Investigation How Differing Funding/Governance Models May Influence GitHub Development Activities

Abstract

GitHub, a major software development site, supports an extensive number of projects. This study seeks to understand if there is a link between different funding/governance models and how much activity has occurred on a GitHub project. To achieve this objective, metrics were created such as the count of commits, watches, pull requests, and other relevant information spanning from 2013 to the present, which helped classify the activity on the GitHub project. Overall, six hundred and sixty projects were examined with the factors listed above. The data extraction process for these projects from GitHub Archive involved executing a sequence of SQL (structured query language) queries in Big Query. Afterwards, the website and GitHub of each project were examined to categorize the funding and business strategies of each initiative. For instance, it might refer to a cryptocurrency wallet, a decentralized application (Dapp), a Layer 2 network, or a token. While the full data collection and analysis of the data collected and has not been completed, further development of this study will establish whether there is a connection between differing project models and its GitHub activity.

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.