If you know Lombiq, you probably know us from GitHub, from the Orchard Core project itself, or from a developer conference. A chamber of commerce or a CMS industry panel isn't the first place you'd expect to find us. But over the past year, we joined five business and industry communities, and we did it on purpose. We know the open-source and developer world well. It's where Lombiq comes from, and where most people know us. But the people who decide which partner to build with, or which platform to trust, mostly aren't there. We wanted to meet them, and we started by joining these communities. This is what each of them has brought us so far. Boye & Company: CMS Experts Boye & Company's CMS Experts group is the one that sits closest to our world. It's a vendor-neutral peer community of digital leaders, agencies, analysts, and platform vendors who compare notes on where content management and digital experience are heading. While some of them already knew Orchard Core, until we joined, it wasn't really in the picture there. That changed quickly. We took part in CMS Summit 26 in Frankfurt, among the agency and consultancy participants, at an event focused on AI, digital experience, governance, workflows, and platforms. Beyond the membership, the real value was in the conversations. When structured content, metadata, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)/Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) came up, we could show where Orchard Core fits. Outside the .NET world, Orchard Core doesn't usually come up in these discussions. HBBA Global HBBA Global is a UK–Hungary business network. For us, the value here is access. For a Hungarian company building for English-speaking markets, these networks connect us with UK-based partners who can open doors to companies we'd struggle to reach directly from Hungary. HBBA introduced us as a builder of complex digital systems for English-language markets, with clients like WTW and Microsoft. Some of that work is easy to picture: a VIP ticketing portal for Live Nation, or the music catalog the Smithsonian calls Spotify for folk music. And it's been an active year, mostly in London. We joined HBBA's Innovation Unleashed summit at the Embassy of Hungary, a fast networking session that ran to around thirty real conversations in two hours. In April, Márk and Zoltán were at HBBA's "When Leadership Meets Strategy" event at The Shard. And in May, Benedek and Zoltán spent several packed days in the city, including HBBA's "AI or Be Left Behind" summit on turning AI strategy into operational reality. In these markets, a cold email usually goes nowhere; the conversations that matter start in person. That's also why we show up beyond the formal events. While we're in London, roughly every month, we drop in on local networking too, like Business Buzz in Canary Wharf. If you're around and want to meet, there's a good chance we can! AmCham and BCCH We also joined two chambers of commerce this year. We're now a member of AmCham Hungary, the American Chamber of Commerce, which connects us with the US business community in Budapest. We first stopped by in June as guests at the INSIGHT Reception, a mid-year gathering at Albemarle's new Budapest headquarters with a little over a hundred people from AmCham's boards, committees, and working groups. It was a part of the business community we hadn't been close to before. We also joined the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary (BCCH) to strengthen our UK-facing network, alongside the HBBA work. We've since been to a couple of its events, including its 2026 Annual General Meeting and the IBCC x BCCH Signature Golf Experience in June. CCIFH Most recently, we joined CCIFH, the French-Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (also known as CCI France Hongrie), the leading Francophone business network in Hungary. It's the newest of these memberships, so we're just getting started. We've been to our first event with them so far, with more to come. What it brings back to the work These memberships aren't logos for a page. They're worth the time because they feed back into what we build and how we talk about it. They give us three things. First, we get a feel for where CMS and digital experience are going, from structured content to GEO and AEO. It shapes how we build and what we recommend to clients. Second, we meet partners in the UK and US markets we build for. And third, we get in front of the kind of organizations we're a good fit for, the ones we don't usually meet through the open-source world. It's something we've written about before. Years ago, being part of the Azure Websites Customer Advisory Board gave us platform-level feedback that fed straight back into our own products and projects. These communities are different, and the stage is wider, but the idea is the same: you learn more, and you're more useful, when you show up in person. Are you in one of these communities too, or looking for a partner for a serious web project? Get in touch.