This week Tom, AJ, and Dane are in Denver attending FOSS4G, the annual open source mapping conference held by OSGeo. We’re excited to learn from the other folks attending the conference, and we’ll also be talking about the open source mapping tools we’re working on with our mapping projects and MapBox’s suite of mapping tools.

Today Tom will lead a session on Turning Data into Beautiful Maps, where he’ll talk about the current ecosystem of open source mapping technologies and then dive into detail on the stack that we use — Mapnik for rendering, TileMill for designing, Wax as a mapping API gateway, and TileStream for map hosting. Tom will talk briefly about what each of these tools can do on their own, and then walk through how we use them together to create fast, beautiful custom maps. You can get a sneak peek of his presentation here. This session is at 11:00 am today (Wednesday, September 14) in the Silver room.

On Friday, AJ will present on Advanced Cartography for the Web where he’ll introduce strategies to design beautiful, effective, and interactive maps with open source mapping tools that are accessible for designers — and not just developers. Specifically on the tool side he’ll talk about how he designs maps using the CSS-like Carto styling language, TileMill, and data from OpenStreetMap. He’ll also walk through the design decisions behind some maps he’s recently made, including Open Streets, World Bright, and one of our headquarters here in DC. This session is on Friday, September 16 at 10:30 am in the Silver room.

Also yesterday Dane led an advanced workshop on leveraging Mapnik and TileMill for custom mapping. If you missed it, he’ll post a tutorial and other materials from that online later this week.

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these tools or strategies, check out these sessions, follow Tom, AJ, and Dane on twitter, and of course look for them at the conference.