Drupal Community Challenges in the East: Real Lessons from Pakistan & China
Drupal community challenges in markets like Pakistan and China share a common root: proprietary technology still dominates the enterprise food chain, making open source adoption a cultural and commercial uphill battle before it is ever a technical one. Building a Drupal community in these contexts is not simply a matter of finding developers — it is about shifting institutional trust away from licensed software and toward a model where the community itself is the product. That shift is harder in the East, and considerably more important.
At the heart of Drupal’s global success is its community. As Dries Buytaert put it: “It’s really the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. So fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than just managing the code base.”
This is easier said than done — especially in environments where proprietary technologies still sit on top of the proverbial food chain. It is this challenge of engaging communities in the East that Kubair Shirazee and Liang discussed in their session Drupal Community in China & Pakistan at DrupalCon Munich.
Why Drupal Community Challenges Run Deeper in the East
Kubair shared his experiences of setting up a Drupal software house in Islamabad to augment Ikonami’s tech teams in London — the challenges of linking with the community locally, the market potential, and the growing strength of Drupal in the East despite those challenges.
The Drupal community challenges faced in these markets are structural, not superficial. Developers working in Pakistan and China operate in ecosystems where enterprise procurement defaults to proprietary vendors, where open source contribution is not yet a recognised career signal, and where local Drupal camps and meetups must be built from scratch without the infrastructure that more established markets take for granted. The session explored all of this — and made the case that the East is not a Drupal backwater but a frontier.
Building Open Source Community in Pakistan: What We Learned
Getting to that frontier requires a different kind of community building. In Pakistan, the work of organisations like DRUPAK — a Drupal Association member that delivers Drupal awareness programmes at universities across the country — shows what sustained, ground-up open source community development looks like. It is not a single conference session. It is years of unglamorous, consistent effort: training, mentoring, demonstrating that open source adoption in emerging markets is not just viable but strategically advantageous.
The session at DrupalCon Munich made this argument in 2012. More than a decade on, the evidence has arrived.
The Drupal Opportunity in Emerging Markets
DrupalCon Asia 2025 took place in Nara, Japan — a signal that the community Kubair and Liang were advocating for has taken root. Asia-Pacific now accounts for 21% of the global Drupal development services market. Pakistan’s Drupal community continues to grow, with developers contributing to Drupal.org and local camps bringing practitioners together across the country. The World Bank projects internet users in developing countries to reach 3.1 billion — the market for Drupal in the East is not a future prospect. It is already here.
The Drupal community challenges of 2012 have not disappeared. But the community that has grown around them is considerably stronger — and the case for open source community building in the East no longer needs to be made from first principles. It just needs people willing to do the work.
You can learn more about the Drupal community and get involved at Drupal.org.
Kubair Shirazee is the founder of Peace Through Prosperity and an advocate for open source technology in emerging markets. Follow on Twitter: @kubairshirazee