Sustainability and the Future#
Building an Open Source Program Office is one challenge; sustaining it is another. From the outset, we knew that VERSO could not survive on short-term enthusiasm or a single grant, and that sustainability had to be part of our strategy from the start — for the office itself and for the projects we supported. Five years in, that lesson has only sharpened: VERSO has grown from a small founding team into an office managing dozens of projects, a 40-student internship program, and an institutional data repository, and every stage of that growth has raised the same underlying question in a new form — what happens when the grant that funds this ends? This chapter describes how we approached long-term viability, the funding models we tested, what we’ve learned from watching other institutions navigate similar pressure, and how we think about the road ahead.
Funding Models#
The first challenge was financial sustainability. Our initial funding came from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which gave us the runway to launch VERSO and experiment with different approaches. But grants are temporary by nature, and from year one we needed a plan for what came next.
We tested several models, with real outcomes attached to each:
Institutional Support: Embedding VERSO into UVM’s core research infrastructure was a priority from the start. Becoming the institutional administrator of UVM Dataverse, and later UVM’s liaison to a national open-scholarship initiative, are the clearest examples of open source becoming part of the university’s standing infrastructure rather than a grant-funded add-on.
Grant Integration: We positioned VERSO as a resource for compliance, data management, and open-science best practices, which made the office a value-add for researchers and administrators seeking competitive funding. The NSF FAIROS award, which funds VERSO’s Dataverse stewardship and open-data training, is the clearest result: VERSO’s first major federal grant, built on the credibility of years of Sloan-funded work.
Earned Revenue: The most consequential shift came in year five, with a formal consulting income-expense account that lets research groups pay directly for research software engineering services. This mattered less for the revenue itself than for what it represented: income that did not depend on VERSO being named on a grant proposal, or on any single funder’s continued interest.
External Partnerships: We built relationships with state agencies, nonprofits, and municipalities interested in open data and civic technology — from wastewater and drinking-water mapping to a statewide fire-district survey. These partnerships opened doors to co-funded projects and paid consulting work, and demonstrated that open-source infrastructure has real value to partners outside the university.
Our goal was to diversify funding streams so that VERSO would not depend on a single source. Sustainability, we learned, is as much about relationships as it is about revenue — but relationships alone do not survive a change in leadership or funding priorities. Earned revenue and institutional embedding are what make a program durable when a champion moves on or a grant cycle ends.
Operating Under Budget Pressure#
Higher education is under real financial pressure nationally: enrollment is flat or declining at many institutions, certain fields (computer science among them) have seen enrollment fall even as overall undergraduate enrollment has ticked up, and administrations are increasingly scrutinizing software, consulting, and professional-services spending as line items to cut. A grant-funded office is especially exposed in this environment, because it sits outside the core budget and can be treated as discretionary the moment budgets tighten, regardless of the value it has demonstrated.
This is not a hypothetical for VERSO. A fully grant-funded model requires constant pipeline maintenance: every funding gap becomes organizational risk, and mission alignment without an independent funding base is not the same as protection. We have watched programs at other institutions survive on the strength of a single champion’s sponsorship only to be nearly cut the moment that champion left. The lesson we take from this is not to avoid grants — they remain essential — but to treat earned revenue and institutional budget lines as the parts of the model that actually hold when circumstances change.
The Risk of Growth Without a Funding Line#
Success brings its own risks, and we have learned to name them plainly rather than assume goodwill will resolve them:
Duplication. As a program proves a model works, other units on campus may propose building similar capacity of their own. The useful response is to position the existing program as the answer to that need, not as a competitor to be consolidated away.
Absorption. If a successful program is folded into a larger institutional initiative as a service layer, it can lose its independent budget line and its own outcome metrics — often exactly when it is demonstrating the most success. Alignment with a larger initiative should be negotiated explicitly to preserve a program’s own funding and metrics, not assumed to be automatic.
Framing. In a cost-cutting environment, positioning new work as “efficiency” invites resistance, because efficiency reads as fewer people needed. Positioning the same work as revenue, added capacity, and survival changes how it is received — and it has the advantage of being true.
Sponsorship. Support from someone sympathetic is not the same as sponsorship from someone who can actually authorize and fund the work. Programs that rely on goodwill from adjacent offices without a real funding commitment are one leadership change away from losing their footing.
Aligning with Institutional Strategy#
Universities increasingly run formal strategic-planning cycles that tie funding and support to a small number of named institutional priorities, on a fixed annual timeline. Programs that are not written into these plans — with concrete deliverables, partnerships, and revenue figures attached — tend not to get resourced, no matter how strong their track record. This means sustainability work now includes showing up in these planning cycles proactively, translating a program’s outcomes into the language and priorities of the plan, rather than relying on informal relationships built over time. It is a newer discipline for an office like VERSO, but an increasingly necessary one.
The Road Ahead#
Looking forward, our priorities include:
Expanding Training: Developing curricula for students and early-career researchers to make open-source literacy a core competency.
Shared Infrastructure: Building platforms for collaborative development, reproducible workflows, and long-term archiving.
Diversified Revenue: Growing earned income through consulting and partnerships so that no single grant or champion determines whether the office continues.
Cultural Change: Continuing to advocate for open source as a core academic value, not an optional add-on.
Sustainability is an ongoing process of adaptation, not a destination. By staying responsive to the needs of researchers, funders, and the broader open-source ecosystem — and by building a funding model that does not depend on any single source — VERSO aims to remain a driver of open practice at UVM and beyond.