Please Help! A Preliminary Study on the Effect of Social Proof and Legitimization of Paltry Contributions in Donations to OSS

Open source communities have contributed widely to modern software development. The number of open source software (OSS) has increased rapidly in the past two decades. Most open source foundations (such as Eclipse, Mozilla and Apache) operate as non-profit; those foundations usually seek donations from users/developers to financially support their activities. Without such support, some projects might discontinue to develop, or even disappear. However, contributions to those foundations are usually solicited in a very simple and modest way, with no special promotions or attractions for such contributions. The aim of this study is to promote new strategies that can help to increase donations to OSS projects. We analyzed how existing donation pages are structured. We then introduce behavioral economics and psychological theories that have been used in other disciplines to promote donations in OSS. In particular, we used the social proof theory, i.e., where people tend to consider the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior when they choose their own actions, and legitimization of paltry contributions strategy i.e., using specific phrases such as “even a very small amount will help” to encourage donations. In this study, we conducted an experiment with University students to examine if those theories are effective in encouraging donations to OSS. Our initial results indicate that the two strategies were indeed effective in promoting donations, and showed that users were more open for donation compared to traditional methods. This is only a preliminary analysis - we aim to include more users in the future for a more comprehensive analysis. We anticipate that such techniques might help OSS projects to secure more donations in the future.