Our goal is to help internet economies measure the impact of open source software contributions to the growth and adoption of their platform. Why does this matter? Every open source community or ecosystem is a distinct internet economy. Its citizens include developers, users, and governance participants. Like any economy, strategic investment is critical for sustaining growth, innovation, and maintenance. However, current approaches to bootstrapping economic activity aren't very effective. Projects are rewarded for marketing and grant writing ability over impact. Foundations and ecosystem funds don't have the data they need to make smarter funding allocations. How are you helping? We believe better visibility leads to better funding allocations. Open Source Observer gives funders the metrics they need to allocate funding based on impact. Specifically, we help ecosystem funds:

• Track the full downstream impact of grants programs on key ecosystem metrics like user growth and developer activity over time

• Create reward functions that allocate funding to projects based on impact analysis

• Deep dive well-known projects and discover hidden gems

We're putting all the metrics that funders need to inform better decision-making in one place, including:

• Impact: trace a project's downstream contribution to end users, revenue, ecosystem growth, and sustainability by linking it to platform metrics
• Activity: graph a project's team, momentum, and dependencies from GitHub and package managers

• Financing: estimate funding and burn rates from grant metadata and analysis of public financial reports

What's the roadmap? In the near term, we're building a dashboard so people can explore and start to use our impact metrics. Then, we'll build an API for developers to experiment with and define their own impact metrics. In the long run, we want to see impact-based funding power the internet economies of the future ✨