The rise of communities: How the tech industry Is redefining engagement and growth

In a world where digital fluency has become second nature, especially in the technology sector, communities have emerged as the new currency of engagement. Whether in the Middle East or across global markets, professionals are increasingly drawn to ecosystems that offer not just information, but identity, mutual support, and meaningful collaboration. For the tech industry in particular, where innovation cycles are short and skills are in high demand, community-driven platforms have evolved from nice-to-have forums into strategic engines for talent, market insight, and even business development.

What we’re witnessing is the decentralisation of traditional knowledge and networking systems. In the past, expertise lived in boardrooms or behind paywalls. Today, it lives in Slack channels, Discord servers, LinkedIn groups, and WhatsApp networks. Platforms like GitHub, for example, host over 100 million developers worldwide, while Stack Overflow sees more than 14 million monthly active users exchanging code, fixes, and workarounds. These communities have reached a point where they are almost critical infrastructures.

In the Middle East, this shift is particularly notable in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where government initiatives such as Vision 2030 and Dubai’s D33 economic agenda have accelerated the region’s digital transformation. Communities are forming around every tech sub-sector. As adoption grows, the region is developing users who are also contributors.  They are an emerging group of tech professionals who see community participation as essential to staying competitive.

The tech industry stands apart in its ability to mobilise around shared problems and collaborative problem-solving. Engineers, product managers, data scientists, and creators consume content, they iterate, respond, and often build together. This builds trust at scale, and that trust becomes the social glue of highly active communities made from members in every time zone aroundnthe planet.

But there’s a deeper layer of value: reciprocity. Tech professionals, more than most, understand that helping someone troubleshoot today could lead to an introduction, opportunity, or insight tomorrow. In a space where hierarchies are fluid and meritocracy is real, community engagement becomes a way to future-proof your relevance and gain professional reputation at the same time.  

When we launched OTTRED, our global community focused on the media, broadcast, and streaming industries we had a single goal: to create a place where professionals across production, distribution, platforms, and technology could meet, share, and learn from each other.

Fast forward to today, and OTTRED has become more than just a network. With members from over 900 companies across 65 countries, the community is now a strategic asset for its members and for the industry itself. We’ve uncovered market trends before they hit mainstream reports, helped companies expand into new regions, and even played a role in unlocking partnerships that would have otherwise taken months of navigation.

Perhaps most importantly and more recently, OTTRED has exposed the inefficiencies created by industry silos. These are invisible barriers that form when sectors within an industry scale quickly, such as streaming or social media have within within the media sector. Content, technology, advertising, and analytics often operate in isolation, each with its own KPIs, vendors, and language. But growth eventually slows when ideas stop moving laterally across a market taking into account new dimensions as well as the older more established elements of an industry.

Recognising this, we’ve recently announced a new initiative: an event designed to bring together leaders from across these industry silos. The goal is simple; cross-pollination. By inviting heads of engineering to speak with heads of content, or advertising strategists to meet with platform architects, we aim to reinvigorate the industry's strategic dialogue. The objective is about removing blind spots and igniting the kinds of conversations that lead to real change.  And this is being facilitated by communities that have become trustworthy brands within multiple industries.

We’re seeing a broader movement where communities are curators of discussion and facilitators of action through the critical mass of invested members from within the sector they originate from. Communities are becoming micro-incubators of innovation and an offshoot is the more modern talent pipelines that rival more traditional recruitment models.

As the Middle East continues its rapid digital evolution, the importance of community will only grow. Governments are investing in platforms for innovation, but it is the people within those platforms, united by purpose and fuelled by collaboration, to drive sustainable impact and growth.  The Creator HQ in Dubai hosts the largest conference for content creators in the world, as one example.

For companies operating in or entering this region, the message is clear: its harder to grow alone. Whether you're building a product, a brand, or moving into a new market, aligning with the right community could mean the difference between momentum or mediocrity.

In a tech-driven world where speed matters and relationships matter more, community is not a side project. Communities are becoming the new infrastructure of engagement, and the smartest organisations are already building on it.

Chris Redmond is a global Tech Executive who is now an entrepreneur in the media tech space. Chris has pioneered the industry community approach to business over the last 5 years with a community of people spanning 1,300 companies in 65 countries.