I went to FOSS4G this year, the primary conference for open source map hackers. I've been playing with geographic software for awhile but have little expertise in the area, so this was a fun and quick way to get up to speed. It was a good conference, well worth my time, here are some notes.

My primary takeaway from the conference is there are a lot of options for open source geo and it's still difficult to know which to use. So many choices. For now I'm keeping my head down and learning GDAL, PostGIS, Mapnik, Tilestache, and Polymaps. PostGIS is the big one, a set of spatial extensions to the Postgres database. The book PostGIS in Action is a big help. Also one small takeaway: a whole lot of people are using Node.js for real stuff, not just the fashionable web kids in the Mission.

I met or heard some very impressive people and companies. Development Seed is building a lot of great mapmaking software, including the TileMill tool I played with recently. Stewart Long of Public Laboratory is doing inspirational work with citizen aerial mapping. Vizzuality got a lot of buzz as a Spanish company doing beautiful map design. Michael Byrne gave an exciting talk about the work he's doing inside FCC to make data available. And Brian Timoney gave a strong talk on how far government agencies have to go in publishing data effectively.

The rest of this post is a link dump of some of the people and things I saw at the conference. I'm no "curator," just a typist, sorry for the lack of organization.

People

Tom MacWright
Peter Batty
Frank Warmerdam
Schuyler Erle
Tripping the Bits
Howard Butler
Paul Ramsey
Dane Springmeyer
AJ Ashton
Stewart Long
dbsgeo.com

Companies

Cirrus Technologies
Development Seed
The Grassroots Mapping Forum
The Public Laboratory
Vizzuality
Paragon Corporation
skobbler
SimpleGeo

Code (non geo)

Socket.IO: cross-browser WebSocket
Inkscape.
Apache JMeter
Node.js kuler
Color Trends + Palettes :: COLOURlovers

Code

Carto: A CSS-like Map Styling Language
Virtual Machine for TileMill
GeoNode
GeoScript
GeoServer
GeoTools The Open Source Java GIS Toolkit
glob3, a 3D GIS framework
Imposm
PDAL - Point Data Abstraction Library
libLAS - ASPRS LiDAR data translation toolset
Cartagen MapKnitter
MapMill: Crowdsourced map processing
Opticks
WKTRaster – PostGIS
SpatialSearch - Solr Wiki
Arc2Earth | Publish your GIS data instantly to the Cloud
Geospatial Indexing - MongoDB
cloudhead/cradle
couchbase/geocouch
mapbox/landspeed.js - GitHub
vmx/geocouch-utils
OSX Downloads | dbsgeo.com

Code with a Web bent

mod-geocache - apache module for caching map tiles
Leaflet - JavaScript library for interactive maps
MapBox
MapBox / Wax
MapFish — MapFish
Mapnik C++/Python GIS Toolkit
Mapnik2
MapQuery
MapServer
OpenLayers: Home
TileStream
MapMint - new Web GIS experience
Mapnik and Node.js
tinyows
AppGeo/geo - GitHub
chelm/FOSS4G-Node.js-and-Polymaps-Workshop
stamen/modestmaps-js
Vizzuality/Windshaft

Data

Geography Markup Language
CartoDB Blog
Dutch open data
Earth Observation Day
Geospatial One Stop
Grassroots Mapping
The National Map
RTMM Home
Open Database License
Developer - National Broadband Map
Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline
U.S. Census Bureau - TIGER/Line
FCC Developers
OS OpenData - Ordnance Survey
Simple Feature Access - Part 2: SQL Option)
OSSIM

Products and Demos

WebGL Earth
Map Chat
dthompson/geotrack - GitHub
dthompson/mapchat
sabman/geochat-example
Welcome to OSGeo-Live 5.0
MapQuest Open
NYC hurricane evacuation map (web)
NYC hurricane evacuation map (PDF)
Geospatial analysis tool for Red List assessment
This Tract
uDig : Home
WorldMap
National Broadband Map
CartoDB

Portals

OpenGeo : Home
Geospatial Information & Technology Association – GITA
Welcome to INSPIRE geoportal
OSGeo.org | Your Open Source Compass