2025: Maturation and Impact#
VERSO’s fourth year built on three years of program development and positioned the organization as integral to UVM’s research mission and regional development. Building on the expansion and repositioning of 2024, the year brought institutional validation through UVM’s attainment of R1 research status, with VERSO recognized as a strategic asset supporting research excellence. Student engagement continued to grow (40 participants), with clear career pathways into open-source-related positions. The project portfolio matured to 42 repositories, while external partnerships reached 25. Most notably, the launch of UVM Dataverse established permanent institutional infrastructure for open-data publishing, extending VERSO’s role in research infrastructure and sustainability planning. The year marked VERSO’s transition from a grant-funded initiative toward a more integrated institutional role in UVM’s research and community engagement.
Strategic Positioning and Institutional Recognition#
February 2025 brought a significant institutional milestone: UVM earned the Carnegie Classification R1 designation for “very high research activity,” recognized for annual research expenditures exceeding $50 million and 70+ research doctorates awarded annually. VERSO was positioned as a strategic asset supporting this research excellence, reinforcing the office’s core mission and providing institutional grounding beyond grant funding.
Early 2025 initiatives reinforced VERSO’s role in research and innovation infrastructure. The Data + Open Science Summit (January 7-9), organized by Kendall Fortney in partnership with the UVM Library, Graduate College, and Office of the Provost, brought together faculty, librarians, and researchers for workshops on data management planning with support from NASA and Software Carpentries. The event showed VERSO’s capacity to mobilize institutional resources around research best practices.
Spring 2025#
Spring 2025 reflected VERSO’s engagement across academic, policy, and community spheres. Educational outreach continued with guest lectures at UVM in Data Science (February), Creativity Cornerstone (March), and Advanced Programming (April). Community engagement expanded as well: presentations to economic development professionals on the Vermont Zoning Atlas (January 28), to the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies on Wastewater Infrastructure Mapping (March 6), and to Leahy Grants participants (March 25). Kendall Fortney participated in an Ithaka S+R webinar (March 20) alongside leaders from George Washington University and Stanford University, discussing OSPOs in academia.
VERSO also extended its reach beyond traditional academic and policy circles. Kendall Fortney taught Arduino microcontroller coding to middle school girls at the Vermont Works for Women Rosie Girls Coding program (February 28), broadening VERSO’s work in technology education. The organization also organized two Research Week workshops (April 23) on user experience design for scientific software and a STRUDEL Kit UX clinic, reflecting a growing focus on user-centered design in research software development.
Infrastructure Maturation and Knowledge Transfer#
2025 marked the completion of VERSO’s core infrastructure through the official launch of UVM Dataverse, providing permanent institutional infrastructure for open-data publishing and research data management. The platform launched with 4 dataverses, 57 datasets published, 16 active users, and approximately 195 downloads in its initial months, an early sign of adoption across the research community.
Complementing infrastructure development, VERSO continued accelerating documentation and knowledge transfer. The VERSO Playbook evolved as a comprehensive resource documenting lessons learned and best practices, designed to be openly accessible and adaptable for other institutions. Guest lecture materials, workshop resources, and organizational guidelines were shared widely in the open-source community, establishing VERSO as a knowledge leader and resource for other institutions building similar programs.
Year Four Summary and Institutional Integration#
2025 showed VERSO’s continued transition from a grant-funded pilot into an institutional asset embedded in UVM’s research infrastructure and strategic planning. Student engagement reached 40 participants with 7,850 cumulative hours logged on substantive projects and a 73% retention rate, with career pathways that included students transitioning to IT positions at UVM, planning offices, public works departments, and geospatial roles. Research collaborations expanded to 60 UVM researchers, with four active ORCA research projects and four community projects. The portfolio matured to 42 repositories spanning community tools, research tools, data visualization, documentation, and educational materials. These metrics are detailed in the impact measurement section.
External partnerships grew to 25, reflecting VERSO’s evolution into a regional hub connecting academic research with practical solutions for municipal planning, environmental management, and economic development. The launch of UVM Dataverse established permanent institutional infrastructure for open-data publishing, with sustainability planning moving beyond grant funding toward institutional backing, external partnerships, and government agency engagement. By year’s end, VERSO had made a transition that few academic open-source initiatives achieve: from grant-funded experiment to an institutionalized program with measurable impact on student outcomes, research productivity, and community engagement. With recognition as a strategic asset supporting UVM’s R1 research mission, VERSO was positioned to expand its model while serving as a documented resource for other institutions building open-source programs in higher education.
Key Themes Across VERSO’s Timeline#
Growth Trajectories#
Infrastructure Milestones#
April 2022: Office space and core team established
Mid-2022: Initial tech infrastructure (GitLab, website, documentation)
Early 2024: Educational infrastructure (course, MOOCs)
Early 2025: Data infrastructure (Dataverse)
Institutional Integration#
2022: Housed in Library, connected to CEMS
2024: Moves to Vermont Complex Systems Center, reports to VP of Research
2025: Integral to UVM’s R1 research mission and institutional strategy
Research and Impact Documentation#
2022: Initial publications begin
2023: Major research papers published (EPJ Data Science, arXiv)
2024: Course offerings and educational materials released
2025: Playbook documentation and knowledge transfer accelerated
Educational and Community Engagement Expansion#
Guest Lectures to University Classes: From Fall 2022 through Spring 2025, VERSO conducted 20+ guest lectures across diverse disciplines:
Programming and Computer Science (Advanced Programming, Data Science courses)
Engineering and Design (Product Management, Creativity Cornerstone, Integrated Product Development)
Community and Environmental Studies (Design Innovation, Ecological Economics, Narrative Data Design)
Graduate programs (Graduate Seminars)
Community Events and Conferences: VERSO grew from zero public events in 2022 to hosting and participating in 40+ major conferences, symposiums, and community events by 2025, including:
International participation: UN OSPOS for Good (2023, 2024), Open Source Festival Africa (2023), ESIP Annual Meeting (2023)
Regional and national leadership: RIT Open Symposium (2022), UC Santa Cruz OSPO Symposium (2022), CNI Annual Meeting (2023), PyData Vermont (2024), RISE Summit (2024)
Community engagement: Open Source Connector series (3+ events), UX Speakeasy design jams, Code for BTV mapping initiatives, Vermont Council on World Affairs presentations
Policy and professional development: Leadership Champlain, Regional Planning Commissions, Rural Entrepreneurship Symposium, Housing and Water Quality conferences
Podcast and Media: Innova802 Podcast on open-source community impact (September 2024)
Summer and Fall 2025#
The second half of 2025 extended VERSO’s institutional reach while making the next sustainability questions more visible. The office became the institutional administrator of UVM Dataverse, expanded ORCA from three summer pods to four fall pods, and began taking on larger civic data and research software projects. At the same time, several grant opportunities clarified the limits of a fully grant-dependent operating model: some opportunities were not pursued because the timelines did not fit available capacity, while others required partnership structures that VERSO had not yet developed.
Funding and Partnerships#
In April 2025, Kendall Fortney submitted the $584,821 NSF FAIROS Cross-Cutting Improvements proposal, Empowering Vermont Open Data. The proposal positioned VERSO as the institutional steward of UVM Dataverse, with a three-year plan for open data infrastructure, training, and an annual Vermont Open Data Summit. The award was announced in March 2026 and became VERSO’s first major federal grant with its director as named principal investigator.
VERSO joined the Agriverse NIFA Open Data Framework proposal as a co-PI in summer 2025. Led by Polly Ericksen of the Food Systems Research Institute, the approximately $955,969 proposal would extend UVM Dataverse to agricultural open data nationally, with VERSO responsible for governance and sustainability planning. The proposal remained pending as of July 2026. VERSO also explored, but did not submit, a Lake Champlain Sea Grant partnered fellowship for a water-focused ORCA pod because the matching-fund and faculty-PI requirements did not fit the program’s staffing model at that time.
Using remaining funds from the Sloan CURIOSS workshop award, VERSO supported a CURIOSS gathering at the Sloan Foundation headquarters in New York on June 17, ahead of United Nations Open Source Week. More than 30 academic OSPOs were represented. VERSO also consulted on a Vermont Small Business Resource Platform with Vermont Womenpreneurs and Radiance Studios; the fall 2025 letter of intent scoped ORCA support around data collection and asset mapping.
Events and Outreach#
VERSO participated in United Nations Open Source Week in New York (June 18-20) and the RISE Open Source and Digital Collaboration Summit in Burlington (June 21). Vermont outreach continued through conversations with county foresters, economic development professionals, the Vermont Leadership Institute, and VECAP. In the fall, VERSO co-organized the second annual Vermont PyData conference (October 21-22), then participated in the Vermont Development Conference and the Northern New England Planning Conference. Guest lectures continued in Design Innovation, Creativity Cornerstone, CEMS 2010, and Advanced Programming.
Projects and Infrastructure#
In October 2025, VERSO entered a Vermont Bond Bank consulting contract through the state’s Community Resilience and Revitalization Program to map fire districts statewide. The project was estimated at approximately 640 hours of student ORCA time plus one month of director effort, for a total of about $28,582. It built on VERSO’s wastewater and drinking-water mapping work and established a phased workflow for data acquisition, GIS mapping, visualization, and documentation.
VERSO also launched GitMed, a Git-based platform for publishing and collaborating on medical programs, in partnership with the Comprehensive Pain Program at UVM’s Osher Center for Integrative Health. The project reflected a broader pattern in VERSO’s work: applying open-source development practices to research and clinical programs that need durable, collaborative knowledge infrastructure.
ORCA ran three pods with 15 students during summer 2025 and expanded to four concurrent pods in fall. Killington supported the Heard and Understood App pilot and the BRIC/Endless Foundation Vermont Cup; Bolton worked on the Vermont Zoning Atlas and drinking-water service districts; Okemo worked on the Vermont Town Data Analyzer, Vermont Livability Map, and community news visualization; and Sugarbush worked on the City of Burlington mobile app, the VRWA Certification Web App, and the Abandoned Parcel Map.
By mid-2025, UVM Dataverse had moved from a project launch into institutional operation under VERSO’s administration. This marked a significant shift from project support toward stewardship of shared research infrastructure, a role later strengthened by the NSF FAIROS award.
The Shift Toward Durability#
The defining theme of late 2025 was the transition from building the program to making it durable. VERSO’s growing portfolio, student program, and institutional relationships created substantial value, but they also increased the cost of relying on short grant cycles. The consulting work, Dataverse stewardship, and continued development of ORCA became practical bridges between external awards and a more durable institutional model. This tension set the stage for the infrastructure, sustainability, and civic-data work of 2026.