About Community Stack
Building the next generation of social infrastructure.
Community Stack builds, operates and stewards the infrastructure communities rely on. We support technical, civic and third-sector communities through owned communities, conferences, platforms, discovery tools, campaigns and research.
What We Are
A community infrastructure group, not an events company.
We operate communities directly. We build the platform underneath them. We give the wider community-led market a way to use it.
Owned communities, conferences and practitioner networks across tech and the third sector.
Engine — the open source platform for community operations — deployed as Junction for technical communities and Switchboard for the third sector.
Discovery infrastructure, open standards, campaigns and research that shape what comes next.
Leadership
Founded and run by community operators.
Founder & CEO
Ethan Sumner
Community organiser and technologist from Barnsley. Ethan has spent years running grassroots meetups across Yorkshire and has worked at Microsoft, Mastercard and global consultancies. He leads strategy, partnerships, platform direction and the operating model.
Head of Marketing and Design
Sam Barker
Leads design and user experience across the product portfolio. Responsible for the visual language, accessibility standards, and interface design of Engine, Junction, and Switchboard.
Legal Advisor
Rebecca Perry
Provides legal advisory support across commercial operations, partnerships, and governance — covering contracts, intellectual property, and corporate structure.
Data Engineering Associate
Melissa Dunmore
Supports the data engineering function across the platform portfolio, helping build the pipelines and infrastructure that power Engine, Junction, and Switchboard.
Senior Partnerships Manager
Jack Herbert
Leads partnerships and sponsor relationships across the community and conference portfolio, connecting organisations with the ecosystems that matter to them.
Interested in joining the team? Email hello@communitystack.io
Why We Exist
Communities are infrastructure. The systems supporting them are not.
The Reality
Communities move knowledge, create opportunity, build careers, support participation, shape markets, and reach people that institutions often miss.
Fragmented tools
Volunteer labour
Inconsistent funding
Platform dependency
Community Stack exists to close that gap.
We treat communities as long-term infrastructure. That means building the platforms, operating standards, commercial models, discovery layers, and stewardship structures that help essential networks last.
Beyond individual organisers, funding cycles, and market shifts.
Where We Came From
Built from inside the work.
Community Stack was not founded from a slide deck or market theory. It was built by people who were already doing the work.
Years of organising grassroots meetups, supporting speakers, finding sponsors, running events, building networks, and absorbing the operational pressure when the systems around communities failed.
The Pattern We Saw
Communities with strong networks, funding, and visibility could grow. Communities doing equally valuable work, but without access to those advantages, often struggled with discoverability, capacity, governance, and sustainability.
Community Stack was created to address that imbalance.
Not as one product. Not as one event series. As a long-term operating model for community infrastructure.
Mission
To build and steward the next generation of social infrastructure.
Helping technical, civic, and third-sector communities become more discoverable, resilient, accessible, sustainable, and better understood.
Vision
A world where communities are treated as critical infrastructure.
Technical communities, charities, grassroots organisations, civic groups, and local networks should not have to survive on accidental discovery, fragile tooling, or short-term funding.
Our Purpose
Making communities easier to find, run, sustain, understand, and protect.
Easier to find
Helping people discover the organisations, events, services, and networks that can support them.
Easier to run
Providing shared tools, platforms, governance, commercial support, and operating infrastructure.
Easier to sustain
Building long-term models for funding, stewardship, accessibility, partnerships, and resilience.
Easier to understand
Creating responsible insight that helps communities, partners, funders, and institutions make better decisions.
Harder to lose
Ensuring vital communities can outlast individual organisers, fragile tooling, short-term funding, and market shifts.
How We Are Organised
One operating model. Five pillars.
Each pillar operates a different layer of community infrastructure — from the communities themselves to the platforms, discovery tools, and research that hold them together.
Junction
The network for technical communities and the people who run them.
Junction is how Community Stack's platform reaches technical communities beyond the ones we directly operate. Engine handles the operations. Junction adds the network.
For organisers
Everything an organiser needs to run a meetup or conference — event creation, ticketing, CFP management, sponsor tracking, attendee communications, post-event recordings ��� in one place, with none of the tool sprawl.
For practitioners
One membership that works across every community in the network. Ticket entitlements, four rate tiers including a self-select Community rate, a public speaker profile, and a talk archive that links every submission to its recording.
For the ecosystem
A single directory of technical communities, events, and speakers. Cross-community discovery, shared sponsorship infrastructure, and organiser knowledge that does not disappear when one person stops running a meetup.
What makes Junction different
Most tools for technical communities are designed for event managers, not community organisers. Junction is built by people who have run meetups for years and absorbed what those tools consistently got wrong.
Free for communities up to 500 members. Your data stays yours. No lock-in. The open source core means no dependency on this company surviving.
What We Have Built
One operating model, proven through real communities.
Since launching in 2025, Community Stack has grown from a South Yorkshire-born idea into an international community infrastructure group.
Community Stack founded
Launched as a stewardship-led operator for community infrastructure.
Community Switchboard announced
Introduced as the discovery and participation layer for the third sector.
First conference delivered
Northern DevOps and Platform Conf proved the operating model at scale.
Engine launched
The operating system for communities launched on September 7th.
Cloud Platform Engineering London acquired
Expanded the DevOps and platform engineering ecosystem.
Expansion into APAC
The portfolio became genuinely international.
2026 conference programme launched
Built across DevOps, cloud native, AI, security, and venture.
Community Switchboard launched nationally
The discovery layer for charities, grassroots groups, and community organisations went live.
Portfolio refocused
Focused on two things: operating the largest independent portfolio of technical communities, and building the software that community operations run on.
Engine Community Edition and Junction launch
The open source platform and technical community network go live.
Built in Barnsley
Headquartered in South Yorkshire. Deliberately.
Most organisations with our ambition would set up in London. We did not, and we will not.
Community Stack is rooted in South Yorkshire because this region understands community infrastructure. Mining communities, working men's clubs, mutual aid societies, the cooperative movement, local organising and civic resilience have shaped this place for generations. That history matters.
Close to the communities that matter most.
Being based in Barnsley keeps us close to the communities too often left out when infrastructure is designed elsewhere. Our hubs, partnerships, campaigns and reinvestment model reflect that.
National and global, with local identity protected.
We are building national and global infrastructure from South Yorkshire, with local identity protected rather than flattened.
This is not a brand position. It is an operating decision.
What We Are Working Towards
Six outcomes. One long term mission.
Operate at a scale that proves the work.
The largest independent portfolio of technical communities in the UK, every one of them running on our own tools. If it does not work for us, it is not ready for anybody else.
Turn what we have learned into infrastructure.
The tools, the blueprints, the commercial models and the methods, written down and handed over. Knowledge that stays inside one organisation is not infrastructure. It is just an advantage.
Make it free where it matters most.
Engine open source at the core and free forever. A credible, accessible digital presence for every charity and grassroots organisation in the country at no cost.
Prove that community infrastructure travels.
The third sector first, then somewhere new, showing that the same foundation serves markets that look nothing alike.
Fund it properly.
The commercial side pays for the civic side. Never donation appeals, never annual funding rounds we have to win in order to survive, never unpaid evenings. Civic infrastructure should be fundable rather than charitable.
Build it to outlast us.
Open code, open directories, shared standards and stewardship structures that survive any one organiser, any one funder, and any one company. Including this one.
Operating Principles
How we make decisions.
Ten principles that hold across every product, partnership, pricing decision, and governance choice we make.
Infrastructure first.
We build for durability, not hype.
Stewardship before scale.
Growth matters. Trust matters more.
Communities first, always.
We do not sell individual member data, run pay to play speaking slots, or accept sponsorship that buys editorial control. It costs us money. It is why the rooms are worth being in.
Free where it matters, paid where it can be.
There will never be a paywall between a small organisation and a basic digital presence.
Accessibility by default.
Accessibility is part of the infrastructure, not an enhancement, and never something we withhold at any price.
Open where possible.
Engine's core is open source and stays that way. We do not use licensing to trap organisations that cannot afford to leave.
Local agency, shared standards.
Each community keeps its identity while benefiting from shared infrastructure.
Reinvestment over extraction.
Revenue improves quality, governance, technology, accessibility and resilience before it does anything else.
Impact over activity.
We measure outcomes, not activity for its own sake.
Trust by design.
We are clear about who runs communities, how decisions are made, and where the value goes.
Strategic Aims
Ten objectives. One long-term mission.
These are the outcomes Community Stack is organised to achieve as a community infrastructure group.
