[NB: Video of Dries' keynote has been posted here: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/live] Dries opened Drupalcon with an inspiring keynote, discussing the successes and failures of the Drupal 7 development cycle, and the proposed changes for the Drupal 8 development cycle.  (Yes, we're already talking Drupal 8.) He started off with some statistics:

• This Drupalcon has 3000 attendees.
• The attendees will consume $100,000 in coffee.
• Every major government uses Drupal in some fashion.
• 1.7% of websites run on Drupal.
• Drupal.org has 551,392 community members

He noted that he would open the Drupal 8 branch today, as soon as one of the git masters shows him how to: "I'm not quite sure how to do branches yet in git." In Drupal 8, we will see a cap in the number of outstanding critical bugs at a time at 15 (any more than that and new features will not be accepted).  We will see feature maintainers as different aspects are developed, adopting a Linux-kernel like development model, and there will be several quality checks on each feature before it is committed into the D8 mainline. Check out the video of Dries's keynote if you want to hear more, and ask yourself: "What have you done today to make you feel proud?"