The commons reports
A commons report is the public side of a record kept in common: who is caring for a place, what they did, what came of it, and where each fact came from. Some reports track State funding, as the Green Fee report does. Others will track a land trust's own work, a community group's season, or a watershed's monitoring, with no State funding involved. Every report follows the same rules and the same review.
The Green Fee report, FY2027
The projects the State's fee on visitors — the Green Fee — paid for this year, each in the moku it serves, with what each reports as the work happens. Ninety-one projects across eleven departments: the first entries in the record, and one part of the care each moku receives.
91 projects · $129 million · 12 of 33 moku named · 0 with results published · 2 public notices on record
Reports that do not start from a budget line are the next thing the register will hold. They start with who the steward is and the moku they work in; the rules for them are being written with Hui Koʻe ʻĀina, and they will enter through the same review. None is published yet.
What a moku can know reaches past any one report. Researchers and community groups add water, soil, species, and community measurements, each tied to its moku, to the Mokunet Research Commons, whose community intake is being tested now. It gathers more than the field survey a project uses to report its results, and that survey stays as it is: a report says what the work did, and the research commons shows how the place is responding.
How a record grows
Every record in a commons report is added in three kinds of step, each with its own rule:
- Public notices — something said publicly about the work, with a link to where it was said. These go on the page as soon as someone records them.
- Place — the island and the moku, confirmed by the people doing the work. Results count in their moku, or they do not count at all.
- Story and results — the work in its own words, and the numbers it reports. These wait for review: the record needs a story, at least one result, a source, and its moku, and then a person approves it. A person publishes, never software.
Information arrives however it arrives. The Green Fee list came from the State's budget worksheet, a PDF read with help and typed into the register, every figure traced to its page; a spreadsheet loads on its own. Whatever its source, every record is checked against the same rules. The pages and each report's data download are rebuilt from the register, so they can never disagree, and every change is kept in the history, so anyone can see what changed and who approved it.
A new report is one new file. The State's maps and dashboards stay the State's; a report links to them and never replaces them. The rules the register is checked against are published with it, along with a second rule set for a program that wants to track budget releases and spending.
How these reports are made
Two documents to read, written for managers and stewards and for anyone copying the method for another place.
1 · Why these reports exist, and how to copy them
Why the reports exist — a moku as a whole system, with funded projects as inputs among others and the community's observations as the record of how the whole responds — who owns what, how to copy it, and a made-up year as a worked example.
3 · What a commons report is for, and the rules that keep it honest
Holding public money and public promises to account, and letting anyone analyze the published record: who reviews what, what anyone may do with the record, what no one may, what it never stores, and how to cite it.
The baseline use case
The first report was built as a Green Fee reporting system, and two documents from that baseline are kept for whoever runs the tools or wants to see the method at its most concrete. They are reference material, not reading for a steward: Document 2, the register field by field (what each field means, the review steps, the rules for reporting a number, the automatic checks), and Document 4, reporting from the field with ArcGIS Survey123 (a plain web form that sends a report to the map layer with the same fields and checks as the survey form, the method being put to work at the Magoon Maker Lab). Both use a made-up funding year as their example.
Who keeps these reports
Kuleana is responsibility and right together: a place that is yours to care for. The people closest to the land are the best judges of what the numbers mean. What a steward sees on the ground is the guidance behind every figure here, and every figure traces back to who saw it, where, and when. These reports are the first public record of Mokunet, a network across moku, still being built, that brings together what the moku report so it can support the care of the land. The network's community learning hub, Hui Koʻe ʻĀina, teaches this way of reporting in Moku Steward Training, and the people in that training are who these reports are built to be kept by. Until they take them on, Āina Design Corp keeps them.
Everything here is open. Anyone responsible for caring for a place and telling its story — a land trust, a community group, a crew, a program tracking its funded projects — may take the record, the pages, the checks, and the handbook and use them: the code under MIT, the record and the writing under CC BY 4.0. How to add to it, and the handbook for project leads, the coordinator, and reviewers.