This is the first posting since we suspended our local government practice in response to Covid. We are now ramping back up and have three updates:
- The Naramata Official Community Plan review is complete and adopted. I will come back to this in future blog postings because it was a juicy one.
- I completed a draft of an academic paper on the Naramata OCP. It is not really on the Naramata OPC. It is a theoretical paper that uses the Naramata OCP to illustrate our methodology. Let me know if you want a copy.
- Noah Marra and I (mostly Noah) spent much of last summer developing AI infrastructure for (a) clustering and (b) labeling user comments. Our Delphi methodology for surveys generates a large amount of textual comments and having a planner read through, synthesize, and summarize all the comments severely limits the size of the public consultation process we can undertake. However, automating this step of the methodology removes the scale constraint. More critically, modern large language models (LLM) are shockingly good at this task. Much more on this later.