iGEM Foundation, Community Labs Track

What it is. I chaired the Community Labs Track at the iGEM Foundation for the 2015 competition cycle. iGEM is the international body governing the largest synthetic-biology student competition and a major institutional anchor for community-bio practice worldwide. The Track was the iGEM-side home for non-institutional and community-based synthetic-biology teams, run in coordination with the active DIYbio / community-bio organizers of that period. Some of that same community would later help organize the Global Community Bio Summit, beginning in 2017.

The problem behind it. Community-bio labs in the early 2010s had been building infrastructure piecemeal — paying for equipment, navigating local biosafety review, training newcomers, hosting iGEM teams — without a stable institutional partner inside iGEM advocating for the lane. iGEM’s leadership needed someone with a foot in both the community-lab world and the formal-institution world to steward the Track for the year and write the year-end report.

What I did. The role was light-touch on the technical side and heavier on the institutional one. Standards conversations. Safety guidance for community-lab-hosted teams. Surfacing community-lab work into the iGEM main competition. Connecting newcomers who wanted to start a community lab to people who had already built one. Mid-cycle I was on the track committee trying to redefine the criteria for what the participating teams actually wanted to get out of the Track. The year-end report went back to the iGEM Foundation after the cycle wrapped. After that, the role passed on, and later iGEM adjusted how community-lab teams enter the competition altogether: rather than a separate Track, community-lab teams now participate as a “kind” and choose any standard track.