Administrative structure of FRUCT program

Steering board is the highest authority of FRUCT program. The board performs general supervision and strategic management of the program. Each full-member organization (academic and industrial) can execute its program steering right by delegating one official representative to the FRUCT Steering board. The Steering board has the ultimate decision power in FRUCT; i.e. it elects FRUCT General Chair, invites new full-member organizations to FRUCT, and so on. Each person who represents the full-member organization or is a FRUCT General Chair gets one regular vote and the Steering Board Chair gets an additional decisive vote. In exceptional cases, a representative can temporarily delegate the vote right to another board member or even some external person, but such vote transfer can be executed not more than twice in a raw. The steering board might temporarily or permanently be extended by members without vote right, e.g. in some cases local coordinators and advisory board members can take part in the steering board meetings and discussions to present their vision and concerns. Under normal circumstances the steering board shouldn’t interfere with the daily program activities, which are in direct competence of the FRUCT General Chair, but in case of conflict of interests or other critical problems, the board has a right to temporarily takeover direct steering of the FRUCT program.

General Chair is the top executive and administrator in charge of managing FRUCT community. General Chair is elected by the Steering Board. General Chair is responsible for daily management of the program, has a right to appoint regional Vice-chairs for Baltic region and Russia, invite new associated members to FRUCT, approves appointment of new chairs of the Working Groups, can invite new members to FRUCT Advisory board, and so on.

Advisory board is an expert body consisting of representatives from industry, business and academia. The academia representatives should be available to evaluate actuality and further development plans of FRUCT projects in regard to scientific and theoretical aspects. The industrial and business members should be available to evaluate projects’ actuality in regard to their application in practice and commercial potential. The advisory board is responsible for consulting and steering when needed of the individual projects executed within FRUCT scope. The advisory board produces an expert opinion on students’ research plans, articles, research topics and proposals.

Local coordinator must be assigned by each full-member university participant of the program. The coordinator is responsible for monitoring progress of all projects run by the university, audit stick to the original project scope and when needed communicate team-originated change requests of the project scope to the advisory board and steering committee. The coordinator is responsible for presentation of new teams and their project proposals to the advisory board. Also he/she is responsible for collecting, reviewing, combining and optimizing financial support requests from the local teams and communicating this information to the steering committee.

Project supervisor is an official head of each project executed within scope of FRUCT. Each research team has high degree of freedom, limited only by the definition of the project scope and project execution timelines originally accepted by the advisory committee. Within the team, scientific leadership belongs to the group supervisors, who have the last word in making research choice (as long as it fits into the original project scope).

When a new person wants to join a team, he/she should contact the project supervisor and discuss all practical matters, including role in the team, personal research topic and other formalities of participation in the team work. Any student or a group of students may come up with a proposal for a new research team, which must be submitted following the defined procedure and format. The new team might come up with a new project topic (as long as it meets general quality standards of the program) or it is also possible to ask the advisory board for a topic. In the first case the team must first justify relevance and importance of the project and insure support from at least one member of the advisory board, who in this case becomes a project supervisor. In the second case the advisory board may propose to the team take one of the topics from the pool open topics generated by the members of the advisory board. In this case the topic originator is expected to become team supervisor or find some other relevant supervisor for the team.