Drupal Community in Donetsk, Ukraine

Donetsk had one of the more active IT clusters in Ukraine: agencies, product companies, freelancers, all in the same city and, for the most part, actually talking to each other. Drupal people were part of that mix.

Drupal is an open-source CMS. It runs everything from personal blogs to the White House website and Germany's official state portal, which gives you a sense of the range.

The Donetsk group had over fifty active members at its peak. People who showed up, helped newcomers get started, and in several cases contributed to Drupal core and the global community.

Drupal Cafe was a regular meetup format: three short talks from community members, coffee breaks between them. The breaks tended to run longer than the talks themselves.

Code sprints were different. Participants blocked off half a day or a full day to push patches together: Drupal core, contrib modules, the drupal.org site. Less lecture, more doing.

All of it ran on local backing. Exadel, Ciklum, and the Izolyatsia cultural platform each provided space at different points.

The biggest event the group organized was DrupalCamp Donetsk 2014, which brought together over a hundred developers from across Ukraine and beyond.