Help Me Investigate.com blog

I recently had something of a mini-crisis of confidence: “Was Help Me Investigate really needed?” I was asking myself. Given that investigations already take place on blogs, on forums, and in Facebook groups, is a tool like this really needed?

The original idea behind HMI was inspired by investigations like these. Imagine, I thought, if there was a bespoke tool designed to allow people to collaborate on an investigation, rather than these crude tools that were built for another purpose?

But now that HMI was actually here, being used - apparently successfully - I needed to ask myself the hard question: we’ve imagined, now how does it work in practice?

Ultimately the answer came when I was creating a blog supporting one of my investigations - into hospital parking charges. At the end of every post I invite people to help and I realise that there were a number of problems:

• Firstly, it requires a lot of effort over a long period of time from a blogger to get the necessary number of readers of the blog to have just one who is able and willing to contribute. Bloggers with an existing audience have an advantage, and of course you could piggy-back on such a blogger’s popularity, but that option isn’t open or obvious to most people.
• Secondly, when a potential collaborator reads your blog, it is not immediately clear how they can contribute. Even if I, as a blogger, created the equivalent of challenges, the blog interface does not make it possible to display those in a way that is easy for users to navigate.
• Related to this is the ‘begging’ issue. After 3 posts that end with a request for help, my blog already feels kinda needy, almost spammy. And I’ve noticed that other people who blog about something they want to investigate rarely ask for help, but rather tell the story.
• Likewise, the nature of problem #1 means you need to provide regular content, which would push ‘challenges’ down. This also produces a new barrier to entry: if you are not a natural producer of content, or write in an incoherent rambling way that obscures the clarity of what you’re trying to achieve (as many angry people do), then you are at a disadvantage.
• Next problem: even if someone agreed to help there is no easy way to support that or monitor who is really doing what and who has forgotten.
• Finally there is the question of how we get the ear of the powerful to force change.

There are similar problems for forums and Facebook groups. Investigations that have successfully used these tools have overcome all of these problems (the Stirrer forums are one of the most successful examples in that they have a professional advocate in site owner and journalist Adrian Goldberg, who is willing to take on causes and use his experience and knowledge to drive them forward. The problem is that he is only one person) - the question is how many have stumbled at one of those hurdles?

When I looked at Help Me Investigate in the context of these problems I could see that, in a nutshell, it was lowering the barrier to entry for people who wanted to investigate something:

• A community is already in place who have effectively stated that they are engaged in issues of public interest. You still need to build an audience and activity around an investigation, and blogs/forums/Facebook play a part here, but there is support for that based on the experience of other users recorded in the site KnowledgeBase.
• The interface makes it easy for potential contributors to see how they can contribute to an investigation - as well as suggest routes of enquiry for others.
• The ‘Help’ is explicit in the site and implicit in the investigation. No pleading required; no apologies. The clue is in the name.
• Content doesn’t have to be your problem. HMI manages the results and process - content is just one challenge for anyone to produce. That said, currently the site needs more people doing this.
• You can monitor who is doing which part(s) of the investigation, and there are plans to build in reminders, expiry dates and other features.
• The involvement of journalists and news organisations in the site means they can press for official reaction and action. (There are plans for users to specify whether they would not prefer the involvement of mainstream media).

The core function, of course, is to make it very easy for someone to make a very small contribution to an investigation without needing to be as engaged as they would need to be in a ‘traditional’ blog-led investigation.

It is also to provide the social stimulus to encourage someone to act on that question they have, or injustice they’ve experienced. Rather than feel they are blogging into a vacuum, the simple act of being set a challenge, receiving an email from the support journalist, or having someone sign up to your investigation may be enough to incite them to send that letter or make that phonecall. And from there to help others.

And of course it is to collate and connect all of that experience to provide a platform for others to make a difference without having to start from scratch every time.

Of course the successes of HMI in just a short time proved it worked, but it would be unprofessional to accept those successes at face value. I’m naturally distrusting of good news stories. Help Me Investigate is at this stage just a rough proof of concept, and has its flaws. Its success has surprised me - it has far exceeded the basic expectations we had, and that is before we implement any of the many features we planned and put aside for ‘Phase 2′. The key thing is: it works, it serves a different purpose to the blunt tools that already exist while not seeking to replace them, and it has incredible potential to empower and engage people.

Now we’ve got that sorted, let’s keep going.