This weekend I, along with Dane and Tom, will be attending State of the Map in Denver (as well as FOSS4G immediately afterwards). OpenStreetMap is an invaluable asset in our mapping toolbox, and we’ll be there to share how we’ve been making use of it (particularly with TileMill, our custom map design studio, and TileStream, our map hosting service) and get insight from the community on improvements that could be made to our tools. On Sunday I will give a talk in the OSM Tech Talks track about our OSM Bright Template, a map stylesheet intended to provide a good starting point for creating a custom map with OSM data.

I’ll discuss how we’re making the template easier to understand, more efficient to modify, and faster to render by leveraging new and improved tools that weren’t available when we first started working on it — such as Carto, a CSS-like map styling language, TileMill, and ImpOSM, an OSM data importer. I’ll show examples of the template’s flexibility and how it’s been used in mapping and visualization projects.

Check out the full State of the Map schedule for more details on the conference. If you’re in Denver, be sure to find Tom, Dane, and I — we’d be happy to answer all your TileMill and MapBox questions.