Investigation on predictors of an open-source software project’s success through GitHub archive

Abstract

With bitcoin’s price surging over seventy thousand dollars in 2024 and more people becoming aware of cryptocurrency and the blockchain, the number of open-source software (code that the public can improve upon) projects relating to the crypto world has increased. The purposes of these projects range from expanding the functionalities of cryptocurrency platforms to improving security as well as financial inclusion. However, with such a diverse range of projects being developed, predicting their success becomes challenging. To this end, six hundred and sixty of these projects were analyzed by extracting their data. This was achieved through a series of SQL (structured query language) queries in Big Query to extract the data of these projects from GitHub Archive. Data extracted included the number of commits, watches, pull requests, and more from 2013 to the present. Subsequently, each project’s website and social media was browsed to classify the funding and business models for each of the projects. When the analysis is finished, it will reveal which activities are associated with certain project types and trends in activity that correlate with success or if there is no correlation at all.

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.