Exploring the Relationship Between the GitHub Development Activities of an OSS and its Funding/Governance Model

Abstract

GitHub is a collaborative tool used for the development of different software and projects. One type of software commonly sourced on GitHub is Open Source Software (OSS), a type of software in which the source code is publicly accessible and anyone can aid in the development of the project. This research aims to uncover whether there is a link between an OSS’s GitHub development activities like watch/commit ratios and its funding/governance models. Using BigQuery, we were able to collect the development activities of 500+ OSS projects through running a SQL (structured query language) script on GitHub Archive, a database of public GitHub records. After this, we collected key information on the funding and governance models of the OSS projects to determine if these attributes were correlated with the GitHub records collected earlier. Although the data has not been fully processed and analyzed yet, if a correlation is found it could reveal key insights into how to successfully manage and structure the development process for different types of OSS projects.

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.