A common well-being issue in open-source communities is the tendency of people to over-commit. Many contributors care deeply, at the risk of saying yes too often harming their well-being. Open-source communities are especially at risk, because many contributors work next to a full-time job.

The contribution graph and the statistics on it, prominent on everyone's profile, basically rewards people for doing work on as many different days as possible, generally making more contributions, and making contributions on multiple days in a row without a break.

Stepping away from our work regularly is not only important to uphold high quality work, but also to maintain our well-being. For example, I personally do not generally work in the weekends. That’s completely healthy. I take a step back from work and spend time on other things. But in the contribution graph it means I can never make a long streak, even though I do work virtually every day except weekends. So the graph motivates me to work in my weekends as well, and not take breaks. And when I see someone with a 416 day streak, it means they haven’t taken a break for a single day in over a year. Although everyone can make their own choices, it makes me very worried about their well-being.

Any mechanism in our community that motivates people to avoid taking breaks and avoid stepping back, can be harmful to the well-being of contributors and is thereby harmful to open source as a whole. Even though it was probably introduced with the best intentions. If our interests are really in supporting open-source long-term, this graph should be removed or substantially changed so that it no longer punishes healthy behaviour. For example, what if we would give people achievements for taking breaks instead of working non-stop?

I therefore want to ask you to consider removing or substantially changing the contribution graph and it's related statistics, to help guard the well-being of the contributors and the communities.

I also wrote about this in a bit more detail on my blog: http://erik.io/blog/2016/04/01/how-github-contribution-graph-is-harmful/