BurnRiSc: Toward Non-Invasive Burnout Screening in Open Source from Public Repository Signals
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Computer Science > Computers and Society
arXiv:2609.19422 (cs)
[Submitted on 16 Sep 2026]
Title:BurnRiSc: Toward Non-Invasive Burnout Screening in Open Source from Public Repository Signals
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Abstract:Burnout is a chronic occupational syndrome, and open source is close to a worst case for it: maintainers absorb unbounded demand with no manager to reallocate work and no organization to notice decline. The cost is not only personal. Burnout precedes withdrawal, and in projects sustained by a handful of maintainers, one departure can break infrastructure that thousands of downstream systems depend on. Yet the field has no way to see it coming: self-report inventories, the only existing measure, miss exactly the contributors most in need of detection and cannot be applied retroactively, so the field cannot even ask how common burnout is or what helps.
We present BurnRiSc, a framework that operationalizes the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory's two dimensions, exhaustion and disengagement, as 14 behavioral and linguistic signals computed from GitHub activity and scored against each contributor's own history. The signals aggregate into two weighted dimension scores, with weights learned from labeled cases, and average into a monthly Burnout Risk Score (BRS). In a preliminary evaluation across 68 contributors in ten repositories (ten disclosed burnout cases, twelve comparable-volume collapses, and 46 comparison contributors), sustained BRS elevation precedes 6 of 10 disclosures by 6-15 months, 8 of 10 when adding peak BRS as a second criterion, and 10 of 10 over any prior time frame. We thus present BurnRiSc as evidence that burnout is screenable from public data.
| Comments: | 8 Pages, Submitted to the JAWs 2 Workshop |
| Subjects: | Computers and Society (cs.CY); Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.19422 [cs.CY] |
| (or arXiv:2609.19422v1 [cs.CY] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19422
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled BurnRiSc: Toward Non-Invasive Burnout Screening in Open Source from Public Repository Signals, by Timofey Sanko and 2 other authors
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