As a hub for collaborative excellence, we strive to empower researchers, educators, and students to actively contribute to and benefit from the diverse collection of open source initiatives. We have below multiple project that we have contributed to in a variety of way from design to paid student development. If you are interested in VERSO supporting a project of yours, please reach out here!
Vermont Zoning Atlas (VTZA ORCA Project 2023-current)
The Vermont Zoning Atlas (VTZA) Pod will creates a state-wide Zoning Atlas (following the standards of the National Zoning Atlas) that will encompass all of Vermont’s 237 towns, 10 cities, 5 unincorporated areas, and 4 gores in collaboration with the 11 regional planning commissions of VAPDA and various State of Vermont Agencies. The Pod will be working on building out the data for towns, validating data and building programming tools to assist in the work of maintaining the Zoning Atlas. This project was made possible by an anonymous donor Sponsor: Yoshi Bird
Wastewater Infrastructure Mapping (WIM ORCA Project 2024-current)
The Wastewater Infrastructure Mapping project, led by the ORCA Pod in collaboration with the Windham Regional Commission, aims to build a comprehensive town-level dataset of wastewater resources in Vermont’s village centers. This project addresses the lack of public water and sewer systems, which hinders housing development, business retention, and community growth. UVM students, working with partners like VCGI and state agencies, will compile and publish this data to identify ideal locations for new development and support strategic public investments. The project aligns with broader state goals, such as the Vermont Climate Action Plan, fostering sustainable growth and resilience. It also supports the Town of Jericho’s outreach efforts to educate stakeholders on funding, resources, and planning for wastewater infrastructure
Heard & Understood App (HUA ORCA Project 2024-current)
This is an Open Research Community Accelerator project of VERSO with a paid student internship team. The Heard and Understood App provides a way to explore and classify silence and gaps in conversations. This is an Open Community Research Accelerator (ORCA) project in collaboration with the Vermont Conversation Lab and their GitHub organization Heard & Understood(tm). This supports the exploration and adoption of the CONSert (Connectional Silence Ensemble-BERT) algorithm which uses a combination of Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks, OpenAI Whisper Transcriptions and a BERT ML model to detect, locate and classify pauses. Pauses will be classified as either Non-Connectional, Emotional, or Invitational.
Interactive Management App (ISM ORCA Project 2023-2024)
This is an Open Research Community Accelerator project of VERSO with a paid student internship team. The Interactive Management App project will design and build an open source tool for conducting Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) research with participants. The Interactive Management App will produce a flow diagram that helps a group of people solve a collective problem. The app will take in a list of factors identified by research participants that affect a specific problem. It will then work with participants to figure out the relationships between factors (things that impact their ability to act). An algorithm will then determine which factors should be addressed first, second, and so on in order for the group to meet their goals. This tool will be used in Thriving in Open Source Communities in Africa. Sponsor: John Meluso Project GitHub:
Controlled Digital Lending (2022)
Boston Library Consortium - Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is an emerging method that allows libraries to loan print books to digital patrons in a “lend like print” fashion. Through CDL, libraries use technical controls to ensure a consistent “owned-to-loaned” ratio, meaning the library circulates the exact number of copies of a specific title it owns, regardless of format, putting controls in place to prevent users from redistributing or copying the digitized version.
VERSO provide facilitate design expertise and technical specification recommendations.
ALLotaxonometer for all
The AlloTaxonometer was a Graduate Student Project with Jonathan St-Onge, Samuel Rosenblatt, Carter Ward to translate the previous version of AlloTaxonometer from Matlab to Javascript. VERSO provided project management and added common industry practices like using Jira, creating stories and epics, doing standups during the week, creating a product requirements doc (much of which was used in this page) and ensuring the final product would be much more open source friendly. Completed (October – December 2022)
VERSO provided project management and technical assistsance.
GIS Open Data Portal
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. At UVM a large amount of data is created through research that may not be accessible to the general public and the goal of this project was to create a Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) Data Portal to publish appropriate data for general access through the ArcGIS hub. This was done in conjunction with the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab.
VERSO initiated the project and provided technical services to create the pages
Vermont Flooding: Humanitarian Open Street Mapping
Massive rainfall has caused extensive flooding across the Northeast with Vermont seeing extensive flooding across the entire state with some towns even being entirely cut off by destroyed roads. We created a communtiy event using Open Street Maps Hummanitarian Projects to add roads and waterways that are not already marked using satellite imagery in Open Street Maps (https://www.openstreetmap.org/) to aid in the response to this disaster.
Beginner Mappers: https://tasks.openstreetmap.us/projects/431
Intermediate Mappers: https://tasks.openstreetmap.us/projects/430
VERSO created the event, tools and facilitated collaboration with Open Street Maps to run this event
3D Center Door Post Replacement Project
This project was a collaboration with UVM Facilities in the publication of 3D Files. They were trying to come up with a cost effective solution to repair the salt damaged aluminum center door posts bottoms without replacing the entire post. From a mock up piece we cut from a chunk of plastic that was taken to the Fab Lab and replicated some on a 3D printer.
VERSO assisted in advising formats and publishing on the VERSO Gitlab
eBookPDFStitcher
This project came from a request by the Library to create a simple application that can stitch together pdfs. Publishers will often publish a book with each chapters in seperate PDF documents, in order to make the digital copy of the book lendable the Library need to be able to stictch together a sequence of PDFs into a single PDF. Currently the workaround requires expensive software and requires expertise in that software.
VERSO provided initial development and now is partnering with volunteers to develop it further