Capital Camp kicks off today, and Dave will be there leading a session on Making Beautiful Maps w/ Open Source + Open Data. Specifically he’ll talk about TileMill, our open source map design studio that makes it easy to design and share custom maps online, and how to use these maps in Drupal sites.

Visualizing data in maps helps you quickly and compellingly tell the story behind your data, as you can see above in the map of excess properties owned by the Federal government in Washington, DC. New open source software makes it easier to make fast, beautiful, and entirely custom maps with your own data. In this session, Dave will talk about the strategy behind using custom maps in websites and then give a step-by-step walk through on how to take data from spreadsheet, populate it on an interactive map, design that map however you like, and get it working on a Drupal website and on mobile devices.

He’ll also walk through the strategy and design process of several maps we’ve created using TileMill, including one of the areas hardest hit by the Japan earthquake intended to drive giving to those regions, Data.AWiderCircle.org, one showing a local nonprofits operations and constituents, and one of U.S. Census data.

This session takes place today at 1:00 pm in Session Room 307 at Capital Camp.