Sunlight Labs

This weekend AJ and I are hosting a mapping hacking party in association with the Great American Hackathon. Our goal is to generate a custom set of tiles for U.S. congressional districts with MapBox. We want to make it easy for people to embed custom congressional map layers on top of their Google maps or OpenLayers in the lead up to the 2010 mid term election. We will use the U.S. TIGER data that is now hosted in Amazon's cloud and TileMill for the tile generation. We're aiming to get the following done:

• A public set of tiles hosted on MapBox for the public to use Documentation on how to integrate these tiles with Google maps
• Improvements made to the documentation explaining how to work with the TIGER public data set

AJ and I are also really excited to share with people how we think about theming maps and how tile generation in MapBox works. We are going to kick off the day at 10:00 am with hot coffee, and we'll each do a ten minute presentation on theming and on how tile generation works. So even if you can't stay for the whole day, stop in for a cup of coffee and to hear about these topics. The rest of the day will be technical, so please set up Quantum GIS and come ready to wrangle some data. There will be fresh coffee and pizza for fuel.