Responsibilities

PTI is a collaborative organization spanning responsibility center lines, so it can muster the skills and talents needed to rapidly address important social, scientific, and scholarly priorities. This is also why PTI refers to centers and labs as being affiliated with rather than part of PTI.

The executive director of the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) is responsible for:

• Leading PTI as a collaborative organization, in which PTI center and lab directors also serve as associate directors of PTI and participate in governance
• Leading fundraising for the online publication Science Node
• Guiding and supervising the operation of centers and labs that report directly to the executive director
• Leading a program of research and development specific to the executive director’s expertise and interests

Governance

PTI operates mostly on a model of leadership by consensus. Each of the PTI center directors also holds the title and authority of PTI associate director. Only a small portion of PTI's overall budget is managed by the executive director, and only a few PTI center and lab directors report directly to the executive director. Most of the PTI center directors are either organizational peers of the executive director, or they are faculty members of the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (Luddy).

Only four management units report directly to the executive director:

• The Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center
• The HathiTrust Research Center professional staff (who report first to the Director of HTRC, Luddy School Professor John A. Walsh)
• The Cyberinfrastructure Assessment and Evaluation Group, headed by Julie Wernert 
• The Humans Advancing Research in the Cloud project 

PTI governance is simple to explain and, as a result of excellent collegial relationships, straightforward to carry out. PTI-wide initiatives are generally proposed by a PTI center director, someone who would like to be a PTI center director, or the executive director. PTI-wide decisions are made primarily by consensus of the PTI executive director and the directors of PTI-affiliated centers.

Partnerships and collaborations

PTI overtly shares credit with its many collaborating partners. Within IU, those include the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering; the Maurer School of Law; the Kelley School of Business; the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology; and University Information Technology Services.

Science Node is another example of collaborative activities. As it says on the Science Node web page, “Science Node is a free online publication, developed in collaboration with organizations in the U.S. and Europe. …  Our mission is to inform the global research community (including everyday, business, and technical people) about research breakthroughs, the resources that make such breakthroughs possible, and new advances that will make possible the breakthroughs of tomorrow.” Science Node operates with editorial autonomy reporting to an external board of directors. However, as the person who initially obtained funding for IU to be involved in what is today Science Node, the PTI executive director remains responsible for raising underwriting funds to sustain it.