Analyzing Open-Source Software (OSS) GitHub Projects to Determine the Correlation Between Funding/Governance Models and GitHub Development Activities

Abstract

GitHub, a service for software development and collaboration, hosts millions of Open-Source Software (OSS) projects. Blockchain, a complex distributed ledger technology with immense emphasis on security and transparency, is the foundation of Fintech that is built on OSS projects. OSS projects with different funding/governance models may have different GitHub development activities (e.g. watch/commit ratios). The GitHub Archive database, containing all GitHub activities, was analyzed using Google BigQuery to search Blockchain project repositories for over 25 different GitHub events. The aggregated and collected data was over 20 terabytes and had data points from the creation to present-day activities. We used Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to collect funding and governance models from various sources, including GitHub repositories, project websites, etc. The data was then partitioned based on parameters such as project type, funding model, and governance model. Comparing the aggregated data provides an understanding of how different business governance and funding models, used by blockchain organizations, impact the business’ 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.