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

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 remained open until April 1, 2024. They’ve received over a thousand comments, between the draft document and map. 

We are grateful to present highlights from a community workshop for residents, where Bethany Morrison and Amy DeBay walked them through our platform perfectly. Bethany oversaw the General Plan Comprehensive Review and the county’s Climate Action Plan.

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 navigation menu and a preview of content overlays. 
• 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. 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.
• The team chose open participation, requiring only a name and email for easy participation. They 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)

• 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)

• 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 (6 Minutes)

• Embedded Interactive Maps: Users were able to access land use and roads maps directly from the Konveio document viewer via a map icon, allowing exploration of proposed recommendations within a familiar ArcGIS interface on desktop or mobile.
• Seamless Document Linking: Selecting a feature on the map activates a “Konveio Document” button that takes users to the relevant section in the planning document, enabling context-rich navigation between spatial data and policy text.
• Commenting by Location: Users were able to search for a specific address, select a location on the map, and submit location-specific comments with optional attachments via Esri's Survey123 tool - all integrated into the ArcGIS map and instantly viewable by planning staff.
• Layer Controls and Transparency: The system includes toggleable data layers, a legend for interpreting map symbology, and a privacy-protective approach where only comment content is publicly displayed while user details are kept private for staff follow-up.

Konveio is 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.