Where 2.0, one of the largest and longest running geo conference, is happening this week in Santa Clara, CA. I’ll be there, along with Dane, to talk about our experience in the open source mapping space, and specifically to talk about our map design studio TileMill that lowers the barrier to entry in map design, allowing people without a GIS background to design beautiful maps like these. I’m also looking forward to learning about the tools other folks are developing.

This afternoon I’ll lead a workshop on how to make fast interactive maps for the web without using Flash or Google maps, which is important issue for anyone trying to move highly custom maps onto open source and standards based code. Primarily, I’ll discuss the UTFGrid spec, a scheme that encodes interactivity data for map tiles in a space efficient manner and works in both modern and older browsers — a large obstacle to interactivity, and will weigh this approach to interactivity, with other open and closed techniques. I’ll also show several examples of fast interactive maps on a website and a mobile device, and will walk through how to make a simple interactive map with TileMill. For those who aren’t at the conference, here are my slides.

If you are at the conference and want to talk more about this or see a live demo of TileMill, please come find me or contact me on twitter at @tmcw.