A toolkit for measuring the impacts of public funding on OSS development

Osborne, Sharratt, Foster and Boehm present a toolkit of methodological considerations for measuring the impacts of public funding on open source software development, arguing that these impacts remain poorly understood because there is no consensus on how to measure them. The toolkit draws on prior work on OSS valuations and community health metrics by the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project, as well as the authors' experience evaluating funding programmes for the Next Generation Internet initiative and the Sovereign Tech Agency. It covers considerations such as funding objectives, project life stage, social structure, and regional and organisational cost factors. It also presents a taxonomy of positive and negative social, economic, and technological impacts across various time horizons, and discusses qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches and the hazards of estimating multiplier effects.