Tomorrow I’m giving a keynote at WhereCamp Boston about the state of open source mapping tools and possibilities for the future of GIS. The conference, themed around ‘Spatial Society, Hacking, and Connections’, promises to include many of the cool things happening in the Boston geospatial scene, which meets regularly under the iSpatialBoston group.

Building MapBox has meant building a lot of open source: we host 39 projects under our GitHub organization and contribute to many more like Modest Maps. Development Seed also has BSD code on GitHub that we use to build all of our websites.

My presentation will touch upon the tools that we’ve made, like TileMill, those we contribute to, like Mapnik, and the places where the future is being built, like vector rendering in d3 and usage of WebGL like MapsGL. Where Camp Boston 2011 Edit descriptionmacwright.org

See the presentation fullscreen (powered by big)

I’m also planning to lead a session on map design and demo some of the newest open-source code in our toolset, like the professional map previewer lots and UTFGrid 1.2’s advanced templating support. I also just propsed a session on Javascript and would love to share some insights from developing and deploying both client and server-side Javascript applications.

It’s exciting to talk about the bigger picture that we’re seeing from being deep in implementation at MapBox, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with the Boston scene.