Our Team

Sono Hashisaki

Consultant and Citizen Innovator

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I have lived in the Salish Sea most of my life. I grew up eating clams, oysters, and the fishy bounty of the Skagit, Samish, and Nooksack rivers. My dad fished the waters all around Bellingham Bay bringing back Dungeness crab, salmon, steelhead, lingcod, rock cod, and more for family dinners. When I went off to college and was out on my own, it was shocking to learn how much it cost to buy fish at the store. While the blue waters of Puget Sound look the same and are beautiful still, we now know that our human imprint isn't as ephemeral or carefree as footprints in the sand. The sheer numbers of people living here are loving this place to death.  The waters and lands of the Salish Sea, home to so many iconic species, are degrading, unravelling, and fragmenting more and faster than ever.  And while awareness of the need for action has also increased, we are moving too slow.  We need to design, fund and implement innovative and transformative actions today to adapt to an uncertain future if we can hope to leave a better world for the next generation.

Tools Designer and User

I am a decision analyst.  I'm most interested in how information can be converted to evidence for use by communities in decision making.   In the last millennium I worked on AI systems in Japan, then came to Seattle and created a multi-criteria decision analysis tool for my company InfoHarvest.  For the last two decades I've been involved in building spatial decision support systems to help restore and protect the environment.  Many of these systems have been created using the Ecosystem Management Decision Support system (EMDS).  Recently I've been co-designing and using the SEON Open Knowledge Network with the goal of making it easier and faster to build and reuse decision support systems, and perhaps make the information they produce more useful for wise decision makers.

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I'm is a founding member of the EMDS Consortium and the Spatial Decision Support Consortium.

Steve Paplanus

Tool Builder and Consultant

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I am a solutions architect and developer.   Over the past two decades, I have mainly focused on environmental and technical projects along the Pacific coast of the United States, Hawaii, and Japan.   These projects dealt with building knowledge mining systems, spatial decision support systems, or visual learning interfaces.   I am the architect and lead developer on the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system.  This system is an application  framework for knowledge-based decision support of strategic and tactical ecological analysis and planning at multiple geographic scales.   With the SDS Consortium, I built the underlying infrastructure and tools for the SDS Open Knowledge Network project.  The purpose of the project was to create a spatially enabled OKN that could be the basis for an  online, collaborative, integrated decision support workbench.   Our initial tools that I built included desktop knowledge graph editor and spatial explorer as well as a prototype online knowledge graph browser.    I am a founding member of the EMDS Consortium.