Open Source
Stamen is an active contributor to and author of multiple open source projects. These collaborative efforts often play a valuable role in our commercial work, and lessons learned from working for clients have a way of making their way into code releases that the public at large can benefit from.
Aight
A collection of tools for making reasonable JavaScript and CSS work in IE8.
Polymaps
Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.
Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.
CityTracking
Dotspotting is the first project Stamen is releasing as part of Citytracking, a project funded by the Knight News Challenge.
We're making tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible. The code for Dotspotting is available for download on Github, and licensed for used under the GNU General Public License.
Modest Maps
Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python.
Our intent is to provide a minimal, extensible, customizable, and free display library for discriminating designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects. Modest Maps provides a core set of features in a tight, clean package, with plenty of hooks for additional functionality.
Cascadenik
Cascadenik implements cascading stylesheets for Mapnik, a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications.
It's an abstraction layer and preprocessor that converts special, CSS-like syntax into Mapnik-compatible style definitions. It's easier to write complex style rules using the alternative syntax, because it allows for separation of symbolizers and provides a mechanism for inheritance.
Tile Drawer
Tile Drawer makes designing and hosting custom maps simple and straightforward. The project lets anyone run their own OpenStreetMap server in the cloud with one-step configuration and zero administration. You can use the rendered map tiles in a number of ways: with other GIS data in OpenLayers, in a Flash application built on Modest Maps, or layered into a Google Map as a custom map tile overlay.
Walking Papers
OpenStreetMap, the wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit, is in need of a new way to add content. Walking Papers is a way to “round trip” map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.
TileStache
TileStache is a Python-based server application that can serve up map tiles based on rendered geographic data.
You might be familiar with TileCache, the venerable open source WMS server from MetaCarta. TileStache is similar, but we hope simpler and better-suited to the needs of designers and cartographers.