 So today ended up being a crazy day and we ended up losing people as the day went along and then we decided because this gets recorded we're still going to go through with the interviews and have the conversations and questions and then the others can watch it and then we can have a deliberative session at the next meeting to kind of talk about it. We wanted to make sure we had this, it took this opportunity because we had wanted as a city to kind of have somebody on board in March and that got pushed to now and now it's getting pushed into July so we're trying to keep as much on track as we can. So I apologize for the way it worked out and then of course we had scheduled to have a break of time at the start for everyone as commissioners to talk before we had the first SE group come on for six and then you guys come on for 630 so that's why we asked you to kind of flip because we don't have anything to do for half an hour so. So that was a little introduction of why things are a little bit slower today. No problem we're happy to be here regardless. Let me send this back here. Yeah so um so yeah if Aiden if you can wait till six we'll have um originally we were going to have you on at well you guys were on at six and they were going to be on 630 and we just rolled them forward to 530 because of our schedule but if you could wait till six to join us that would be great. Awesome I'll see you then thank you. All right so I guess we can jump right in Gabe if you want me just to go and kind of run this thing through. Yeah I think since there's not any I am the vice chair planning commissioner Aaron's a planning commissioner we're grateful to have you here sorry that we don't have a quorum we're missing a member and then somebody else was traveling and somebody else had to step out so anyway we as Mike described we'll look at this later. Mike just go ahead and you know run the meeting if you would and we'll have the two presentations and have our formal meeting in a couple weeks. All right and Jeff Batista is also here joining us so he's the third planning commissioner um so I'm Mike Miller I'm the planning director here for the City of Montpelier and um really quick I mean you guys have obviously looked through the RFP and I'll just go through really quick for the general public anyone who may be watching this on ORCA or watching this after the fact so what this project has been is a the city is working on the city plan update we've been working on it for about four years now and our goal is to when we update the city plan as we update the city plan that we move this plan into kind of into into the 21st century into the next century here let's go for a web-based plan most of the printed documents don't get used they sit on the shelves and our hope is that having something online will catch a few more people with a few more web searches of different topics if people are interested in housing then at least we'll start to grab some people and we wanted to also take the opportunity to create um storybooks for each topic each of the 12 chapter topics so that way we could try to use just as an educational opportunity for the public to go through what's important why is this topic uh being discussed and then to talk briefly about our implementation strategy and if they want more information we can then link to a bunch of other things so rather than having a 400 page city plan we can condense it down to more of a bite-sized piece and for people who want more information they can drill into more information but we can go through and get the the important tell the important story to the public and so that's a lot of um what we want and so by looking at ArcGIS um we also know it has tools for public inputs we want to be able to try to take advantage of some of these tools but um other than John Adams who some of you may know John is a VCGI director um he's the only one on our planning commission or staff that really has any GIS experience so we're really all novices and we're kind of hoping we'll get some help from somebody who's going to come in and kind of show us what's the best way to work with this media to talk about uh how to write a good story how to tell a good story within this story board media and uh and that's you know uh generally our kind of big picture of what we're trying to do so I guess I'll turn it over to you guys um we we did put out the RFP um just for the public's benefit uh we had a $20,000 budget which was from our general fund we then after or like the day the the grant closed or our RFP closed we got a $10,000 grant that had previously been denied they came through so we had $30,000 our grant required us to repost it which we did um and we have two responses so uh we'll be interviewing both folks tonight um so now I'll turn it over to you and and let you guys give a brief presentation like I said we've got about 20 minutes to a half an hour to kind of go through a presentation have some question and answer and um and if you have any questions for us by all means um let us know great yeah well thank you um thank you all for having us here we're excited to be considered for this project um so start with myself my name's Warren Rich from Stone Environmental I'm a project TIS specialist here so I um um TIS technical tasks a lot of ArcGIS online development I'm working with hub story maps web applications um entered web maps um into whatever the whatever the needs are for in addition to that I also manage a lot of projects that are um more taking ArcGIS online capabilities beyond what they're able to do um just kind of standard out of the box ArcGIS online quality um we do have a team of uh web developers who you know really take and fill things from the ground up um I don't foresee that being as much of a need for this project but um we do that online sometimes um I've been in stone about four years now and I got my master's 2018 and I'm GIS for sustainability from University of Washington um yeah I think I'll give a kind of rundown of stone later but why don't we let Paige go ahead and introduce herself she's the other uh kind of the primary uh technical um person who would work on this project yeah thanks Warren so I'm Paige Gebhart I also work at stone um I'm a GIS specialist I just started in the beginning of March at stone um prior to that I worked at the state of Michigan for four years in their um Department of Natural Resources and then I also did a little stint in Texas as a contractor with the Air Force um but at my time in the state of Michigan I did a lot of work on story maps and communicating to the public using maps and then also other kinds of media um so I do a lot of GIS but I am well good at I'm interested in the design aspects of presenting information um and presenting information to the public um so I've worked quite a bit with like communications representatives at my time at the DNR so I'm quite tuned into communicating well to the public awesome next page um yeah and I guess uh just a brief kind of introduction to stone as a company um we're located right in Montpelier on a stone cutters way I'm the big story building right on the river right there um about 30 years longer than I've been there when they started but um yeah um they were pretty diverse for only being a 50 person company but um our particular group which is the geospatial and data solution team um really focuses on um developing what's become more recently web-based kind of solutions for um varying varying sectors really um you know a lot of it because we're an environment swelting firm lands in the kind of environment for natural resources toward a lot of local and state governments for um you know various things kind of like the city plan um we recently worked with the regional planning commissions to develop a hub system for them to um be able to kind of manage their data in a single place and collaborate um yeah you know that's our our focus kind of varies from just standard data crunching gis analysis to um you know just full on developing hub applications or story maps um telling stories through data and maps um and visualization is really kind of a specialty so that's pretty much the rundown for stone um we don't have you know I guess a specific presentation no powerpoint or anything um we want to make sure it's time to kind of talk to me everybody's bread the um proposal we sent you know we can kind of go through the proposal or relevant projects that we um included in there but um I guess you know I think Mike had mentioned kind of um you know focusing on what we feel the strengths of our proposals are so I think a lot of that comes down to really our ArcGIS online specialty um we've been an Esri silver partner for six or seven years now um we work closely with Esri to stay on top of emerging technologies and platforms that they present um ArcGIS Hub being one of them that's why we're really kind of excited to see this proposal come out because it's Montpelier where we work um where page lives it was really exciting to kind of have those two worlds converge um ArcGIS Hub has been really excited about for a while and we're using more and more of it for um you know a lot of different things it's really versatile platform um so anyways it was really cool we were excited to see that coming about and um you know Stone did I think it was four years ago it was just before I started um kind of our first delve into hub was with the city of Montpelier building access hub site which um it looks like it's been built upon a little bit since we kind of left hands on it but I think the uh snow plow tracker was the big the kind of shiny part of that one it was a pretty cool way to kind of track to where your plow is in real time yeah um you know I think we again we try and stay on top of all the modern technology hub is still relatively new but again we've been working with it for four years finding more ways to extend it and do more things with it um it's a great visual platform to just get your content out tell your story just you know get things about um as well as including more um dynamic content applications data and community engagement and feedback is another big part of it um various um steps within ArcGIS Hub that allow the community to engage in different ways but um you know there's there's really a lot there and I think it's really great um great tool and for this type of web-based city plan so yeah um I guess on top of just our excitement about hub in general you know again we're we're in Montpelier um I don't live there but I've worked there 40 hours a week I'm really involved um yeah I think just being local we have local knowledge and you know through the stake in this work as well beyond just you know a cool project um it's it's really applicable to a lot of a lot of people at Stone who have lived in Montpelier for a long time pay yourself in Montpelier um you know it's it's a cool way that we can be involved with the community and help out the community by um yeah you know kind of taking the city plan which is a dense complex long document um breaking it down into more digestible sections um and you know my as Mike was saying you know kind of throwing out the big picture ideas and letting people drill down into further what they you know if you want to read the actual document we'll have that there for them but um you know in a world of you know I want it now I want to see give me the you know short and dirty of what it is um it's really important to have that um yeah that user experience I guess as we would call it um to make it more digestible and user friendly for the general public so um I think that's about it for my my spiel for Stone and why we're excited for it um you know the proposal was fairly fairly open-ended I think there was a lot of um you know the the RFP said what the city wants and what the goals are for it how exactly we get to that um it's a little less uncertain um but one thing that we do really with any of our projects and it is an important part of how we work is we just work closely with our clients on constant communication contacts um you know we're not going to take something and then get back to you a month later and say here this is done you know no time for comment no time feedback we really are um banking and counting on the city planning commission and the city to be an active participant in the development of this work um you know we are very knowledgeable about what ArcGIS can or can't do ArcGIS online and how to do it um whereas the rest of you are the active participant in the subject subject material and you know putting together this long document are intimately familiar with so this kind of collaboration between us and you know clients all of you is um really how we work with anything it's an iterative process and development and a lot of that plays into the budget as well you know we don't want to promise you know endless abilities when um yeah the budget is what it is so a lot of that is this iterative development we'll come back say okay this is where we're at this might take a little bit more let's shelf that until we can get uh you know forward into place and really kind of iteratively develop it as we go keeping in mind budget and your needs um considering the nice to haves and the must haves um and we will always consider the nice to haves and you know hopefully be able to provide all of the nice to haves but really you know understanding those must haves and then working down into the nice to haves as we go is um you know I think the best way for everybody to be on the same page about realistic expectations for what can be done as well as you know making sure that core points are always getting done and um you know it can be developed on later it's another part of the thing about the ArcGIS online platform it is somewhat user-friendly um it's easy for us to say we have our hands in it all day every day but uh you know it's low to no code there's you don't need a web developer to go in there and update some content or you know add another paragraph throw in another picture if you have this is something that can be maintained by the city more long term um you know without necessarily the need to have um you know a contractor on hand for continuous constant support and development page you have anything else to add I think you hit all my main points as well okay um yeah so we um yeah I mean I guess that's kind of my summary of what how we feel about our proposal um why we're well suited to do this work um do you might want to ask questions right now we have some kind of examples of projects similar where you've worked up that we can show but um I'll kind of I guess throw that back out and see um see what I already think that was actually my my question was uh you know if you've got I I've been able to look through some of what you did for the city of Montpelier um it looks like the other master plan there might have been something for uh was it was a Bennington area yeah that was a PDF that was sort of an older that was kind of an older school so do you have any examples you could point to something that was web based that we could look at yeah let me share okay um yeah so I guess just in general this is our um this is the upside as well but this is more of our portfolio if you will it has a lot of development projects and um if in here you know if you want to look dig in a little bit more there's a lot of examples of different types of web applications we've developed here um so we plucked out kind of a few from here that we think are most relevant the Bennington plan um it's interesting you mentioned it was a PDF this is still a live story map it's an old story map um as you can kind of tell if you viewed a story map recently they don't look like this anymore um Ezria is continually updating um improving their story map platform but this was I'll say I did not work on this personally this is where I arrived at stone but this was a big project that was done um by our environmental assessment remediation um team at stone um they did the kind of work to read um do the cleanup that was needed for a lot of this redevelopment but then the GDS team took on this um story map working with the city of Pennington kind of get this area wide plan into a story map format tells the history um images we got the maps all the different all these kind of elements combined and you know we can see this format of story maps again looking a little bit different nowadays than they did I think this was six or seven years ago this is a an old one but um yeah just another way of kind of getting all this that would have been one long you know PDF document that really hard to sift I'm breaking it out into sections that are a little more digestible with some media behind it um what else let's see here is another example of something again this is a slightly old this one's three years old but it was just before they um um Ezria this day updated their formats and um this is um work I'm involved in kind of doing GIS technical lead for our water resources department um GDS you know in addition our team in addition to taking on products of their projects that um the water resources of the environmental assessment that might take up um but this was a status update for the phosphorus control plan that we're developing among agencies or historically these have been long long dense PDF documents that um you know again you just kind of have to sift through and um we were actually able to provide this as a um official um submittal to the DEC as part of the requirements of the plan or VTRIAN which was really cool to be able to you know kind of come into the 21st century with these submittals rather than doing just a paper submittal um do something a little more dynamic but uh yeah again this one kind of goes through and just lays out the background the history why what's being done has been done and even includes one of these really long kind of PDFs in it I'll put you know again override the ease of the story map by uh you know plugging in these documents into it um we'll get a little further down and there's some of them um maps yeah there's a map here's a dashboard that we're able to plug into it so yeah and this I guess the main reason that's another that's really useful thank you for showing that looks like Cameron had a question okay I did thank you um I'm Cameron Eater Meyer I'm the assistant city manager I had some questions about um I tried to skim through your present your proposal um and I didn't really talk about longevity to me and like how how would you propose getting like staff you said that is maintainable how how do you bring staff along and how much training or time afterwards would be put into this project yeah of course Paige do you want to yeah definitely this is um a bit similar to what we're doing with the Vermont Community Broadband Board right now um on another project we're working on data maintenance yeah there's the site there a hub site and various applications to show data what we're doing on this project is um working directly with someone at the VCVB um she's we're working for her but also she is curious about how these things work she wants to be able to keep it up after our work is done um so what I've been doing is teaching her like I was working on a dashboard recently and I walked her through how I'd created it um she's got access you can get in and edit it herself so I could foresee for the city um as we work on this project we could teach we could have like training sessions we could screen share show how we're building things and then make sure that it's accessible to your team to be able to edit into the future and maintain and hopefully I know Warren had mentioned that Esri continues to update their story map platform this ArcGIS story maps now are supposed to be um have good longevity last into the future as they make updates um we should be able to keep our story maps where they are and they just get updated behind the scenes um so yeah so that's that's what I would imagine we would do and that's a great question so would that would that training in that time be something you would add into your proposal sort of formally or and within the same pricing structure is that an additional something I think if we you know I didn't see necessarily training um listed in RFP specifically um you know if we wanted to do any kind of real official training um you know more than just a few hours it would probably something we need to consider within the budget um I do think the budget is somewhat flexible um I mean again given just the um kind of broad nature of it right now we can you know work certainly to keep that in mind as we go and make sure that there's enough time at the end or an official training if need be um but again as Payne's mentioned um taking any top opportunity along the way to provide a little bit of detail and info and just oh hey let's you know show you how this works real quick um but I could also foresee as part of the the official handoff um you know just an hour or two long training session to get everybody together in one room and kind of go through the nuts and bolts and um you know it is all really configurable and accessible without code so um you know the learning curve isn't too steep although you know you need to kind of know know where to click kind of thing thank you we'll have some advantage in that we do have Zach watch it it's trained hey Mike I think I think you're covered you've covered up your microphone I can barely hear you still can't really hear you I don't know why it's been a problem sounds better now it's better now yeah all right it's been strange how it gets good and bad from time to time um so yeah so we've had we have Zach um and one piece is just going to be a fixed document um to a point uh we do want to have opportunities you know and we'll talk about you know whatever when we when we reach that point of we want to be able to gather public input into the future and use this document but there has to be kind of a line that either has kind of dynamic data so if we have something that's that's stealing from another site or something that we plug in that's dynamic has to be below a line because officially the plane can't change without going through a formal readoption process so we're kind of we want to talk about some of these opportunities that might be there to kind of make a plan that says this is what our goals are and then maybe there's some sort of line that then gets us to a dynamic portion that shows us progress but that's for a conversation down the road a little bit but we do have Zach and I think that'll be a big help for maintenance I have kind of a more basic question this largely comes from sort of my lack of tech savvy but I think one of the things that I keep thinking about as we move towards this online model is being cognizant that in my pillar we're going to be dealing with uh it's going to be released to a public audience that has varying levels of comfort with technology and I'm curious what sort of considerations you guys may have taken into account and thinking about how to develop these storyboards how to solicit public input um you know linking documents can you talk a little bit about that yeah um you know I one of the good things about hub in general to me is you know hub can become this kind of confusing what is hub you know I think we hear that a lot people don't almost scared of it because they're not sure what it is it's really a website builder so it will interact and you know the user will interact just like they would a standard website with it so you know here in the bcbb one this one's based a lot around data currently but not stories but um you know it it'll be as intuitive as a standard website would be so I think anybody with you know general comfort navigating a website should be able to navigate through this as well but you know a lot of that comes into how we develop it as well you know and I think that's a big part of what we're going to do is help hide all of you and to you know the best way to format it and organize it and you know present it in a way that does make sense in a basic website format flows well that's not you know you have to get five clicks to get somewhere a single point of information really presenting it all in the best way possible so um you know that's something that we do with any any kind of public facing application website like this that we develop um we keep user experience in mind and you know best practices and guiding principles for web design throughout the process so um yeah um you know that's definitely something that's going to be at the forefront for everything that we're doing in this is making sure that it is accessible you know intuitive to a wide audience like say you know end users for this or what will become the city plan so yeah that's you know a part of what we do daily so the answer is a question I hate to cut everybody off but we're wrapping up to six o'clock rolling into six so uh if you have any last questions or comments you want to let the commission know about um before we move on uh I don't think so um thank you all for having us here um we we hope we've answered all your questions um we're excited about this project again it's it's not often that we get to work directly within our within our community on something that we're really excited about and that we do a lot of anyways so um this is an exciting project and um yeah I hope you'll consider our our proposal yeah thank you excellent thanks and thanks for your time yeah thanks for being so flexible of course of course I'm sharing so I can get off there have a good night everyone thanks have a great day all right let me ping mark here hello everybody hi mark how are you sorry about that I thought we were on at six I thought I'd get in here a few minutes early I didn't realize stone was going ahead of us yeah that's the the uh the change of plans was that our planning commission very slowly went from seven to six to five to four to three and then so we without a quorum we we kind of had a decision and we decided we're still going to do the interviews we're kind of behind schedule on a lot of stuff and and this was something we wanted to make sure we got done because this is being recorded the other commissioners are going to watch it afterwards and kind of see the presentations um and kind of go through kind of go through that way um so I think I kind of gave the the summary last time to to um to the previous folks really you know our so our projects um our goals to kind of work towards having a web based plan and uh we wanted to build it with storyboards it was really you know we've seen a couple of these we thought it would be a great idea um you know we've got this 200 page 300 page plan and we want to try to start to get it into more bite-sized pieces where the public might interact with it more and we've seen this on um whether it's national competitions other things where these web plans are accessed and used more often and so that's why we want to kind of move in this direction but we as staff um don't really have any experience uh and and commissioners don't have this experience except for john adams who you probably know oh yeah vgs director um so we really kind of relying on getting a consultant who's going to help us to to not only take care of the technical pieces but also teach us how to have a conversation in this media how can we tell how can we create storyboards how can we tell this story how can we inform the public because we're going to have to adjust our narrative as we learn how to how to write in this format how to best communicate so we we kind of need a little bit of that lesson a little bit of that learning and then also the third little piece of what we're trying to do is to we know art gis hub has great ways of uh doing public input both during and after the plan is up and running and so we wanted to take advantage of those again we don't know we we just know that it can do it and so we really want to have take advantage of full advantage of what opportunities are there and so that's what we're hoping to get from the um from the various consultants and I guess at this point we'll turn it over to you guys give you guys a couple minutes to kind of make some presentation of what you guys have and great great thank you all for this opportunity to chat today um Mike and I you know we talked a long time ago about this and this sort of idea of of establishing a an online city plan you know something that was uh accessible and approachable to average resident obviously because as you noted the current plans tend not to be that way because they're so thick um the biggest part of this project and you know aid and I cop is with me today she's actually traveling so she's going to be just on audio but I'll I'll make sure Aiden has a chance to talk a lot um about some of these projects we worked on but a key thing I think the key distinction between maybe other teams and our team is is one of the is that because we're a planning firm that's our job we're community planning based practice my practice is community practice it's that act of curating the information in a way that takes it from the uh policy document to the public that is really kind of the most important thing it's easy to get bogged down in the technology or get hung up in the technology aspects of this and going to an online version of anything is going to be wrought with some of those technical compromises and issues they have to deal with but at the core of it you can't lose sight of the fact that this is a planning document that needs to communicate something it needs to tell the the community about what the policies the city are what the vision the city is it has to be able to communicate those things in an accessible way so that it's not limiting in that delivery that's really really super important we got to be careful about stepping on accessibility in this process and to do that effectively even though ASRI provides a really good platform a really good starting point what we have found is that you need to have a graphic artist's eye to curate the information in a way that actually is is more can help facilitate that process better gis maps on the you know the the raw gis data maps you might see are awesome but a lot of times they hide the point it's harder to get the point out using those so what we've all we've often done and I'll show you some examples of this we've often done is kind of hybridize our story maps to include a variety of online mapping tools integrated mapping tools that ESRI provides for spatial information with graphics that we prepare that clarify and and curate and sort of focus the points of key issues whether they're policy issues or questions or whatever they might be in the in the planning context so that somebody can understand them in a more accessible way so that's a really big part I think of of one of things that we sort of approached this project with and we're glad to see you got some additional resources to sort of expand that because we think that part of it is going to be really super important we know that Mike and your team can put together a great city plan you know what you know that city better than anybody but being able to take that information and turn it into a mean into a into information that can be shared on an electronic platform and it is accessible and works across different devices which is also going to be a huge issue for this we want to make sure it works on a phone because that's how most people are going to look at this and us GIS people with our big screens and stuff that's not how the world is probably going to look at this I think that's going to be a really important way a important part of this project is to get the the the art of curating your information in a way that can then be delivered through StoryMap and on a hub site that lets it get out there and be able to be engaging it won't be engaging if it's just data on a website that's for sure Aiden do you want to introduce yourself and maybe give a little bit of a overview yeah hi everyone sorry I don't mark I don't know if you hopped off but I saw that the other group was still presenting and I was like oh I gotta go I took off my headphones and went into the kitchen yeah no absolutely absolutely um so yes hi as mark said I am traveling so I'm I'm sorry I'm just not presentable right now um but I did just want to again commend you guys for taking this next step towards an online plan it's something that we often grapple with when we get to the end of a process and we're like okay now we gotta write it up and as much as we try to not make a 90 page document it turns into a 90 page document so absolutely trying taking that and translating it so that it's more inviting for the general person to look at I think it's just a really great endeavor um this conversation absolutely reminds me of the work that we completed for the kingdom trails that's one of those story maps that was highlighted in our in our proposal where we got to the end of that and we didn't want to put a planning document together because we knew that that was not going to be the right way to communicate these the the ideas because it was graphic rich and because it was map mapping rich and spatially rich um and that I I really really enjoyed that process taking out a lot of our complex methodology and analysis and saying like nope we can link we can link those in our story map the people who really want to get into the details but we we need to make this as digestible as possible and the story map still still a bear to get through but it has it has the key ideas highlighted and I truly do believe that the information can be accessed from a range of perspectives and a range of uh knowledge abilities so um I hope that this this product can be similar in that I think the hardest hardest thing that we'll have to do is pare down the amount of information without losing um without losing its richness and I think that's that's an exciting but it's going it's going to be quite the task so as mark said um appreciate that there is more both financial support and also uh city staff support to to get that end great thank you adan so adan um I think what we might want to do is like I'm trying to get the kingdom trails to show up on the screen here so if I can do that that was an example all right all right I'm not sure yeah I love this let us know Mike and team if you have any questions that yeah but I just wanted to sort of that that's a backdrop to this I mean I think one of the things that um you know you'll sort of notice in this story map is this kind of thing this infographic-y thing you know Esri doesn't do these it doesn't do those those are things that our team actually does in terms of part you know communicating complicated information and finding a way to actually get it to make it understandable and again that's the kind of thing where you the benefit of a of story map is you can do that you can embed those kinds of images or illustrations or whatever they might be to help understand to help make the points a little more clear but it's it's super um and so that's one of the reasons we like it as a platform because it's super flexible for dealing with all that kind of information but again we've had we found it in our process that you know listening to community listening to an organization try to understand what they're trying to do trying to understand what they're trying to sell or communicate finding a way to actually present that can be really challenging but as Aiden said this this friend was also super graphic rich and one of the key things on that was to be able to highlight the spatial aspect of i'm going to go down to the spatial aspect of it here we go so you can see and this is a this is a gi this is an arc gis um you know this is an actual image that we made with arc gis combination of illustrator because it actually as a map reads better this is not a native esri map as an example and part of that was because we wanted to make sure these this information was as readily understandable and relatable as possible so that's an area where I think in in the in the interest of of getting this out to the public and to have it have the most valuable value it's sometimes better to um focus more information and to do that you may have to sort of drop some of the esri tools in favor of a combination of esri related tools and some other tools like illustrator adobe products that kind of thing which let you expand the scope and scale of spatial information even in a way that's more powerful that's a that's one area where we've sort of spent a lot of sort of time in curation in other ways sort of is also making the interactivity of these maps very again very visually compelling and clear so that it's not um super challenging if you look at this on your phone what it does is it shows you the area in question and then the infographic comes up afterward to kind of communicate the point so that's a way of accommodating that end user something I want to highlight here while we're looking at this is that um this is the classic version of story maps and it has now gone to what we call new story maps I don't know actually what the official word is um but we've done probably about 20 or 30 of our projects now yeah now you're looking at a new version of the story map which have many of the same tools but more mobile tablet and computer friendly like it's optimized for that because classic story maps wasn't optimized for that so now it ensures that if someone does open it on a phone they have the same experience or as good of an experience as someone that has it on the computer and also Esri has a tool called Survey123 that can be easily embedded in these new story maps so as we continue to talk about what sort of engagement strategies that we want to embed in this that you guys can have ongoing engagement with these plan updates as it gets built out that's absolutely something that this tool can be can be used really well for I think an important aspect of this project though is going to be back to the I think kind of the core of the of the ask and that is to make sure that you know what the again this I think one of the unique things about this project is is how do you comply how do you meet all the statutory requirements in terms of delivering a plan like this while you want to take advantage of some of those engagement tools you got to be careful about that feedback loop around that it's like you know they the plan is the plan when the plan is adopted the plan is the city's plan that's got to kind of stay sacrosanct relative to city policy and all of that there can be discourse and dialogue associated with the plan but they can in visually and then in the organization of the plan of the story map and the way it's communicated I think there needs to be some very clear accommodation for delivery of what is what is in the plan what is officially adopted and officially you know policy of the city versus where is where is there in interest or issues related to discourse around a policy or or issue that that information that sort of engagement information could be super helpful for the city and for you guys as you think about what you might do want to do to amend the plan down the road or make adjustments in city policy for sure but I think we need to be very tread very carefully on on crowdsourcing policy because that's that that's not how the planning process works right there is going to be an adoption there's going to be a an acceptance of what's in the plan and that needs to be communicated and clear to everybody and then I think that's where the hub site might come really you know come into this really well structurally so the plan itself could exist as a story map because that's a curated experience you have purposefully pulled together the relevant information and I'm just going to pan through some other ones we're working on right now this is a storm water from state storm water master plans summary study we're working on you you purposefully bring together the information you organize it you can control what's what's being seen how it's being seen what's being presented very clearly great tool for that the hub site embedded in a hub site though could allow for some interactivity around the story map around the plan right so you could look at the hub as a community engagement add-on to the story map that would allow for discourse around specific policy issues or thematically issues for example each one of these subsites could could be a part of the plan economic development whatever structure you want to do the hub site could be associated with one of those subsites and that would allow for an engagement around economic policy for example but the plan stays the plan the plan is the plan so that's where I think the careful road mapping in our proposal kind of talked me in the first phase of our proposal is to figure this out like what is the right structure to put this together to meet the needs of the city in terms of its plan document its intentions around getting it out there its excel accessibility objectives and all of that and then think about how things like the story map in the hub site can actually combine together so that like I said there's absolute clarity as to what the city's plan is in the delivery of it electronically but there's also a forum a pinch of forum for the city to have the ability to understand what the reaction of the plan is to people how is it actually working as it relates to people okay that's a whole new world of well other than people calling up Mike or the planning department complaining or that's that's not new but but they know the aspect of having more of a platform a constant a continuous platform that you as a city can maintain on the hub side of this that lets you get reaction to plan policy you know policies and plans information and plan but not make that so intertwined with the actual plan that people think that the last comment posting is now the city's policy that would be a real issue Mike um how familiar we've been throwing around like as rehab story map the hub site all these all these different words do you guys have um like you you absolutely know you want to use esri hub versus story map I mean I think mark you could show them we could talk about new port as the example there where the story maps page um it's hard to explain without a graphic but the story maps page is like what you were seeing with the with the kingdom trails website and then the hub is like you can build it out as a sort of a landing page and you can actually go in the background of esri hub sites a bit more and do some sort of like web developer coding magic so you can kind of get it to work for your purposes a little bit more than you can just the pure story maps story maps is built to be very intuitive people can be you know you can easily add content and then the hub sites are a little bit more customizable so I think what mark said as a build out the hub site as the more interactive continuing living breathing website and have the story maps is that static site would probably be our approach yeah and I would say probably John Adams would probably been the only one who really would see the subtleties we we kind of know what we wanted and and I kind of threw around storyboards and hubs as if they were the same thing and they're different but we do have and I used hub in in writing the rfp because we have we have used hub for some dpw work and so we own a license to it so we don't have to yep so we're like all right well we've got the license to that we'll use that but perfect certainly if there's a better you know we're not going to use hub just because that's you know yeah in a box we want to we've got a product that we want to reach and we're hoping for consultants to give us the best tools to get there absolutely yeah and I think for the you know again I think back to the stated purpose of what you're trying to accomplish you know those different pillars of what you're trying to accomplish within the context of what you have available to do and and I think for for ease of future use right again you want the you want the plan to be done when it's done you want the the electronic version of the plan to be doing its job it's telling everybody what the policies of the city are the hub site is where down the road if you want to ask new questions around the policies if you want to have if you want to get some spatial enabled data about you know what neighborhood you live in or where is the issues you're seeing kind of happening that's a great great reason to have the hub site right you can you can use that platform to gather and share all that sort of reaction to and or thoughts around the plan but at some point you've got to lock the plan down and I think story map for us has been the kind of the go-to platform for that because it does let you like I said thoughtfully map out what you want to say how you want to say it and then develop the structure to do that and it also gives has given us the flexibility of saying okay what do we like this map I'm showing us from the stormwater master plan town maps this is raw as read data this is like you know stormwater site data basically there's some you know things you could sort of you can zoom around it and all that kind of stuff that's good for certain sets of data for certain information that's going to be wonderful but there is oftentimes a need to like I said to curate that there's something really important that you want to make sure is visually compelling you might need to do something beyond what you can get out of as we conveniently and the good news is that if it's in the if it's in the city's plan and if it's if it's established through policy it's not something that's going to be changing in a dynamic way you're I mean to change it to change the zoning boundary to change a policy boundary of whatever it might be that's a process the city has to go through and so I think for for this type of project I think this this idea of having some maps that are more curated more sort of visually compelling clear or perhaps that rely on some as we data but don't sort of default to it necessarily in the interest of visual communication is probably okay because you're not going to have to go back and update those but once every number of years unless something dramatic changes um whereas if there's gently background census data information about the community you know existing conditions all of that stuff totally could imagine a lot of that information would be just raw as re raw data you have collected it's just informative it's just you know it's backdrop right but if there's something if you want to take like for example the city the city plan the downtown plan and sort of make that alive have a piece of that that's kind of part of the vision for the city for example you know taking graphics from that work and bringing it in would provide more value to the city plan because it would reinforce what you're trying to pull you know what you're saying so we have the story map to do that gave I see you have your hand up or had your hand up yeah just a just a question mark thanks for the presentation and walking through some of the examples I'm curious like in the in your write-up you had several examples of similar projects but then did you say 20 or 30 can you just give us an idea on how many of these web-based plans that you've done it sounds like you've got quite a bit more experience than you outlined in your proposal um yeah yeah so when I said 20 or 30 I more meant like we've used them for um probably 20 or 30 different recent projects that are used for different purposes so they're not always as the final planning document as you see for kingdom trails or we did for enusburg but they're often used as a community engagement platform or we build them out as here's what the consultants are doing here's your opportunities for engagement it's just a pure project information website so the ones that were highlighted were the more full-scale buildouts that we thought aligned most with this project um but in terms of just using them I think we'd probably use story maps for almost every community and recreation planning project that we're starting at this point at some level yeah yeah thank thank you and yeah of course so this is again this is a asp this is for the city of aspen we did a big economic recreation uphill economy plan for them a few years back this is on the older version of the platform but again very super graphically rich super map enabled that was the whole premise of this um and I think it really works well in terms of like being able to communicate some of the complexity of the information being able to get that out there obviously these these data points these sort of narrative scrolls really help um communicate that as adan said that the newer versions of the website are are better they there was a while there when we were really freaking out because esri was sort of changing the the the templating for story maps hub sites like it seemed like every couple hours and we weren't sure if a lot of our original websites would work and I know you know we've had that question come up with clients before it's like you know um what happens when you're done you know how usable is this this is a good example this city of aspen we work closely with the city of aspen they have a gis team they've got a couple people they're in their office that that do gis we develop this this plan for them on our platform and when it was all done tested and verified and 100 percent working the way everybody wanted it to work we then transferred it to their tenant in esri so there was no it was actually a relatively seamless process but I think it's a really important thing they don't they they can they can do anything they want with this site now it's all theirs 100 percent there's nothing that we have to do and um going through currently going through a corporate website redevelopment piece for us internally I know that's oftentimes a really big part of you know it's like you want to be careful about having to um in the delivery of a document like by years worth of maintenance and service you know it's like what's the point of that it becomes like this constant drip drip drip of update this update that and again I think esri's done a good job of allowing for the sites to transfer between ownership so if if again if we got it's developed under our scgroup.com esri platform got it all dialed in your city's got licensing it should be able to transfer over there without a lot of problems um that's a good thing I think the the key though is to make sure um we you know we know what's what we're dealing with ahead of time so we can make sure we plan that out so there's nothing that we own or have that you don't have that would then be you know technically problematic but that's a really good sort of important part of these documents is being able to kind of communicate them Aiden could you just give everybody because this is a relatively recent project we're working on but you're just just starting it but I think it's really important for the Friends of the Front Range Wildlife Refuge? Yeah absolutely so in that project we're working with the Friends of the Front Range Wildlife Refuge as well as the National Fish and Wildlife Service on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal project um Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge which is right near the Denver Airport and just north of the Denver area and for that project they're embarking on a two-year sort of community listening project where a couple different consultant teams are doing different engagement processes with the neighborhoods close by which are predominantly minority majority minority neighborhoods and they're asking questions like what would make you more likely to recreate the arsenal do you feel safe here and we're kind of we're gathering all that information and using story maps as sort of our version of a website that takes some of that information that we're learning and transforms it both to let the community know about the project that we're embarking on but then also use some of the best practices that we learn through these conversations so we're really trying to focus on spatially based and graphic rich content so that people can navigate the site better when they're there have some familiarity with it see photos of people interacting with the landscape so that it's you know some people think that there's there's there's bison on this land and some people don't want to go there because they think they're going to get trampled by bison so showing you know here are the paths here where your car can go bison are fenced in just really using the website as a tool to do some of that first engagement before they get to the site and a big thing that we're learning is that the federal fish and wildlife website has a lot of rigidity to it that doesn't allow for these more engaging graphic styles so we're really trying to build that in to our website and the key thing on that I wanted to sort of highlight is that in that particular we're just starting it just really starting to get going it's a two-year commitment so it's not something that would conflict with working on this for you but it's I think it's it's useful backdrop in terms of our work as a planning consultancy because a key a key aspect of the final deliverable it's final story map system that's that we're going to deliver is making it accessible I mean these communities are Hispanic speaking for example so there's going to be bilingual accommodation in there there may need to be accommodation for visual impairment in there and I'm not saying those are all things that necessarily need to be sort of fully fleshed out in the city's website but it is one of the things to get back to accessibility of this I think we need to be very conscientious on the deployment of visual information so that it does have you know so that the planet is as useful to as many people as possible and I think we need to be thinking about those sorts of things so in the cities you know we're making decisions about about color choices or making decisions about do we do a simplified graphic or more complicated graphic I would love to know where the city you know where the city's at on that so that we can make you know informed decisions about how to give curate that information so that it's as readily digestible as to people and obviously there are state and federal there's federal standards there's there's not international standards for color and accessibility on web platforms and story map facilitates a lot of them not all of them I may see the minute you show a map it gets hard the minute you show a view you know a map that that's communicating spatial information it's very hard to communicate that to the visually impaired for example almost the best you can do is have a note that's embedded that says this is a map that shows x y and z a narrative description of the map but we do want to be sort of sensitive to that and try to do our best to think about what those issues might be at the beginning of this process so that when you guys are giving us information to kind of figure out how it goes into the website we can say yeah we might want to tweak this a little bit or we might want to emphasize this a bit differently so that it doesn't cause a downstream problem and I just want to add to that I know we're slightly over our time but I wanted to add that I think we're really hoping that this product gets up to the level that the other graphic work going on in Montpelier right now is up to I mean I drive through there all the time and the new signs you guys have put in and a lot of the standards and the work that Montpelier at Live is doing I think is just a really really good way of showcasing the character and energy in Montpelier and I hope that this website rises to those same standards all right excellent and as I said you know in fairness to our other folks we wanted to make sure we try to give everyone the same amount of time but I did I did notice that we had forgotten especially for for Aiden's well I guess Aiden you might be able to see us we just can't see you so for introductions I'm Mike Miller Mark knows me but we also online here we have Cameron Needemeyer who is the assistant city manager we had Gabe Lodge and us we have Jeff Jeff Batista and we have Aaron Kasicki who the three of them are the planning commissioners so just so you guys know looking at your screen who's who I did apologize for not mentioning that up front but I want to thank you guys for your flexibility and everything to kind of get to where we are today and so we're going to because we don't have a forum we're going to just going to be signing off today we're going to meet up at our next planning commission meeting and we're going to have a quick deliberative session whoever gets selected will probably know pretty quickly after that meeting and then officially the way this works is we'll send it to city council with our recommendation and that is I believe like July 20th is the next council meeting they're on their summer schedule so they only meet once a month it'll be a consent agenda that will go through at that time so we'll just so you are aware of the schedule for how that'll go thank you and if again if there's any questions that come around before you're in during your deliberations by all means let us know thanks so much for being here and I really appreciate it yes thank you nice to see all right thank you all have a good night thanks so we'll see you next time right Mike you're all set yep I we're all set for tonight and we'll see you in a couple weeks thank you guys for first hanging in there yeah no problem take care thanks