About Community Stack
A stewardship-led operator for community infrastructure.
Community Stack runs the practitioner communities, conferences, and platforms that the technical and third sectors depend on. We treat this work as long-term infrastructure, with the governance, continuity, and reinvestment that infrastructure requires.
What We Are
A portfolio operator, not an events company.
Most organisations in this space describe themselves by the events they run. Community Stack is structured differently. We acquire, support, and strengthen community assets, communities, conferences, and the platforms communities rely on, and we operate them as a coherent portfolio under shared standards.
Revenue from sponsorships, conferences, and partnerships is reinvested in operational quality, accessibility, governance, and the shared infrastructure that the rest of the sector can use. The model is closer to a stewardship-led foundation than to a media or events business.
The result
Communities that are not optimised for short-term throughput, but built to last, with practitioner leadership preserved, local identity protected, and the operational backbone that lets them grow without breaking.
Why We Exist
Communities are infrastructure. The systems supporting them are not.
The Value
Technical communities and third-sector organisations move knowledge, build careers, and reach the people public services and markets miss. They generate substantial economic and social value, and they hold trust networks that institutions cannot manufacture or replace.
The Gap
Yet the systems they depend on are fragile by default. Organisers run critical communities on fragmented tooling that reprices without warning. When a platform shifts terms or a volunteer steps back, there is no continuity layer, the community absorbs the loss.
Our Response
Community Stack exists to close that gap. We operate the communities. We build the platforms. We steward the standards that allow this layer of social infrastructure to function with the seriousness it has always deserved.
Where We Came From
Built from inside the work, not from the outside in.
Community Stack was not founded by people who studied communities from a distance. It was founded by community organisers, by the people running the meetups, organising the speakers, fielding the sponsorship calls, and quietly absorbing the operational cost when the systems failed.
Years of organising grassroots meetups and user groups across Yorkshire surfaced a pattern that kept repeating. Communities with strong networks, funding, and visibility thrived. Communities doing equally important work, but without those advantages, struggled with discoverability, capacity, and sustainability, and often disappeared.
That imbalance is what Community Stack was built to address. Not as a single product. As a portfolio, an operating model, and a long-term commitment to the communities and causes this work serves.
How We Operate
Stewardship before scale.
Six operating principles shape every decision, from which communities we take on, to how we structure sponsorship, to where revenue is reinvested.
Infrastructure-first
We build for durability, not for cycles. Systems are designed to outlast individual organisers, individual platforms, and individual funding rounds.
Stewardship before scale
Ecosystem health takes precedence over growth metrics. A larger community that has lost its trust is worse than a smaller one that has kept it.
Trust by design
Legitimacy and transparency are structural, not stylistic. Communities know who runs them, how decisions are made, and where revenue is reinvested.
Global vision, local agency
Shared standards across the portfolio do not erase what makes each community its own thing. Local organisers stay local organisers.
Impact over activity
Outcomes are the measure that matters — not event counts, attendance figures, or social media reach in isolation.
Open where possible, responsible where necessary
We default to openness about how we operate, what we earn, and how we reinvest — within the limits of what protects community trust and member privacy.
What We've Done
11 months. Eighteen communities. One operating model proven at scale.
Community Stack was founded
Launched as a stewardship-led portfolio operator for community infrastructure, building on years of grassroots community work across Yorkshire.
Mercedes Moxon Greenfield joins as CTO
UK Robotics Champion and accessibility advocate, leading platform delivery with an accessibility-first, inclusion-led approach.
Community Switchboard announced
Public commitment to building the discovery and participation layer for the third sector, free, accessible, and discoverable by default.
Acquired Cloud Platform Engineering London
Acquired from Appvia, expanding the DevOps & Platform Engineering ecosystem into the capital and demonstrating the portfolio acquisition model in practice.
Expanded into APAC; 24,000+ members
Acquired communities in India and crossed 24,000 members across the network. The portfolio became genuinely international.
Launched the 2026 conference programme
Eight flagship conferences across DevOps, Cloud Native, AI, security, and venture, in-person across the UK and virtual globally.
Launched three national campaigns
#NoCommunityLeftOffline, #DigitalSENDInfrastructure, and #CommunicationForAll, civic campaigns targeting systemic gaps in digital inclusion and accessibility.
Community Switchboard national launch
The discovery layer for the third sector launched with a fully accessible web presence and national participation index for charities and community organisations. Announced plans for a new Barnsley HQ and Advanced Accessibility R&D Lab.
Community Engine launches
The unified operating system for technical communities, events, ticketing, CFP, sponsorship, memberships, and analytics in a single platform.
Leadership
Founded and run by community operators.
Ethan Sumner
Co-Founder & CEO
Community organiser and technologist from Barnsley
Community organiser and technologist from Barnsley. Ethan has spent years running grassroots meetups across Yorkshire, and has worked at Microsoft, Mastercard, and global consultancies, where he saw both how technology can transform careers and how digital exclusion can leave whole communities behind. He leads strategy, partnerships, and the operational model.
LinkedIn
Mercedes Moxon Greenfield
Co-Founder & CTO
UK Robotics Champion, accessibility advocate, and engineer from Sheffield
UK Robotics Champion, accessibility advocate, and engineer from Sheffield. Mercedes leads platform delivery with an accessibility-first, inclusion-led approach, because the people who most need community support are often the same people excluded by complicated technology. She is responsible for Engine, Switchboard, and the technical standards that hold the portfolio together.
“Accessibility isn't about ticking boxes or meeting legal requirements. It's about understanding that the people who most need community support are often the same people who get excluded by complicated technology.”LinkedIn
Our Location
Headquartered in Barnsley. Deliberately.
Most organisations with our ambition would set up in London. We didn't, and we won't.
Rooted in community history
Barnsley is a town with a long history of organising itself. Mining communities, working men's clubs, mutual aid societies, the cooperative movement, South Yorkshire has been building community infrastructure for two hundred years, long before the word “community” became a marketing term. The instinct to look after the people next to you, to build institutions that outlast individuals, to treat trust as something earned rather than claimed, is in the fabric of the place.
Building from the inside
Being based here means being honest about who gets left out when infrastructure is built elsewhere. The towns and regions that need community support most are often the furthest from the platforms, the funders, and the networks that decide what gets built. We don't want to design for those communities from a distance, we want to build from inside them.
What this means in practice
Our hubs are in Leeds, Sheffield, and Manchester before they are in London. Our campaigns, in particular #NoCommunityLeftOffline, are written for rural, post-industrial, and underserved communities that the rest of the sector tends to overlook. Our hiring, supply chain, and reinvestment default toward the North wherever possible without compromising the work.
It's not a brand position. It's an operating decision, and it informs the rest of them.
Strategic Aims
Six objectives. One long-term mission.
These are the outcomes we are organised to achieve over the next decade. They are deliberately broader than any single product or event.
Position communities as long-term infrastructure
Move community work from the margins of how the sector is understood, into the centre. Treated, funded, and governed as the infrastructure it has always been.
Grow and connect a portfolio of ecosystems
Operate a coherent portfolio of communities and conferences across technology and the third sector, in which each part strengthens the others.
Provide shared infrastructure that enables scale
Build the platforms (Engine, Switchboard) that allow communities and third-sector organisations to operate at scale without losing their identity or independence.
Create the discovery and participation layer
Make the people, organisations, and services doing essential work findable by the people who need them, not just the people already in the network.
Build an independent insight and outcomes layer
Develop community-native intelligence that supports coordination and resilience without becoming extractive, directive, or controlled by any single funder.
Support communities for resilience and longevity
Provide the operational, governance, and stewardship support that lets communities outlast the people who founded them and the platforms they started on.