microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community in the Online Sphere

The microbiology of the Built Environment network (microBEnet: http://www. microbe.net/) was formed as an experiment in interdisciplinary community building, with an overarching goal to facilitate and nurture the development of a new research field: the microbiology of the built environment (MBE). The field of MBE research was conceived based on the reasoning that modern humans spend most of their time indoors (where they come into contact with countless microorganisms), yet we know relatively little about the microbes and microbial ecosystems that exist within buildings. The microBEnet project began in 2010 and was funded as one of the keystone initiatives in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in Microbiology of the Built Environment (http://www.sloan.org/major-programareas/basic-research/mobe/). The first phase of microBEnet represented a close, crossdisciplinary collaboration between the Eisen laboratory at the University of California (UC), Davis (microbiology and genomics research), and Hal Levin at the Building Ecology Research Group in Santa Cruz, California (building science). In the first three years of the project, microBEnet focused on four categories of activities in order to facilitate work in the MBE field and to build a culture of openness and sharing: