Today was the first day of the first ever Mapnik Code Sprint that is bringing together committers and cartographers to improve and add features to the open source mapping toolkit. Tom and AJ are in London participating in the sprint out of Cloudmade’s offices in London, while Stamen is hosting people in their offices in San Francisco to work on the sprint remotely.

CC-By-SA — open street map data

Today the focus was on planning for Mapnik’s future, with the group discussing the current state of Mapnik, future features and design needs, and advanced cartography needs and dreams, followed by an afternoon of starting work on some of those goals. Tomorrow and Sunday participants will dive into more coding, fixing bugs, improving performance, and writing documentation.

In the next few days, Tom and AJ will blog about what was accomplished at the sprint and where Mapnik is going. For updates from the sprint check them out on twitter — @tmcw and @aj_ashton.