See the FCC announcement here.
MapBox has been winning a lot of high-profile converts lately, such as Foursquare. In my opinion, it’s one of the more perfect web mapping solutions, commercial or open-source, to come along in a while. The combination of cartographic engine (Mapnik), tile generation (TileMill) and storage (MBTiles) make MapBox one of the most elegant ways to serve beautiful maps currently available.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been using MapBox to make a number of compelling maps available to the public. Additonally, the FCC’s site has been built on the open-source content management system Drupal. Today, the FCC announced that they are making the source code to their MapBox module for Drupal, SlashMap, available. This should provide a straightforward way to integrate MapBox maps with a Drupal site.
The FCC has been very active in using open-source tools for their work and it’s great to see them giving back to the community in this manner. It’s a phenomenon that I think we’ll see a lot more of from all levels of government as understanding of and comfort with open-source models increases.
So, if you are a Drupal user, you may want to check out SlashMaps as a way to integrate some very nice web maps. Kudos to Michael Byrne and his team at the FCC for taking this step.