Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. Here is our hello world post on the forum ICYMI.
This report is a shallow dive on the 300+ open source software projects participating in the latest round of retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF 3). It combines both off- and onchain data about projects.
The report itself has two objectives:
Let’s jump in.
Over 600 projects and individuals applied for RetroPGF 3. This report only includes the 311 projects that are contributing open source software and that included links to GitHub repos (plus any OP Mainnet contract addresses) in their applications.
We also have data on projects that applied for previous RetroPGF rounds (but not the current one). A total of 366 OSS projects are represented in the Venn diagram below, of which 205 have no prior experience with RetroPGF.
These projects have lots of shared contributors too — a theme will explore further later on in this doc!
There are a number of places to find aggregate or project-specific GitHub activity metrics, but we think it’s interesting to look at cohorts of projects over specific time periods.
Among the RetroPGF 3 cohort, we can see this number hovering between 500-600 developers around the time of RetroPGF2 (March 2023), and, general, up sharply from late 2021, when the first RetroPGF occurred.
(Note: we are not implying that RetroPGF produced these developer activity numbers. Macro trends have probably been far more important. We’re just providing these dates for context.)
We’ve defined a “monthly active developer” in the same way as Developer Report, ie, anyone who has committed code on at least 10 days in a given month to a project (excluding bots and forks).
We can also do some light cohort analysis to compare growth among projects that also received funding from RetroPGF 2 versus those that only applied for RetroPGF3.
