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.

I. Introduction

OSS projects have been widely developed in past two decades. Key OSS projects such as Linux OS, Mozilla Firefox and Eclipse IDE have been used by million of users around the world. Major OSS projects are very large in size and non-profit foundations mostly manage their development and distribution. For example, Eclipse, a major multi-language integrated development environment (IDE), is developed and managed by the Eclipse Foundation. Those organizations often solicit donation to cover their operation cost through their websites. For instance, foundations such as Eclipse, Mozilla, Linux, and Apache provide a donation web page on their websites to encourage users and developers who use their products to donate. However, most of the existing donation pages are very simple and static, might not look very attractive for potential donors. That is, they do not have special characteristics that may help to encourage donation. For example, Eclipse current donation page shows only one sentence (i.e., “Power the Eclipse Community with your donation”) and a box to entre the intended donation amount. When we compare this with the donation pages from other disciplines, we found that such pages are mostly designed with special attributes that can help to promote donations. For example, UNHCR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) current donation page provides a comprehensive view of how the donation could help, and it breakdown the use of the donated money as it provides some figures on how such donations will help families to bring in food, water and other necessities. In addition, the sentence shown in the donation page includes words such “urgently” to explain why the donations are crucial. Similarly, the U.S. Government organ donation page includes some inspiring stories of individuals who have received organs from donors, and how those individuals have improved their lives due to the donations. ¹

https://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation

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https://www.eclipse.org/donate

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https://donate.unhcr.org/int/general/~my-donation

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https://www.organdonor.gov/