The famous WhereCamp geo-unconference is hitting Washington, DC this Friday and Saturday in its inaugural edition — and it’s completely sold out. WhereCampDC Ignite talks are happening tomorrow evening at 7:00 pm, with the WhereCampDC unconference taking place on all day Saturday. There will also be a happy hour starting at 5:30 on Saturday at the Big Hunt that’s open to everyone, so if you didn’t get tickets to WhereCamp, you still have a chance to come talk geo this weekend.

We’ve talked about how awesome WhereCamp SF has been for our team to attend as a venue for sharing tech ideas with new and old friends and encouraging collaboration on open source tools. So we have been helping make it shine locally — MapBox is a gold sponsor, Development Seed is a bronze, Bonnie has been helping the lead planners Nathaniel and Kate with logistics, Saman designed the t-shirts, and Matt worked on the banners.

Many of us are attending. Look for Eric who will give an ignite talk on TileMill, our open source map design studio, and where Development Seed sees the future of mapping headed.

Saturday is the main conference day where attendees will meet and on-the-spot sessions will emerge. We are looking to hold a few sessions on TileMill and advanced Javascript mapping themes. AJ and Saman, as our lead cartographers, will be attending and have in mind one TileMill session for new users to learn the basics (installation, where to get data, and what is possible) and one advanced session on how to style OpenStreetMap data stored in PostGIS using the latest TileMill release. Tom, our lead mapping architect, is planning a session on “Putting maps on the web: bleeding edge APIs, the real challenges, and wax” — basically why, in addition to OpenLayers, you should be paying attention to ModestMaps and Leaflet, and how to leverage our Wax API. I’m looking to meet with Mapnik users at the conference to vision future features and directions for the rendering library, highlighting the NodeJS bindings and an ambitious performance roadmap.

Hope to see you there! And you can always follow along at #wherecampdc.