Investigating How Funding and Governance Models Impact GitHub Development Activities in OSS Projects

Abstract

Open Source Softwares (OSS) are softwares in which people can openly access, modify online, and distribute its source code to others for any purpose. Many Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are OSS Projects, allowing visitors to openly access their GitHub repositories. In the study, our team first analyzed over 500+ different OSS projects, using BigQuery to pull GitHub data for the repository name, dates, actor IDs, actor logins, and 28 different events. Examples of the 28 events include the total number of activities and distinct commits; the data was taken from the years 2013 to present. The second part of our study involved further research on the 500+ projects we analyzed in the first part through visiting its GitHubs, personal websites, and CoinMarketCap page. The three main components our team researched were project type (eg. DApp, token), the funding model (eg. fundraising, token exchange), and the governance mode (eg. DAO, private company). Specifically, the goal was to find trends between different funding and governance models and their respective GitHub Development Activities such as watch/commit ratios. For example, OSS projects which mainly rely on fundraising may have greater watch/commit ratios than projects which rely on public token sales.

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.