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One of the first public responses to the Maui wildfires was a Google sheet. It was a quick and lean attempt to bring some structure to the early hours and days after the disaster.

On its face, the Maui Fires People Locator was just three columns; Name, Status and Notes, a list pulled together from Post-It notes and sign-up sheets pinned up at wildfire emergency shelters as people searched for any information about family and friends.

As our columnist Ben Lowenthal wrote, “At first the sheer number of names was overwhelming. It gave a sense of how massive this had become. But when I began going through it, I started recognizing names.”

It’s still online as a testament to the asset that met an immediate community need faster than officials could manage. But even when official information was more forthcoming it didn’t always clarify things for the public.

Facing a bevy of unhelpful data points about the testing of water supplies in fire-ravaged parts of Kula and Olinda, Kula resident Melissa Kaufman spent her Labor Day holiday doing hard learning and creating a spreadsheet that deciphered the results for local residents, helping dissipate concerns about the presence of volatile organic compounds in samples.

Kaufman is now looking into the larger issue of water storage in Upcountry and the system’s dependence on surface water carried by the former plantation ditch system. She is concerned that it would only take one dry season for the district’s taps to run dry.

These on-the-fly data assets helped the community navigate crisis in 2023, and another handful noted below will be worth monitoring as 2024 unfolds.

Tracking Hawaii Housing

The winner of 2023’s “breakout” category was a solutions-oriented dashboard on bootstrapped by resident Matt Jachowski.

Jachowski used his software developer skills to build a platform to connect displaced residents with landlords looking to rent their properties. It sounds simple, but it was a way of cutting through the noise from government and nonprofits that, Jachowski said, were struggling to form those connections.

He quickly found himself being pulled into meetings with Maui County, and by all accounts stole the show during a presentation at the 2023 Native Hawaiian Convention and his strategy has been picked up and amplified by the .

The data under the hood of his site illustrated the gap between what most of the displaced residents were able to afford, and the rents that many property owners said they needed to charge.

I asked Jachowski for an update on its progress just after Christmas and he said that local residents were continuing to sign up to offer properties for rent.

But, he said, housing efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Global Empowerment Mission, CNHA and Maui Hale Match have struggled to persuade many out-of-state owners of Maui’s short-term rentals and second homes to help.

“I hope that this changes with the new year, and our long-suffering displaced families are able to finally secure stable housing,” he said.

Also to watch: UHERO launched itswith a prebuilt page devoted to Lahaina. Of note is the capacity the UHERO dashboard has for tracking building permitting in the fire-affected area, thanks to a data-sharing agreement between UH and the County of Maui that will be updated regularly, the researchers say.

Mapping The Wildfire Risks For Vulnerable Populations

With wildfires elevated to the highest level of risk in the state’s disaster preparation plans, more residents may be looking for guidance on how to make their communities more fire resilient.

The official death toll from the Lahaina fires also starkly illustrated the risks faced by Hawaii’s vulnerable populations; People over 65, people with disabilities, people without reliable transport, those living in poverty and those who don’t speak English as their first language.

You can assess community vulnerability at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service site, as well as fire likelihood and exposure risk. Depending on your role in the community you an also select from a menu of recommended actions that can be taken, including advice on fuel reduction and how to create clean-air rooms at home in the event of wildfire smoke.

For more local historical context, head to another knowledge base maintained by the that enables users to see the patterns of past fires and highlight the level of risk posed by potential hazards like road width, defensible space, street signage and prevailing wind speeds and direction.

Currently the site holds more than a decade of starting in 2011, that includes wildfire hazard assessments, community wildfire protection plans and census data and an overall indicator. There is another decade of data waiting in the wings.

The Universe Of Crime

Moving away from fires, 2024 will provide new opportunities for analyzing crime trends in Hawaii, and that’s largely because of data upgrades by the Honolulu Police Department and the Attorney General’s Office’s Research and Statistics Branch.

In the case of HPD, its dashboard, launched in September, presents some data points that had been difficult for the public to access or only after long delays.

When I interviewed HPD Capt. James Slayter who had headed up the project, he said that the dashboard enables the public to see daily updates from the department’s Crime Reporting System in a range of categories including clearance rates and the rate of offenses in categories like violent crime.

Further upgrades are planned but right now “this is the our best way to put out a quality product in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable amount of money,” Slayter said.

This year saw all of Hawaii’s police departments meet compliance with the more-accurate National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS tracks more offenses, including multiple offenses from the same incident and in significantly more detail. It also collects information on the victims of crime.

The NIBRS compliance matters because it will help address some of the “apples to oranges” problems that have hampered comparisons of crime trends across the state and the mainland.

According to Paul Perrone, head of  a relaunch of the state’s NIBRS data dashboard is imminent and promises to provide a lot more functionality for the public.