1. Why: a moku is a whole, and the money is only part of it
A moku runs from the mountain to the sea. Its forest holds the rain, its streams carry it, its reef takes what the streams bring, and its people farm, fish, build, teach, and clean up along the way. None of those parts works alone. A fence line in the uplands changes a stream; a stream changes a reef; a crew that keeps a trail changes who walks it and what they leave behind.
The Green Fee pays for some of that work. For FY2027 the Legislature funded ninety-one projects with it. Each one is a real piece of a real moku, and each one matters — but a list of funded projects is not a picture of a place. A project's result only means something next to what surrounds it: the stream it drains to, the reef below, the school next door, the crew that will still be there when the money is spent. The question a moku's people actually ask is not who got funded but how is our place doing, and is the work helping.
That is why these are commons reports and not a showcase. The record they keep belongs to the moku, and it is built to hold everything that helps answer that question, side by side:
- The funded work — in the Green Fee report, what the Legislature paid for, what has been announced about it, and what each project reports in its own words and numbers. These are the first inputs, because they are already public.
- What the community observes — water, soil, plants, fish, visitors, weather, counted and recorded by the stewards, crews, students, and labs who are on the land anyway. This is how the whole system answers back, and it is the part no budget line can supply.
- The place itself — every record read in its moku, so the funded work and the observations land on the same ground and can be read together.
Green Fee projects are the first inputs, not the subject. The subject is the moku, and a report that starts from a steward's own work rather than a budget line serves it the same way.
2. What a commons means here
Calling the record a commons commits it to five things:
- It is held in common. The record belongs to the people of the moku it describes. Today Āina Design Corp keeps it; it is built to be kept by the people learning to manage their moku, through Moku Steward Training at Hui Koʻe ʻĀina.
- Anyone may add to it, with a source. A public notice with a link. An observation with who made it, where, and when. A correction with the record it contradicts. Nothing anonymous, nothing unsourced.
- A person decides what publishes. Every addition is checked against the same rules and reviewed by a person before it goes public. The checks are automatic; the decision never is.
- Everything traces back. Every fact on every page points to where it came from — the State's worksheet, a news release, a crew's log, a lab's report — and the history of every change is public.
- It is open to use. The record is published as data anyone may cite, aggregate, compare, and build on, with the derivation theirs and the source named (Document 3).
3. Who owns what
| What | Whose it is | What the report does with it |
|---|---|---|
| The budget and the program record | The Legislature and the State department that administers the program. Always the authority for what was funded. | Lists it from the public worksheet; links to the State's own record and never replaces it. |
| A project's story and its numbers | The project — the program or group doing the work. | Publishes them in the project's own words once a person has reviewed them, with the project's source note on every figure. |
| An observation from the field | The person or group who made it, credited by name, shared under an open license. | Records it against the place where it was made and reads it next to the funded work there. (The path for this is being built; see §4.) |
| The register itself | The moku's people, in common. Kept by Āina Design Corp until its stewards take it on. | Holds the records, their history, and the rules; builds the pages and the data download. |
| The maps and dashboards | The State's own mapping, when the State sets one up. | Links to them; keeps no map of its own and no parcel boundaries. |
| The moku | Tradition. The Mokunet shared map holds the 33 moku of Hawaiʻi and never redraws one. | Reads every record in its moku, as context — whose place — never as a land-use class or a jurisdiction. |
| The way of reporting | Hui Koʻe ʻĀina, the network's community learning hub, which teaches the practice. The rules for reports that do not start from a budget line are being written with it. | Follows the published rules; the stewards it trains are who the reports are built to be kept by. |
4. Inputs that work together
Three kinds of input meet in the record, and the report is honest about which are here today.
- The budget line. Here today for all ninety-one projects: the program, the title, the amount, the fund, the worksheet page it came from.
- Public notices and what projects report. Notices are here as they are recorded, with their sources. Stories and results arrive as projects report them and a person approves them; none have yet.
- Community observation. Being built. The same method is being put to work at the Magoon Maker Lab (Hui Koʻe ʻĀina, UH Mānoa): a steward at a place records what they see on a plain form, the record lands on a map layer with the same fields and checks, and a person reviews it before it publishes (Document 4). The tools that bring those observations into this record are the next releases of the toolkit the report is built with. Observations from research labs enter through the network's research commons and are read here by moku.
Read together, by moku, these are how a place's people see whether the work is helping. Read apart, they are a list of grants and a pile of readings. The report exists to keep them together.
5. How to copy it
Adding a funding year is adding one file, checked by the same rules, approved through the same review, built by the same process. Copying the method for another moku, another program, or another place follows the same steps this report followed:
- Say whose record it is and who will keep it. A commons has keepers; name them.
- Say what question the record must answer — for a moku, how is our place doing, and is the work helping.
- Start from what is already public — a budget, a grant list, a plan — and check it against its official source.
- Use the place's own vocabulary for places, work, and people.
- Agree what will be measured, and how, with the people who will do the measuring, before anything is shown.
- Check every record against the same rules, automatically, on every change.
- Have the people who know the place review before the first page publishes.
- State the limits on every page and in every download.
6. The made-up year as a worked example
Before the real projects were listed, the report ran on a made-up funding year: six fictional projects across five moku and four islands, four published and two held back on purpose, so the controls could be seen working rather than described. Held projects are counted but have no page and are in no download. A project cannot publish without a story, at least one result, its source, and its moku. Every page shows where its facts came from, and the data download matches the pages exactly. That year is kept in the repository for testing and is marked practice data wherever it builds.
One of its projects shows the fee's loop closing: a reef-stewardship crew pairs monitoring the reef with briefing the visitors on the shore. The visitor who paid the fee meets the steward the fee funds, at the place itself, and that meeting is recorded as a result.
7. The moku
Every record reads in its moku, the traditional district whose people the work is for. The moku says whose place a project serves. The State's land-use classifications say what may happen where. The record carries the first and claims nothing about the second. The moku is what lets the funded work and the community's observations be read on the same ground.
8. Boundaries
Every project in the Green Fee report was funded by the Legislature; nothing here is a report from the State, and no agency has adopted or endorsed this site. Where a report tracks State funding, the State's records are the authority for every fact of the budget. Where the report reads a place from a project's name, it says so and asks for confirmation. Nothing here decides funding, eligibility, policy, or enforcement. The rules the record is checked against are published with it.