Author: Nick Booth

Help Me Investigate’s first spin off story for the maintream media.

Birmingham Post on help Me Investigate
Birmingham Post on help Me Investigate

Whether it is the social media surgeries, the grassroots channel podcast or Be Vocal I’ve always been interested in helping active citizens find new ways to collaborate and communicate.

So it is with Help me Investigate, a site I’ve helped establish alongside Paul Bradshaw (who had the original idea) and Stef Lewandowski (who’s building our prototype site).

Help Me Investigate allows people to ask civic questions and work together to find answers. Since it emerged into life a couple of months ago people have sought answers to questions ranging from:

  • “Why wont’ Birmingham City Council hand over the running of Lightwoods Park to Sandwell Council”
  • “Help me investigate why my doctor has an 0845 number”
  • “What is the tracking process for petitions handed into Birmingham City Council.”

The site feels quite Birmingham centric at the moment simply because we are experimenting using questions about the place where many of us live. As the site evolves that will change.

Who pays for this?

It is funded by Channel 4’s 4ip fund, Screen West Midlands and Advanatage West Midlands and it’s launch attracted interested from the mainstream media. The Guardian summed it up like this:

Rather than a publishing platform, the site is a tool that could equally benefit news organisations and the public; it follows the MySociety mould of successful activism sites like TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet.

“Journalists think investigative journalism should be very secretive, but [HelpMeInvestigate] has to be seen to be owned by the community than by journalists because that puts off the public. People can contribute their expertise to answer specific questions, and journalists with no resources could use the site to call on the community for help.”

Today the site, still in a private experimental phase, saw it’s first spin off mainstream media news story.

The Birmingham Post runs an HMI story on Parking Tickets.

This morming the post ran this story about how HMI had found the worst street for parking fines in Birmingham.  The story began here, with a question from Heather Brooke:

Help me investigate on which Birmingham Streets are the most parking tickets issued?

It’s an interesting HMI question because it is about something which bothers many  of us, but it’s also specific and local.  It’s also a classic local newspaper question, but what thye may not take the time to ask.

The next stage was  a freedom of information request, which you can see here on MySociety’s brilliant WhatDoTheyKnow service, which makes FOI requests public and easy to make.

When the information finally arrive in three files another user of the site stepped into to help. Neil Houston likes messing around with spreadsheets (part of the point of Help me Investigate is to allow people to play to their strengths).

He quickly established the 10 worst places to park for ticketing were:

•Alum Rock Road, Washwood Heath (3,995)
•Stratford Road, Sparkhill (2,418)
•Corporation Street, city centre (1,748)
•Alcester Road, Moseley (1,545)
•Waterloo Street, city centre (1,455)
•High Street, Harborne (1,391)
•Gas Street, city centre (1,083)
•Whittall Street, city centre (1,022)
•St Paul’s square, Jewellery Quarter (1,008)
•Dean Street, city centre (978)

Neil normally blogs about food, so even though he wanted to right about this he didn’t want to contaminate his normal blog.  He borrowed some space on Be Vocal to write this piece, including the observation that:

it’s surprising to see that the warden BM739, issued 5,080 tickets.  The next ‘top’ ticketer issued 3,559.  This shocked me, as that’s a LOT of extra tickets by BM739.

Tom Scotney at the Birmingham Post started to use his papers position to seek explanations for the figures from the council, and this morning he posted the article including explanations for these questions:  1/2) Why is Alum Rock Road the most ticketed area in Birmingham?
3) Why did the number of tickets given out rise significantly over the last full recorded year?

So what do I make of this?

  • Thanks to the Birmingham Post for running the story and more importantly sharing credit for the story. It’s important for news organisations to get used to being open and generous with sources.
  • It’s good to see citizens and journalists (who are also citizens, I know) collaborating with each other to get to the bottom of something
  • This one set of data has already triggered new questions about car clamping and could lead to a  flurry of similar questions across the country.

The other thing to remember though is that this may not be typical of what happens on Help Me Investigate. This is a question which has general interest, hence useful for a mainstream news organisation.  Many of the questions though may be, on the face of it,  more mundane and more about how thre system works or perhas problems that are very very local.

For these the collaboration could involve public servants using the questions as a means to improve the work they do.  At least let’s hope so.

Stuff I've seen from July 22nd to July 25th

These are my links for July 22nd through July 25th:

  • Message in-a-Box – Do you want to use multimedia, online or offline tools to advance your cause? Creatively and effectively? To reach the broadest possible audience?
  • Helen Milner: Digital Britain sees digital inclusion emerging from the chrysalis – Helen writes: “From my point of view the evidence is clear, and it’s the link between social and digital inclusion which remains most concerning and most urgent. Those already at a disadvantage are up to seven times more likely to be digitally excluded.”
  • Jackie Hai | Convergence Commons – “There’s a simple reason why no iTunes for the news exists yet: it’s because the journalism industry has thus far failed to produce any songs worth buying. For that matter, the journalism industry has produced very few songs at all — the staggering majority of stuff being circulated today is commodity news, contextless updates with no replay value after being consumed once” via @paulbradshaw
  • ASH-10 » Echoworking – Pete Ashton on the new Moseley exchange Co-working (Cow Orking) space in Birmingham. My view is that it’s utterly brilliant that one of our neighbourhoods has such a fantastic thing for small businesses and creative types.

Social Media Help – support for local groups blogging.

If you look at the top of this page you’ll see a new set of pages called Social Media Help.  They are an extension of some work we have been doing for Groundwork UK on the Big Lottery Community Spaces fund..

With tight resources we wanted to provide some simple guidance for any community groups who use social media as they  apply for or perhaps spend the Community Spaces fund dosh.  My favourite of all is this wonderful blog post from the Friends of Abbey Gardens, but other groups are at it, including Macclesfields Skate Park group, Fairland Park, and  some consistent blogging from Roy at Meols Park.

The help section is available on their site and here.  It will also be useful for the facilitators who help groups with contracts etc.  there are 50 of them and we neither had the time or the desire to try and show all 50 how to blog etc.  For those do want to encourage local groups to use social media it’s a starting point.

The help section is available on this site and here and the end result is:

We’ve compiled some practical articles and videos to help you get the most out of using social media to tell your story. You can go through them one at a time, or dip in and out. Each section has a search facility to help you get to useful nuggets of information from trusted help and support sites.

  1. Tips for blogging with WordPress
  2. Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr
  3. Tips for sharing videos with YouTube
  4. Tips for using Twitter
  • What makes the web social?

    • It deliberatley only covers a few services because we dont want to clutter things up for beginers.  Thanks very much to Paul Henderson for pulling this together.  Feel free to use it for social media surgeries and the like.

    Westminster Council's clear new website

    Westminster City Councils bold search box
    Westminster City Council's bold search box

    I’m very keen on this bold and simple new website from Westminster City Council.  It speaks the visual language many web users already understand:  google and search.

    I also like to see good use of maps. Perhaps a next step might be for Westminster to collaboprate with local open street mappers and start using that.  Why? Because in the long term it will help alleviate copyright problems over data and maps.