I'm Soonreal (Michael) from Minsk, Belarus. In this two part series  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. The first post focused on the beginning in 2011. Today I will focus on 2012 and 2013.

In spring 2012 we began a sprint to translate Drupal 7 core into the Belarusian language. We wanted to involve translators and non-technical people and we had a good result. It increased core in Belarusian from 30% percent to 100% and raised the amount of participators.

After the event I heard about Global Drupal Learning Day and we decided to join in the process. The first time it was an introduction to Drupal http://drupal-sliot.by/drupalclub/754. We asked event guests “What is Drupal?” We opened main definitions and notions, how to install Drupal, what mistakes appeared more often during the first learning stage. The participators were beginners. Some people were without any technical education skill. It was free (as were the other Drupal Days which we organized). The first event attracted about ten people.

Drupal Club Presentation on the Forum of Youth Initiatives. June 7, 2012

In summer, the Club opened various development tools. SSH, Drush, and git went from being something exotic to becoming the usual tools for our collaborative work. In Autumn the falanster.by website was finished and was shared on github.com repository. 

On the 14th of September we participated in the second Drupal Day. This time we didn’t limit the concept with the question “What is Drupal?” We decided to show the deployment of a non-profit initiative’s website in 4 hours (preparation took a few weeks). There were about ten in the audience. During the whole process I commented on the projector what we did. In 4 hours the blog was completed. The website is now here: pirates.by

We chose a slogan for the club: "Be social!" We focused just on interaction with other free-source communities. We visited Linux parties for building positive relations.

The next Drupal Learning Day - on the 14th of December - we moved to the weekend, because it coincided with the Second Drupal Rally. This time idea was more serious. A month before the Rally we organized another competition among different social and non-profit projects, initiatives and groups. The initiative that entered and won get a ready website during the two day Rally’s period. There were 14 applications and a crew of archaeologists and historians won. We had two days for the implementation website - niekropali.by. The development core team was composed of 3 people again. The other participators could enter and leave the team when they wanted. As a result about 15 people took part.

Drupal Rally 2. Hakathon. December 15-16, 2012

2012 Recap: In 2012 we widened cooperation with communities not just in Belarus but abroad (Russia http://drupal.ru, The Ukraine http://drupal.ua), participated in different conferences (for example in Moscow http://drupalconf.ru/ and Minsk http://camp.drupal.by ), and set up bridges with related crews such as Minsk user linux group. It was the year for establishing a relationship with Drupal Association too. 

2013

During spring Drupal Day we created the opendata-platform which will sort with different types of state awards and give table data and CSV feeds for visitors. It is not a simple website for us. Every club’s meeting we work on it without hurry. We don’t forget about Drupal theoretical questions too.

On the 14th of June we thought to systematize our knowledge collection and to create a wiki page http://bit.ly/15y0j8f for people who would like to begin to learn Drupal, from how to start, and what most popular mistakes will be appear. With the gesture we wanted to share knowledge with the most simple form. It was the main aim of the Drupal Day.

Recap and plans

We understood the theoretical knowledge is actual still, and it is necessary to develop relations with other countries Drupal communities (i.e. http://drupalladder.org/), take part in the code-sprints, hackathons for improving our skills and help in global Drupal agenda - such as Drupal core contribution.

On the 15 of November we are going to do the “What is Drupal?” presentation for students. We have plans to pull into some contribute modules development, and continue to focus on Drupal 8.

Conclusion

Nowadays more than a hundred people take part in the Drupal Club and Drupal Days meetings. Some hundred followers appeared on the Club social networks. I hope, that above mentioned projects contributed into Belarusian Drupal movement and were good poke for the next steps such as code sprints, hackathons and international cooperation.

The Club usually is opened for other offers and ideas. Share this!

Our videos:

- From the first Drupal Rally - http://bit.ly/10HhEtA - 26 Nov - 2011
- From the Drupal Translation Competitions: http://bit.ly/10HhEtA  http://bit.ly/HTBmX3  - 3 Apr 2012
- From the Drupal Club’s presentation: http://bit.ly/1aPCBbq - 7 Jun 2012
- The biggest drupal Graffity and unique drupal song - http://bit.ly/1bgv3gH - Jul - 2012

Our website:
http://drupal-sliot.by

Social networks:
http://twitter.com/drupalsliot
http://vk.com/drupal_sliot
http://on.fb.me/154gk3e

We are in wikipedia:
http://bit.ly/168aQ90