The Steering Committee is intended to determine the direction to be followed in the development of the SBN network and includes broad international representation from the biological and geological communities that study seamounts. The Steering Committee committee will consist of approximately ten members and offers independent oversight of this project, with Katrina Edwards as the first chair with an initial tenure of three years. The remaining members will have a minimum membership duration of two years, with some being available for four, with the hope of a 1/3 membership rotation every two years. Some members are ex-officio members that are also listed as PI’s or Senior Personnel, and there is one RIDGE liaison. The remaining members were chosen on basis of missing key disciplinary representation, choosing individuals with a leadership role in their own disciplines. Steering Committee members may be called upon to deliver a keynote or act as discussion leaders at SBN workshops. They also will take on the leadership in writing white and/or review papers.

The Senior Personnel is a focus group that actively will work to establish and further the goals of the SBN network. The network is directed by Lead-PI Hubert Staudigel, including the network development, disciplinary integration, workshop planning, and the user-end of the database development. Co-PI Anthony Koppers will direct the development of the SBN database and website. The rest of the Senior Personnel will take on the cumulative scientific responsibility for the network, while advising the PI’s on scientific issues, such as metadata choices and structure, choice and prioritization of data and materials to be archived, relationships of these data to neighboring disciplines, how data are represented in the database, as well as workshop planning and execution. Senior Personnel and the PI's will meet frequently in person, online or in videoconferences that will be held about every three months.

The SBN Database Team is responsible for the development and maintenance of the SBN database and website, but also is actively involved in populating the database with legacy data. This team exists of researchers, software engineers and undergraduate students.

It is critical to the SBN Network to have active involvement from all the critical research disciplines studying seamounts. For this reason we have included key representatives for each sub-discipline as Charter Members. These Charter Members will represent the SBN within their communities and they contribute to the network with advice on the setup of the database, by contributing to the database and workshops, and by testing the website and database.