We often are so focused on the future opportunities of collaborative technologies that we may not see the outcome of successful collaborative work right in front of us. The Drupal Open Source content management and community development platform is a powerful Web 2.0 system that is being used to facilitate distributed teams, publish blogs, host communities, and serve thousands of Internet websites. But the Drupal project itself is an example of how a large loosely knit group of people can produce powerful results.

You may not recognized the Drupal name but you have used the product. According to estimates the number of sites using Drupal is in excess of 50,000! These include MTV UK, Sony's MusicBox, Leo Laporte's TWiT site, NowPublic, The Onion, Spread Firefox, Linux Journal, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary, Draft Obama, and Chris Dodd for President. Web 2.0 darlings Flock and SocialText use Drupal on their corporate websites. Drupal.org, the project's home site, is one of the busiest Drupal sites serving over half a million software downloads a month. This includes downloads of Drupal itself (about 80,000 a month) and numerous extensions available for the product.