Video Series: County of Hawai'i General Plan engagement strategy

The case study for County of Hawai’i General Plan update will be published in two separate parts. This first edition will focus on the choices they made to craft the ideal participant experience, while the second will delve into the promotional efforts, outcomes, and impact of their implementation once analysis and reporting have been completed. 

Background:

The County of Hawai’i is in the process of updating the county’s general plan. The Draft General Plan 2045 was released for public comment on September 18, 2023 and will remain open until April 1, 2024. So far, they’ve received over a thousand comments with a few weeks to go. 

Video Series:

We are grateful to present highlights from a community workshop for residents, where Bethany Morrison walked them through our platform perfectly. Bethany oversaw the General Plan Comprehensive Review and the county’s Climate Action Plan. Midway through the General Plan update process, Morrison was elected interim administrator of the county's new Office of Sustainability, Climate, Equity and Resilience. Bethany has been with the county for over 15 years and has served in various roles in the Planning Department, most recently as a Senior Planner .

‍Please enjoy the highlights from their presentation that shed light on their implementation of Konveio’s Document Engagement Platform. 

Introduction to Konveio’s Viewer (3 minutes)

• Details what a visitor will typically experience when a document is uploaded to Konveio, including a demonstration of our powerful navigation menu and a preview of content overlays. 
• Strategic decisions: Added a glossary to define terms and jargon throughout the draft general plan and allowed visitors to download the PDF to print, share, or review how they please. They also included bookmark links in their PDF file for Konveio to automatically generate a useful table of contents menu. 

Commenting on documents (2 Minutes)

• Over 1,000 comments have been submitted on Konveio during the commenting period already. Inviting open ended feedback from the community in a transparent way ensures that participants are both heard and feel heard too. They may also explore the feedback and ideas of others to become more aware of the views that other community members have, and upvote, downvote, or reply to start a threaded conversation. Since comments are collected digitally and in the context of the materials, they do not require organization or transcription before analysis and reporting and can be used to extract real time insights throughout the process.
• Strategic decisions: The team chose open participation, requiring only a name and email for easy participation. The team also implemented custom comment categories to track which districts are underrepresented (a paid add-on). They monitored participation throughout the commenting period and focused their outreach efforts to ensure equitable participation across all districts. 

Interactive Executive Summary (1 Minute)

• Strategic decisions: mirrored their executive summary to provide information at a glance from any page and to provide easy access to navigate to key areas of the draft plan. They included local imagery to give a sense of brand identity, and being the County of Hawai’i, it looks spectacular!

AI Enhance Document Search (2 Minutes)

• Strategic decisions: Elected to present AI-Assistant over AI-Search to provide an ai generated summary of information related to a visitors' query rather than page references alone. This equipped visitors with a powerful way to explore the information in their plan along with a brief summary of relevant information so they can move quickly.
• Impact preview: Thus far, over 800 searches have been made between AI-Assistant and our ArcGIS Integration below.  

Two-Way ArcGIS integration (1 Minute)

• Strategic Decisions: Equipped visitors with ample instructions on how to use the map and integration using an overlay of helpful explanations and a detailed tutorial video. The sidebar was crafted to provide access to a wealth of features including a before and after slider to compare proposed land use parcels to their previous land use map from 2005. They chose to provide two to three access points to view the map throughout a participant's experience, including an additional button atop the viewer for visitors to open ArcGIS in a new tab in full-screen. 
• The integration with ArcGIS allows visitors to easily explore between map layers and the documents that define what each type of land use means.

To be continued!

Stay tuned for part two of this case study where we’ll dive into the results and impact of their engagement on Konveio. Expect to hear about their experiences using Konveio’s AI-assisted analysis workflows, and more. 

Again we’re proud to be supporting the county of Hawai’i in engaging their residents on this important plan for the future of their island. In the meantime you can read more about the history of the project here.