonly the project is updated. This study is aimed to find what factors lead to a successful project, with a specific focus on how a project's major source of funding and organizational structure impacts its success. By utilizing both an SQL and Python script, data on the activity of 20 different OSS projects from 2013 to the present were compiled. Each project was then labeled with specific information on its functionality, governance model, funding, etc. These projects were then aggregated to a data collection of over 600 projects to find the correlations between their funding models, organizational structure, and general success.

This abstract is part of a collection in which the overarching large project under Dr. Jiasun Li was subdivided into discrete critical tasks that were carried out by multiple individuals or smaller teams. Abstracts in this collection read similarly given the shared project goals, but represent distinct tasks completed by the abstract authors towards finalizing the described analysis.