Help Me Investigate.com
Open source, UK-based investigative journalism project, Help Me Investigate.com (HMI), has generated its first news story on parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham.

The site, which will encourage both journalists and members of the public to pitch and participate in investigations, has been publicly available for just a couple of weeks.

Several 'test' investigations, including an exploration of plans for a new Birmingham.gov website, have led promising story leads, but the Birmingham Post's coverage of the parking tickets investigation is the first published news story sparked by the site.

Freedom of Information (FOI) campaigner and journalist Heather Brooke, who is working with HMI as a 'support journalist', initiated the investigation on June 2, as testing of the site began.

She also made the successful FOI request to Birmingham City Council to release information on parking tickets issued in the last financial year.

But the process from start to finish was a collaborative effort with user Neil Houston putting the information for 135,656 tickets into a workable format after it was supplied on July. Site user 'James RB' also helped to analyse the figures.

Post journalist Tom Scotney, who authored the piece published today, also contributed information to the HMI site, journalism lecturer and blogger Paul Bradshaw, who came up with the idea for HMI, explained to Journalism.co.uk.

"Tom Scotney got a reaction from the council press office which he has added to the investigation on Help Me Investigate as well as his own piece in the Birmingham Post today. It's important that journalists engage with the site in that way," he said.

"We had no plans around the story until it got results. Once it got results and it became apparent this would be a good story, I spoke to Tom Scotney at the Post, who is a user of Help Me Investigate and understands how important it is to participate and to acknowledge the work of its users."

Around a dozen people joined this particular investigation on the site, but it is likely only half contributed, Bradshaw said. While it has been a relatively low-key project, publication of the story may raise its profile and user interaction, he added.

The figures released by Brooke's FOI request have also been made available in a Google spreadsheet as part of the investigation. Releasing data in this way is key and will become more of a feature of HMI's work, said Bradshaw.

"I'm hoping to do a datablog for the site specifically for data like this as obviously there will be people who will be particularly interesting in mashing that up. There is also another project in Birmingham - BeVocal - which is specifically interested in mashing up public data, and there are obvious connections there," he said.

Bradshaw has had meetings with news organisations regarding HMI's work and all have been 'very interested', he said. "On an individual level we are involving individual journalists too. We are not selling stories or advertising; the objective is successful investigations - and news organisations and journalists are as much a part of that as people who don't work in the news industry," he said.

A follow-up investigation has also been launched by Bradshaw on the site looking at parking ticket hotspots nationally. "This should test how we expand the experience gained in a local investigation into a national one," he wrote in a blog post.

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