Dubai has no shortage of communities.
Events fill up every week. WhatsApp groups multiply faster than you can mute them. Founder circles, creator networks, professional guilds -The community-building scene here is, by every visible measure, booming.
But here’s what nobody talks about: the people building these communities are mostly doing it alone.
I’ve met community professionals in this city — real practitioners running communities with hundreds, sometimes thousands of members — who had never once sat across from another community builder to talk honestly about their work. Not because they didn’t want to. Because there was simply nowhere to go.
No peer space. No local network for the people who build networks.
That’s the gap we just closed.
Why I Co-Founded the CMX Connect Dubai Chapter
Together with my co-director Prerna Prasad, I’m proud to announce that CMX Connect Dubai is officially live — the first CMX chapter in one of the region’s most active cities.
CMX is the world’s largest network for community professionals, supporting tens of thousands of practitioners globally. And until now, Dubai didn’t have a chapter.
That always seemed like a gap that needed closing — especially given what’s happening here. The MENA region is in the middle of a genuine community moment. Remote work reshaped where people live. Expo 2020 changed how this city thinks about gathering. Founders and operators from around the world moved here and immediately started building — audiences, networks, brand communities, professional guilds.
But most of that knowledge was staying siloed.
A community manager at a regional e-commerce brand had no idea that someone two floors above them was running a thriving creator community. A founder building a new community product was solving an onboarding problem from scratch — unaware that someone across the city had cracked the same challenge six months earlier.
Knowledge that should be shared, wasn’t.
CMX Connect Dubai exists to change that.
What This Chapter Actually Is (And What It’s Not)
This is not a conference. It’s not a panel event. It’s not another networking night on Dubai’s already packed calendar.
CMX Connect Dubai is a peer space — small, focused, and built on the principle that the most valuable thing community professionals can offer each other is honesty. Honest about what’s working. Honest about where we’re stuck. Honest about the parts of this work that never make it onto a LinkedIn post.
Our first session had no speakers and no set agenda. Just community builders in a room, sharing where they are and what they need. Everyone left with something real.
That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to.
A Message to Community Builders in MENA
If you’re building a community in Dubai, the UAE, or anywhere across the MENA region — you are not as alone as this work sometimes makes you feel.
There are people in this city asking the exact same questions you are, facing the same retention challenges, the same monetisation uncertainty, the same exhaustion of building something people care about without a single peer to debrief with.
They just haven’t been in the same room yet.
This chapter is new. It’s open. And the early members will help shape what it becomes.
Read the Full Story on the CMX Blog
I wrote about the full launch — why it took this long, what we built first, and what we’re building next — over on the official CMX website.
👉 Read: We Just Launched the CMX Connect Dubai Chapter
If you’re a community professional in MENA, this one’s for you.
And if you want to get involved — whether you’re in Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, or anywhere across the region — reach out. This chapter is being built for you.
Anjum Arsheen is MENA’s Community & Membership Expert and Chapter Director of CMX Connect Dubai. She helps entrepreneurs and organisations turn their audiences into structured, revenue-generating community ecosystems.
