Sustain is a Verb- Code is Sustained or Not Sustained, not 'Sustainable'

(Note: This post is adapted from #182 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter)

So you, reader, will already understand that software is not “sustainable”. There’s no sustainability linter you can run over the code to highlight possible sustainability issues, no test suite you can run to check for sustainability regressions. Sustainability is not an inherent property of a piece of software.

Same with a computing system, or a curated database, or..

Instead, these efforts are sustained, or not, by people or organizations who pay for it to be sustained.

Those people or organizations do this sustaining because they (or a community they support) need that software or other effort to do their jobs. Because there are users who advocate for sustaining the effort, or sustain it themselves.

In other words, sustaining is something a community does, and to the extent that “sustainability” in this sense is a thing that exists at all, one enhances an efforts’ “sustainability” by nurturing and supporting that community, and making it easy for them to effectively advocate for continued sustenance.

Even so, the need the community has for that effort is going to wax and wane over time, as will the sustaining. Eventually, at some point, the community will move on or dissolve entirely, and the sustaining will come to an end.

So a tool goes from a prototype or something bespoke for one problem, and grows in technological readiness (#91) to become RCD development, not just research (#119), and over time gathers a community which, with luck, will sustain the effort for as long as the community exists and needs it.

It may not find or build such a community - in startup speak it may not find “product-market fit”, and fade away (as with Sochat’s article on updated software in #172). That’s disappointing for the individuals involved, but it’s very much the nature of research - not every idea or effort pans out.

This understanding of sustaining vs sustainability is finally starting to gain wider acceptance, which heartens me. We need to understand that passively hoping that by checking off a list of criteria we’ve proved ourselves worthy, and that therefore sustaining funding will somehwo happen, is to let down our community and our users. We have to actively create the communities that will sustain the work we start.