In 2010, Stamen was awarded a Knight News Grant to build tools that help people tell better stories about cities. In 2014 we were awarded another grant from Knight to extend and support this project, as follows:
- Terrain layers, at all zoom levels, outside the US
- Transfer the hosting and processing to a cloud-based infrastructure to increase stability, scalability, server response and service levels, creating more reliability and confidence for those considering using the tile sets, & to allow for more frequent data updates
- Improving the accessibility and openness of the code base for the whole system
You can help out by adding terrain data sources to the wiki page here.
We also have a Tumblr blog where we will document the process of collecting the best available freely-available terrain datasets for the entire world, and developing the cloud-based tools and workflow to process that data.