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Introducing new Open Collective transactions datasets

· 3 min read
Javier Ríos
Javier Ríos
Engineer

Open Collective is a platform that enables groups to collect and disburse funds transparently. It is used by many open-source projects, communities, and other groups to fund their activities. Notable projects include Open Web Docs (maintainers of MDN Web Docs), Babel, and Webpack.

At Open Source Observer, we have been working on collecting and processing Open Collective data to make it available for analysis. This includes all transactions made on the platform, such as donations, expenses, and transfers. Datasets are updated weekly.

Datasets​

Transactions are the core of Open Collective data. They represent the flow of funds between entities on the platform. We currently provide two datasets for Open Collective transactions: expenses and deposits. These datasets contain all transactions of the respective type.

Both datasets follow the same schema. This schema contains important fields such the transaction's id, group, type and amount. For the full reference, see the BigQuery schema.

Use cases​

The Open Collective transactions datasets can be used for a variety of applications. Here are some examples:

Donor contribution patterns​

One use case is to analyze overall donor contribution patterns. This involves examining the frequency of donations, the amounts donated, and the growth of donations over time.

For example, the plot below illustrates the frequency of different donation amounts. We can see that the most common donation is around $1,500, with approximately 600,000 donations at this level. This indicates that people tend to donate around $1,500 more frequently than other amounts, suggesting that establishing a donation tier at this level would be a good idea.

Frequency of donation quantities

Another use case is to analyze donation trends and retention. This involves examining how donations have changed over time and how many donors have continued to donate over time.

This plot illustrates the total donations made to the Pandas project over time. Notably, donations reached an all-time high in April 2022 but have since declined. As of September 2024, there has been a slight rebound in donations; however, they remain at less than one-eighth of their peak average.

Pandas donations

On the other hand, the plot below shows the total amount donated to the Babel project over time. One interesting observation is that donations spiked in the beginning of 2021. This spike was likely due to the project's widespread usage during the global pandemic, as many developers turned to open-source tools to build applications.

Babel donations

Getting started​

To get started with the Open Collective transactions datasets, subscribe to the dataset on BigQuery here:

Subscribe on BigQuery

Note: If you have not yet set up BigQuery on your Google account, check out our Getting Started guide.

For instance, getting the total amount of donations per month in USD can be done with the following query:

SELECT
  DATE_TRUNC(DATE(created_at), MONTH) AS donation_month,
  SUM(CAST(JSON_VALUE(amount, "$.value") AS FLOAT64)) AS total_amount
FROM
  `YOUR_PROJECT.open_collective.deposits`
WHERE
  JSON_VALUE(amount, "$.currency") = "USD"
  AND DATE(created_at) >= DATE("2020-01-01")
GROUP BY
  donation_month
ORDER BY
  donation_month;

This data can then be visualized to gain insights into donation patterns and trends. We can see that donations in Open Collective have massively increased in the last year, with almost 8M USD donated in the last months.

Total donations per month

These are just some examples of the insights that can be gained from the Open Collective transactions datasets. We hope that these datasets will be useful for researchers, data scientists, and anyone interested in understanding the flow of funds in the open-source ecosystem.