Dries Buytaert

Drupal has thousands of contributors. About twice a year, we stop contributing long enough to have a beer together. We call that DrupalCon. ;-)

DrupalCon DC, or DCDC for short, is this week, and I'm leaving in a few moments to attend. DCDC's official events are held March 4th through the 7th at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There is little doubt that this will be our largest DrupalCon yet. In fact, the conference has been sold out at 1,300 ticketed attendees since early in February (before the conference program was online!). With guests and volunteers, around 1,500 in total are expected to attend.

The conference schedule is great, featuring multiple tracks of workshops, presentations, and birds-of-a-feather meetups on all the important topics in our community. Special presentations include keynotes by David Weinberger and Chris Messina and a recap of the Drupal.org redesign by Mark Boulton. My regular presentation on the "State of Drupal" is Wednesday at 10:15am.

Acquia is a DCDC platinum sponsor, and Jay Batson, Tom Erickson and I are leading a presentation on Wednesday at 1:45pm providing an overview of Acquia's Drupal support model, our vision looking forward, and the newest products and services that we're launching this week. I'd like to invite everyone to attend, ask questions, and learn more about how Acquia intends to keep participating in the community.

Of course, DCDC is largely driven by volunteers, and many of them are hard at work already. It takes a lot to coordinate a huge event like this, and everyone involved — from the local volunteers to the Drupal Association to the event planning staff — has my thanks!

I'm looking forward to meet you all!