2022 Vision and Foundation#
The first year of VERSO established the program’s scope, clarified what the office would and would not do, and laid the operational foundation for sustainable support of open research at UVM. This section captures the early decisions, infrastructure build-out, community partnerships, and pilot projects that shaped VERSO’s identity. For additional context on the broader landscape and motivations, see Why VERSO Was Created and Context and Landscape.
Building the Team and Launching the Program#
VERSO officially began with the successful hiring and onboarding of its core leadership and research team:
Kendall Fortney joined as the VERSO Program Director on April 24, 2022, bringing strategic direction and coordination to the initiative.
Jonathan St-Onge was hired as the VERSO Ph.D. Fellow on January 14, 2022, conducting research on the costs and benefits of learning to code in scientific disciplines.
John Meluso joined on June 1, 2022, as the Sloan VERSO Postdoctoral Fellow for Systems, Organizations, & Inclusion.
Spring 2022#
VERSO received a $635,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation over two years to establish an academic Open Source Program Office, positioning the initiative as one of the first academic OSPOs in the United States. On April 24, 2022, Kendall Fortney was appointed as Program Director, providing strategic leadership and coordination.
Summer 2022#
Mid-2022 marked a critical phase of infrastructure development for VERSO. The office secured dedicated space in Howe Library’s Center for Teaching and Learning, established processes for open-source licensing with UVM TechTransfer, and set up a GitLab repository through UVM IT for project management. VERSO launched a formal RFP process and created a website as a central resource hub. On June 1, 2022, John Meluso joined as the Sloan VERSO Postdoctoral Fellow for Systems, Organizations, & Inclusion.
Six pilot projects launched:
Allotaxonometer Project – An interactive Observable notebook for comparing two ranked distributions. It computes rank-turbulence divergence and visualizes differences with a diamond plot, balance view, and word-shift chart, letting users explore how elements move between ranks and contribute to change. It supports example datasets and user-uploaded files for side-by-side comparison. This project successfully translated a proprietary tool into open-source with interactive features.
Boston Library Consortium Digital Lending Project – Collaborating on tools that support the sharing and lending of digital books. Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is a method that allows libraries to loan print books to digital patrons in a “lend like print” fashion, with technical controls to ensure a consistent “owned-to-loaned” ratio. This project stopped after a legal decision made the practice illegal.
GIS Open Data Portal – Building a centralized ArcGIS Hub to publish public-facing maps, datasets, and dashboards, making UVM geospatial research easier to discover and reuse. This project laid groundwork that later evolved into the UVM Dataverse infrastructure.
UVM Press – Supporting Diamond open-access journals hosted on the UVM Press platform by helping with publishing workflows, metadata standards, and the software pipelines through the open source software OJS to manage submissions, peer review, and dissemination.
UVM Compute – Attempting to restart a project that aggregates spare compute power from website visitors into a distributed “supercomputer” (similar to SETI@home). The concept was promising but ultimately stalled due to resource constraints.
Open Source Grant Resource Library – Identified through interviews with UVM Research Development, this project aimed to create templates explaining the context, format, and requirements of specific grants. A structure was designed to be shareable beyond UVM while keeping content internal.
Fall 2022#
Conference Speaking Begins
RIT Open Symposium 2022 (September 7-9, 2022) – Kendall Fortney participates in panel “OSPOs in Academia: What do they do? What could they do?” (video)
UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium 2022 (September 27-29, 2022) – Kendall Fortney participates in panel “OSPOs in Academia”
Burlington Data Scientist Meetup: How to Create, Find and Work with Open Data (October 27, 2022) – Kendall Fortney and Jean-Gabriel Young (Assistant Professor in Statistics) speak at Hula in Burlington
Education and Training#
VERSO established educational infrastructure through a website serving as a learning hub with blogs, event announcements, and open-source resources, complemented by weekly office hours for student training in Git and open-source practices.
Fall 2022: Guest Lectures Begin
UVM – CDAE 060 Design Innovation I (Sarah Williamson) – October 3, 2022
UVM – CS 120 QR: Advanced Programming (Lisa Dion) – October 25, 2022
UVM – CDAE 395: Ecological Economics Applications (Joshua Farley) – October 25, 2022
Research and Academic Contributions#
Jonathan St-Onge and John Meluso led VERSO’s research component, contributing to the understanding of open-source ecosystems. Relevant publications include:
Trujillo, M. Z., Hébert-Dufresne, L., & Bagrow, J. (2022). The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic, and more collaborative. EPJ Data Science, 11(1), 31. link
Warrick, M., Rosenblatt, S. F., Young, J. G., Casari, A., Hébert-Dufresne, L., & Bagrow, J. (2022). The OCEAN mailing list data set: Network analysis spanning mailing lists and code repositories. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.00603. link
Funding and Sustainability#
To ensure long-term viability, VERSO pursued multiple funding opportunities: an EPSCoR Track 1 proposal (August 22, 2022) to support the OSPO Director’s salary and expand infrastructure across Vermont; a Google Open Source renewal to sustain operations through 2025; and additional NSF and NEH conference grants in development.
VERSO began developing a comprehensive playbook to guide academic OSPO activities, making guest lecture materials and organizational growth documentation openly accessible and adaptable for other institutions.
Year One Summary#
VERSO established itself as one of the first academic Open Source Program Offices in the United States, anchored by a $635,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The core team assembled quickly, with Kendall Fortney providing strategic direction as Program Director, Jonathan St-Onge conducting research on coding education, and John Meluso leading organizational development. By mid-2022, critical infrastructure was in place: dedicated office space in Howe Library, a website serving as a resource hub, a GitLab repository for project management, and formalized processes for open-source licensing. Six diverse pilot projects were launched across research, publishing, and community engagement, demonstrating VERSO’s capacity to support faculty-led innovation across the university.
Throughout its inaugural year, VERSO built momentum through community engagement and knowledge sharing. The team delivered guest lectures in three UVM courses, established weekly office hours for student training, and participated in major national conferences on open-source practices in academia. Research contributions from team members advanced understanding of open-source ecosystems, while multiple funding proposals positioned the office for sustainable growth. By fall 2022, VERSO had demonstrated both operational capacity and institutional value, laying a solid foundation for the growth and institutionalization that followed in 2023.