HWMO Project Coordination Dashboard

HWMO coordinates prevention, mitigation, planning, education, and recovery work across the Hawaiian islands. Project information arrived through staff and partner submissions, but the organization needed a clearer way to see locations, owners, status, funding, and impact in one place.

I partnered with HWMO staff to translate that coordination need into a working data product rather than a static report.

• Operational problemProject information was difficult to scan across teams, places, and stages of work.
• Communication problemThe same data needed to support staff coordination, public storytelling, and future funding conversations.
• Data problemForm responses contained long, inconsistent field names and different question paths for completed and proposed work.

The application turned a staff-maintained form and spreadsheet into a normalized, filterable Flask dashboard. The pipeline preserved a simple editing workflow for staff while giving the public-facing layer consistent fields and categories.

1. Normalize the sourceMap verbose form questions to stable field names for project, county, lead, status, funding, outcomes, and future needs.
2. Create useful categoriesTranslate varied status responses into proposed, in-progress, and completed groups.
3. Separate two storiesPresent completed and active work as impact, while giving proposed projects a future/funding view.
4. Make geography usableConnect projects to county and district filters and place available locations on an interactive map.

The dashboard’s structure followed the questions HWMO needed to answer in practice: Where is work happening? Who owns it? What stage is it in? What has it accomplished? Which efforts still need funding?

• Geographic filtersCounty and district views made statewide activity easier to compare.
• Program filtersEntity type, organization, program area, funding source, and status supported coordination across different kinds of work.
• Impact vs. futureSeparate views kept completed outcomes distinct from proposed scope and funding need.
• Brand alignmentThe interface used HWMO’s safety red, stewardship purple, knowledge teal, and smoke palette.

While working with HWMO staff, one recurring concern stood out: neighborhoods that depend on one road in and one road out. I first translated that concern into a GIS prototype built from road and building data.

That prototype became the starting point for my later Hawaiʻi Wildfire Home Risk Explorer—a statewide system that evaluates access and wildfire context at the property level.

The coordination dashboard organized the work already happening. The next project asked where access risk might be hiding.