Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

4-2024

Abstract

GitHub Sponsors was launched in 2019, enabling donations to opensource software developers to provide financial support, as per GitHub’s slogan: “Invest in the projects you depend on”. However, a 2022 study on GitHub Sponsors found that only two-fifths of developers who were seeking sponsorship received a donation. The study found that, other than internal actions (such as offering perks to sponsors), developers had advertised their GitHub Sponsors profiles on social media, such as Twitter (also known as X). Therefore, in this work, we investigate the impact of tweets that contain links to GitHub Sponsors profiles on sponsorship, as well as their reception on Twitter/X. We further characterize these tweets to understand their context and find that (1) such tweets have the impact of increasing the number of sponsors acquired, (2) compared to other donation platforms such as Open Collective and Patreon, GitHub Sponsors has significantly fewer interactions but is more visible on Twitter/X, and (3) developers tend to contribute more to open-source software during the week of posting such tweets. Our findings are the first step toward investigating the impact of social media on obtaining funding to sustain open-source software.

Keywords

Open-source Software, Sponsorship, Social Media

Discipline

Social Media | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE-Companion '24: Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering, Lisbon, April 14-20

First Page

1

Last Page

12

ISBN

9798400705021

Identifier

10.1145/3597503.3639127

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.3639127

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