Dries Buytaert

It's that time of year again where we are gearing up for another great DrupalCon. Next week, 3000 Drupalists, including more than 70 Acquians, will be migrating out west to the Rocky Mountains for an action packed week filled with sessions, stickers, beer, and lots of face time with the best open source community on the planet.

There is one remarkable event that caught my attention and that speaks volumes about an important trend we're seeing: the Higher Ed Drupal Users meeting on Wednesday.

Why is this so interesting you ask? Well ... it all started with one of Acquia's team members reaching out to a couple of universities from Canada to organize a meeting at DrupalCon where they could connect and share insider tips for what works for them at their respective university. However, it turned out they were already talking on a regular basis and what they really wanted was to talk to others from universities outside of their immediate circle. Word spread, and now what began as a lunch meeting has turned into a meet-up with approximately 50 Higher Education Drupal users coming together to talk about how they can grow Drupal on their campus and overcome the common challenges they are facing. This is what DrupalCon and the Drupal community are all about!

As Drupal adoption has grown, so has adoption in Higher Education. We recently found that out of 3260 universities that we tracked, over 35% of them are using Drupal including 71 of the top 100 universities like Harvard, Duke, MIT, UPenn, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Stanford, McGill, and many more. That is pretty amazing!

But it makes sense because Drupal provides significant advantages to universities, including support for large scale mulit-site deployments, fit with centralized IT organizations, low end-user training requirements, lower costs, appeal among digital natives and young developers, support for integration with campus authentication and authorization systems, and strong content relation capabilities - particularly taxonomy support for libraries.

I look forward to meeting with this unique group of Drupal users as they learn from each other, and undoubtedly teach us more about the specific needs in higher education. DrupalCon here we come!