Collaboration & roles
Delphi Studio is multi-tenant: each organization owns its studies, panel resources, and templates. Within a study, collaboration is controlled by role-based access so principal investigators can involve co-investigators and analysts without sharing credentials or over-exposing panelist identities.
Study roles
| Role | Typical user | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Principal investigator / study creator | Everything co-investigators can do, plus the owner-exclusive actions: manage collaborators, transfer ownership, and toggle organization-wide read access |
| Co-investigator | Senior collaborator | Full study operations: wizard edits where unlocked, panel, rounds, results, qual, reports, identity unmask, and the lifecycle actions — complete, terminate, archive, and delete |
| Analyst | Statistician or methods support | View access plus sensitive exports (results, analytics, qualitative workspace, export downloads) |
| Read-only | Advisor, funder liaison, or trainee | View study surfaces without mutating data or sending communications |
The study creator always resolves to Owner — creator status is permanent provenance and is not removed by role changes or ownership transfer. Sensitive actions (identity unmask, role changes, archival) are always audited.
Inviting collaborators
- Open the study Settings → Access (or equivalent collaborators surface).
- Pick a member of your organization and assign a role. Collaborators are selected from existing same-org accounts — there is no email-invitation flow for external users.
- Role changes are recorded in the audit trail.
Collaborators work inside the same study record — there is no need to export spreadsheets between team members for routine operations.
What stays restricted
Even owners and co-investigators normally see panelists as pseudonyms. Real identities live in a separate encrypted store; unmasking is a deliberate, audited action for operational needs (for example, correcting an email address), not routine review of ratings.
| Surface | Visibility |
|---|---|
| Ratings, comments, results | Pseudonyms only |
| Panel list (routine) | Pseudonyms + expertise / stakeholder fields |
| Identity unmask | Explicit action + audit event |
| Exports | Pseudonymized by default |
Organization context
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Organization | Tenant boundary for users, studies, and shared templates |
| Study templates | Org-scoped methodology snapshots (taxonomy, policies, configuration — never item statements) for program-level standardization |
| Org-wide read access | A per-study toggle owners can enable so any organization member can view the study read-only (as org_member); the change is audited |
See Study design wizard for how templates seed new studies.
When the PI is unavailable
Co-investigators can continue most study operations without the owner’s credentials, including lifecycle actions such as archival. If a study has no active owner (for example, the owner account is deactivated), the study becomes read-only until ownership is resolved — plan collaborator roles before launch if continuity is critical.
Next steps
- Panel management — recruit and monitor the expert panel
- Audit trail — role changes and unmask events
- Delphi Platform lifecycle — how roles fit Design → Report