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Open source is ubiquitous and many projects act as critical in- frastructure, yet funding and sustaining the whole ecosystem is challenging. While there are many different funding models for open source and concerted efforts through foundations, donation platforms like PayPal, Patreon, and OpenCollective are popular and low-bar platforms to raise funds for open-source development. With a mixed-method study, we investigate the emerging and largely unexplored phenomenon of donations in open source. Specifically, we quantify how commonly open-source projects ask for donations, statistically model characteristics of projects that ask for and re- ceive donations, analyze for what the requested funds are needed and used, and assess whether the received donations achieve the intended outcomes. We find 25,885 projects asking for donations on GitHub, often to support engineering activities; however, we also find no clear evidence that donations influence the activity level of a project. In fact, we find that donations are used in a multitude of ways, raising new research questions about effective funding.
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Unit asking—a method for increasing donations: A replication and extension
We replicate and extend unit asking – a method to increase donations by first asking donors for their willingness to donate for one unit and then asking for donations for multiple units (Hsee, Zhang & Xu, 2013) We conducted a large scale replication and extension using a 2 (unit asking, control) x 3 (domains; children (original), animals, environment) between-subjects design. Across three domains, we find that unit asking increased donations, suggesting that this method can be used to increase giving to different charitable causes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757315
- PAR ID:
- 10219412
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Judgment and decision making
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1930-2975
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 989–993
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Open source is ubiquitous and many projects act as critical infrastructure, yet funding and sustaining the whole ecosystem is challenging. While there are many di erent funding models for open source and concerted e orts through foundations, donation platforms like PayPal, Patreon, and OpenCollective are popular and low-bar platforms to raise funds for open-source development. With a mixed-method study, we investigate the emerging and largely unexplored phenomenon of donations in open source. Specically, we quantify how commonly open-source projects ask for donations, statistically model characteristics of projects that ask for and receive donations, analyze for what the requested funds are needed and used, and assess whether the received donations achieve the intended outcomes. We nd 25,885 projects asking for donations on GitHub, often to support engineering activities; however, we also nd no clear evidence that donations in uence the activity level of a project. In fact, we nd that donations are used in a multitude of ways, raising new research questions about e ective funding.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
