Drupal is a free, open-source platform for building social publishing web sites. It is built and maintained by the community of developers and individuals who use it daily, and has developed a rich ecosystem of add-ons for special needs like electronic commerce, social networking, news aggregation, and so on.

Drupal's primary focus has always been on enabling communities to collaborate and communicate effectively. In particular, geographically dispersed communities who must rely even more heavily on such software tools. The drupal.org web site itself is an example; dozens of thousands of individuals from around the world use the site to collaborate on the process of enhancing the Drupal software, building and maintaining their own add-on tools, and building web sites with those tools. It's been used to build artists' home pages, citizen-driven journalism web sites, large information archives for museums and nonprofit organizations, and more.

In 2000, permanent internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's high-speed connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: there was no simple way to share information and collaborate on this mini-network. This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items. When Dries moved out after graduation, the group decided to put the internal website online so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and keep up on each others' personal lives. The site went live at www.drop.org, and slowly its audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site. In January 2001, Dries released the software behind drop.org as an open source project. His purpose was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. Today, more than seven years later, the community of developers and enthusiasts who launched Drupal has grown by many orders of magnitude.

A small, rotating group of individuals (founder Dries Buytaert included) serve as the gatekeepers for the core Drupal project, ensuring that code added to the official core project is high-quality. Any member of the Drupal community, however, can submit new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements for consideration. In the past year alone almost 1000 individuals have contributed changes to the software in that fashion, and an active core of individual volunteers are responsible for maintaining specific portions of the Drupal code. Whenever a change is proposed, any member of the Drupal community can vote on the quality and applicability of the new addition or fix, making the project's participation model one of the most open and democratic in the world of open source.