I'm Soonreal (Michael) from Minsk, Belarus. I'm social. My values and principles are very closely aligned to the Drupal community's principles. I've been involved in Drupal closely for 3 years. I work with frontend and create modules in web-development too. But my main interest is the community. I like to take part in building new social movements, structures, groups and to develop them in my country.

In this three part series of posts I will tell you how our group “The Drupal Club” took part in Drupal Days and helped build a community in Belarus during 2011-2013 years, step by step. Today we will focus on the beginning in 2011.

Day 1 blog post: 2011

I engaged in the community in early 2011. At first I was interested to learn Drupal and exchange experience with other developers.

I felt there was a lack of exchanging practices and knowledge sharing in the Belarusian Drupal movement. Therefore in October 2011 I began to organize “The Drupal Club.” Every week we had meetings and made presentations. The topics were more theoretical. In the meeting slots we touched popular modules and ordinary tasks, such as deploying rich editor or improving site performance.

First Drupal Rally. November 26, 2011

At the end of 2011 the most active club’s participators organized the first Drupal Rally in Minsk. The main aim was to connect professionals and Drupal newbies. The event was interesting for many people from Belarus and other neighbour countries. The Club’s meetings were continued after Rally.

Recap: In the first step the Drupal Club was faced with disinterest from local experienced Drupalers. Many of them ignored our initiatives, but newbies wanted to learn the system. Thus we concentrated our efforts on involving beginners into the community, to emphasize practicing and learning the way and communication with related communities. In the next post we will focus on 2012.