TL;DR
This paper presents a live observatory for tracking GitHub Sponsors, providing real-time data and analysis tools to study open-source funding patterns and sustainability.
Contribution
It introduces a novel, continuously updating observatory with an interactive dashboard for large-scale analysis of GitHub sponsorship data.
Findings
49,000+ users in the sample dataset across 144 countries
Strong participation asymmetries in sponsorship patterns
Geographic concentration of sponsors and sponsored developers
Abstract
Financial sustainability is vital for open-source software, yet systematic research on funding remains limited. GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019 as a direct developer-to-developer funding model, lacks bulk API access, hindering large-scale studies. This paper introduces a live, continuously operating observatory for tracking and analyzing the GitHub Sponsors ecosystem. The observatory performs priority-based graph traversal with daily incremental updates, real-time normalization, and exposes collected data through an interactive dashboard and analysis-ready CSV exports. A sample dataset collected during a 72-hour run captures 49K+ users across 144 countries and serves as an example of the tool's output, not a fixed deliverable. An interactive dashboard (https://github-sponsorships.com) enables practitioners and researchers to explore sponsorship patterns, filter by geography and…
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