View Birmingham’s parking ticket hotspots in a larger map

Today the Birmingham Post publishes the first story to come out of the crowdsourcing platform I’ve been creating – Help Me Investigate. It’s about parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham*. UPDATE: The Birmingham Mail have also published a report, from which the map above comes.

The site has only been public for a couple of weeks, and we have refrained from any launch or publicity, preferring to let it grow organically in these early stages.

But the early results have been extremely encouraging.

Although the parking ticket story is the first to appear in traditional media, it is not the first investigation to be completed on the site. One investigation was completed during the testing stage; another shortly after. Both had resolutions that might not have made traditional media, but were important to the users and, for me, resulted in the sort of engagement you want from media (more on that below). Continue reading →