Using AI to Help Create a Standardized Style Guide

Guest post by Tori Greer, Executive director of Inform Florida, and James Counihan, Inform Florida's Data Analyst. Welcome!

Inform Florida, formerly the Florida Alliance of Information & Referral Services, was established in Florida Statute as the collaborative organization for the Florida 211 Network. The mission of Inform Florida is to strengthen the referral and community navigation network through advocacy, coordination, and education.  

In 2023, the State of Florida funded Inform Florida to hire an Executive Director and Data Analyst to support statewide advocacy, disaster coordination, and a more coordinated statewide system. Members of our board of directors include representation from 211 and 988 organizations, Advantage Aging Solutions, ElderSource, World Renew, and United Way of Florida. While the use case we describe here is specific to 211, our organization aspires to serve and convene information and referral professionals throughout Florida.

We learned that two Florida 211 agencies were considering using Yanzio tools to clean up their resource records. Rather than using their agency style guides for that purpose, we saw an opportunity to bring consistency across all 11 agencies by developing a state-wide guide. As individual agencies apply the guide, resource data collected from across the state should become more standardized. It became apparent that consolidating style guides might be a good first step toward developing a more unified state-wide system. 

The project was a six-week sprint, with Style Guide Working Group volunteers from the different agencies doing the heavy lifting. We brought together eleven style guides (~500 pages plus "a good example from outside the network") and set to work. First, each agency reviewed the guide from another agency, highlighting parts considered "foundational" elements and good examples. Highlighting was used to give more weight to those sections as they ran through the AI engine. Comments added by reviewers were also incorporated into the content - a step that became increasingly important further into the process.

We found AI to be surprisingly good at this. As a math processor, it can combine words into sentences that synthesize concepts. Looking at our original set of style guides, it was hard to see how these wildly different documents could be combined into a single, consolidated version. It turns out that it can work.

The bulk of the work involved resolving guideline conflicts. Some conflicts were easily resolved (phone number formatting), while others were more challenging (what, exactly, is a bullet point?). Conflicting guidelines were identified, tagged with their source agency, and commented on by reviewers. The comments, added to a shared document, were then incorporated into the style guide content for the next round of AI processing. That gave the AI engine more content to work with when assembling potential resolutions.

These training instructions prompted the engine to generate synthesized style guide drafts that reflected the most common conventions and significant points of interest across all variations. After three rounds of review, we found that AI had excelled at proposing language that helped us identify and resolve conflicts.

The biggest challenge in this project wasn't technology – it was managing the process in a way that respected the experience, time, and energy of everyone involved. We're all swamped, and the process required a commitment from staff on top of their regular workloads. It was only through understanding that our work was for the common good that this project was successful. The results are an example of what a group of champions can accomplish.

We have recommended the final version of a consolidated style guide for adoption by the statewide Florida 211 Network. We are very pleased with the results of this process and encourage others to explore the potential of AI tools to develop style guide conventions for more consistent resource data quality.

If you would like more information on the Florida 211 Network, please reach out to Tori Greer, Executive Director, at tori@flairs211.org.

 James Counihan, Data Analyst, can be reached at james@flairs211.org.