Anyone can set a challenge. The most successful ones tend to be

a) short and simple. Don’t ask people to do too much – break it down into smaller chunks.

b) include a link to a longer tutorial or useful tool. The site’s KnowledgeBase contains a number of tutorials that are related directly to typical challenges; while there are a number of online tools on sites like MySociety that you can link to.

Typical challenge questions

Use the following list to help:

• Blog about this issue
• Write the story so far
• Add some background information
• Invite a friend
• Find a discussion space
• Get expert opinion
• Find evidence on where the money goes (or should be going)
• Find out who regulates this
• Find out who is responsible
• Write to your MP
• Write to your councillor
• Submit a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to get answers
• Get response from party concerned
• Map occurrences
• Find regulations
• Create a spreadsheet of XXX (Collate data)
• Explain why this is important
• Find a definition or explanation of this
• Find an expert
• Invite someone with good contacts
• Write about your experiences pursuing this
• Add your tips to the KnowledgeBase
• Write the full story of a completed investigation
• Organise an event to discuss the issues
• Vote on whether this investigation is complete, open, or a new one needs to start

Here are a few ways you can use Help Me Investigate most effectively:

Add a link to your articles – and raw material

If you write up a story from the material in an investigation, please come back to the investigation and at the very least post a link to the story you published. This should lead to more people clicking through to the story, which is what you want.

If you’ve added something to that material – for example, a reaction from the council press office or a Google map – then post that material too so that others in the investigation can add to it or pick out the reality beneath the PR spin.

Seed an investigation with useful material

Investigations are most successful when people are active and contributing stuff. If you’re only writing up near-finished investigations then you’re not going to get that much from the site. If, however, you see an investigation where you can contribute something, that will spur others into further action, and increase the likelihood of there being something in the future to write up.

Even if all you do is suggest a key person to invite – or invite them yourself – you’ll be doing something useful.

Not only that, but you’ll be creating goodwill towards yourself for when you need to ask the community for help…

Start an investigation yourself

If you:

• have a lead but no time to pursue it, or
• raw material that you need someone to go through, or
• you’ve published a story but there’s more digging to be done,

Then call for help by starting an investigation. You’ll need to bear in mind the points above – invite people, and add what you can. Birmingham Post journalist Tom Scotney described it as being part of “An investigative team that’s bigger, more diverse and more skilled than any newsroom could ever be.”

Don’t ruin it

These are early days for Help Me Investigate and we are continually adding features based on how people use – and abuse – the site. It’s not clear yet how ‘private’ or public investigations will become, whether users will want to restrict how their work is used by news organisations, and how news organisations will support investigations in formal ways. At some point we will be introducing a feature to ‘flag’ users as not contributing to the community (among other things). The point of the site is to make it easier to investigate the powerful by allowing journalists and non-journalists to collaborate and play to their own strengths. The more positively journalists use the site, the more positively everyone else will.

Here are some tips in finding useful information:

1. Search Google News

Google News is “a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalised interests.” It is a particularly useful place to start searching for information as, unlike Google.com, will prioritise more recent information and leave out general, and perhaps less relevant pages.

News stories will often provide a starting point for identifying further useful documents. An article might for instance mention an official report, an organisation, a set of guidelines or regulation that apply to the issue being investigated. The next step is to find the original document if the article doesn’t link to it (Some news organisations are better than others at linking, notably the BBC and Guardian).

2. Use Google’s Advanced Search facility

Certain types of webpages or documents are likely to be more useful in your search for information. By clicking on Google’s Advanced Search link you can be more specific in the types of results you want. Here are some options to try:

File type:

Official reports tend to be published in PDF format. By selecting PDF from this drop-down menu before you conduct your search you are more likely to find reports that would otherwise be buried in the normal search results. You can also try Word documents.

Likewise, try selecting Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets of raw data published by organisations. Less useful, but also worth trying is Microsoft Powerpoint – often used for public presentations.

Search within a site or domain:

The search facility on many websites is often very poor. Sometimes you will be more successful by using Google to perform the same search.

Type ‘birmingham.gov.uk’ into this box and Google will only look within that website.

Type ‘.gov.uk’ and Google will only search within UK governmental websites

Type ‘.ac.uk’ and Google will only search within UK educational establishments

Type ‘.org.uk’ and Google will only search within non-profit organisation websites – also try ‘.org’ as not all UK nonprofits use ‘.uk’

There are other domains that are worth trying too, depending on the nature of your investigation, such as:

• .ltd.uk (some limited companies),
• .info (some information providers, worldwide),
• .nhs.uk,
• .police.uk,
• .parliament.uk,
• .sch.uk (LEAs, schools, etc.),
• .bl.uk and .british-library.uk (British Library),
• .nls.uk (National Library of Scotland)
• and .mod.uk (Ministry of Defence).

All of these are likely to bring more useful results than a broad search of the web.

Find pages that link to the page:

The last box on Google’s Advanced Search page (you’ll need to click on the + icon to bring it up) allows you to search for pages that link a specific webpage. If you’ve found a useful webpage in your search using this option to see what else is linking to it can be useful in a number of ways:

• If it’s particularly specialist, anything linking to it will be likely to be equally specialist
• It might add new information, or correct incorrect information
• The person who created the webpage may be able to contribute to your investigation

3. Search blogs

Blogs can be a useful source of specialist knowledge that a Google search wouldn’t bring up. Although Google has its own search engine, it tends to include more irrelevant information than others. For that reason a better search engine to use is the specialist blog search engine IceRocket.

Even if the search doesn’t result in useful information, it may bring up someone blogging about the same issue – it’s worth asking them directly for any relevant information, and inviting them to the investigation.

Here are a few simple things you can do to help make your investigation progress:

1. Invite lots of useful people

The more people you have in your investigation, the more likely it is that challenges will be completed; and the more likely that someone has the piece of knowledge or contact you’re after. There’s more advice on that front here. In short, you’re looking for friends, others who are passionate about the same issue, and experts.

The more users an investigation has, the more prominent it will be on the Investigations page, which means others who could help will be more likely to see it.

2. Add as much useful information as you can

The first challenge on any investigation is ‘Add background information’. This might be news, council or government reports, official webpages of relevant organisations, contact pages for useful people, or links to material you’ve gathered yourself, such as photos, video, emails or forum posts. This helps give others some context – and might highlight the oddities you’re investigating.

3. Write about it on blogs and forums

You want other people who are annoyed by the same issue to be able to find your investigation easily. The more you write about it – in as many places as possible – the more likely they are to find out. You might try one or more of these:

• A forum where the issue is being discussed, or where affected people might gather (e.g. if your investigation is about health then a forum for health professionals or patients). You can search forums at Boardreader.
• A Facebook group related to the issue (if one doesn’t exist, start one!)
• A blog or blog post where the issue is being discussed (search IceRocket).
• Start a blog of your own, even if there are other blogs talking about this. You can link to the other blogs and join that community. How to start a blog is explained here – but also ask other bloggers who are writing about the same issue for advice.
• You could also record a simple video about your investigation and post it on a site like YouTube or Vimeo. (Advice here)
• Finally, look for similar investigations on Help Me Investigate and mention it there (use the search facility or browse by tag).

4. Contribute to other investigations

Others are more likely to help if you can contribute something to their investigation too – even if you only invite more people, or do a quick search to find background information. It’s the thought that counts.

• Google Maps Help page on creating Google Maps
• 5 Ways to create a Google Map in minutes
• How to create a Google Map in about 30 minutes

Once you’ve created the map you need to be able to link to it in your investigation. Instructions on publishing your map and getting the link to paste into your investigation can be found in the Google Maps Help page at this point.

Create an account with Google Docs if you don’t already have a Google account

Log into your Google Docs account and click on New, then select Document from the list that appears

If you’ve ever used a word processing package like Word this will look very familiar. Click on ‘Untitled’ to give your document a name.

Type (or paste) your letter as you would in any other package. Leave out any personal information as this is going to be used by other people and visible by others.

When you’re done and ready to publish your letter so others can use it, click on Share (upper right) and select Get the link to share…

A new box will appear with a tick-box: ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. Tick this. (Don’t tick the second box allowing others to edit the document unless you want to allow that too)

Now the box below should have a web address (URL) that you can copy and paste elsewhere. Copy this (right-click on it and select Copy)

Go to your investigation on Help Me Investigate and any relevant challenges. Accept the challenge and type some text explaining that you have created a template letter. Paste (right-click and select Paste) the web address in the Update’s link box so others can see it and use it too.

To do this, open your spreadsheet in Google Docs and click on Form > Create a form.

A new window will appear containing a form that you can edit, with some information automatically added.

If you roll over any of the questions you will see buttons for you to edit, duplicate or delete it. You can also edit the form title and description and there are various extra options across the top.

Along the bottom of the form you will see a web address (URL) for the form that you can send to people or copy and paste into an investigation update. When a person clicks on this they will be able to fill in the form and the information will be added to your spreadsheet.

Once you’ve finished, just close the window.

If you need the address of your form again open your spreadsheet and go to Form > Go to live form… this will open the form – copy the URL from the web address bar as you would with any other webpage.

If you want to edit the form again just open your spreadsheet, click on Form > Edit form…

To allow others to edit your spreadsheet, open it and click on Share (in the top right area) then click See who has access…

This last option is best if you want to allow others to add information to your spreadsheet

But what if someone deletes all my data? Setting up alerts

On the same window you can set up the spreadsheet so you are alerted whenever anyone makes changes.

Click on My notification settings.

You will be presented with a number of options for when you are notified of any changes

If a change is made that you don’t like (e.g. someone deletes all data) go to File > Revision history

The spreadsheet will now have the latest change highlighted and above the top row of cells will be a number of new buttons – click on Older to see how the spreadsheet looked before the last change that was made.

Then click Revert to this one to change the spreadsheet back to how it looked then (You will be asked to confirm – click OK).

If this isn’t the version you want to revert to you can keep clicking Older to go back in the spreadsheet’s history. The Newer button will take you in the other direction, to more recent versions.

Making it really easy – allowing updates by form

There’s a better way to allow users to add data to your spreadsheet – creating a form. I explain how to do this here.

• It’s a better way of displaying data than using a sentence of text
• It means people can easily see where the gaps are – and fill them in
• It also allows people to do interesting things with the data, like visualise it, or mix it up (‘mashup’) with information from elsewhere, e.g. maps

One of the most popular tools for creating public spreadsheets of data is Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs.

Creating or uploading a spreadsheet

Creating a spreadsheet in Google Docs is pretty much the same as in any other spreadsheet software. Click on New > Spreadsheet to start creating one. Name it by clicking where it says ‘Unsaved spreadsheet‘ and add your data.

You can also upload a spreadsheet from your computer into Google Docs by going to File > Import.

Publishing your spreadsheet online

To publish the spreadsheet click on ‘Share‘ (in the top right area) and select Publish as a web page.

A new window will appear where you can select whether to publish an individual sheet or the whole spreadsheet (if it has more than one). Change this if you want to, then click Start publishing.

Publishing a Google Docs spreadsheet

The bottom half of that window will now become active and you should now have a web address (URL) where the spreadsheet is published. Copy that web address and paste it into a new window to see how the spreadsheet looks in its published form.

You can also paste that address anywhere you want to show people the spreadsheet – including in investigation updates.

Allowing others to edit your spreadsheet – and tracking what is changed

There’s a lot more you can do with a Google Docs spreadsheet when you allow others to collaborate on it. To find out more read: how to allow others to edit your spreadsheet – and how to track the changes they make.

If you have any questions or comments please post them and I’ll try to answer.

1. Get it onto your computer if it isn’t already

If your evidence is physical – e.g. a printout – then use a scanner to get it onto your computer. Many company photocopiers now offer this facility as well.

2. Upload it to a document-sharing website

There are a number of these. Scribd is a very useful place to store PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. You will need to create a (free) account first. Once you do, just follow the instructions given here. You can also use the service to create backup copies of documents that are already online.

The biggest advantage of Scribd is that people can label and annotate documents, making it easier for others to spot things you might not see. It also makes it easy to embed documents in other webpages so you could display the document in a blog post about it.

Google Docs will also allow you to upload the same types of documents – you’ll find links on how to do this via this page.

If you have scanned in a document and it is an image then you’ll need an image-sharing website. There are dozens of these but the best-known and most widely used is Flickr. Again, you’ll need to create a free account and then go to the upload page. You can also upload by sending them to a special email address – more information on that can be found here.

Perhaps the easiest way to get your documents online is to send them in an email to post@posterous.com – this will create a blog for you with your document ‘embedded’ in your first entry. If you send a number of images Posterous will even create a gallery for you. There’s more information on Posterous’ FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.

3. Link to it on your Investigation Page

Once your document is online you just need to link to it from the investigation page.

• If you’ve used Posterous a link will have been emailed to you.
• On Scribd make sure you are logged on and go to http://www.scribd.com/my_docs – then click on the name of the document you want to link to. You will be taken to the page with your document on it. Copy the address of that webpage.
• On Google Docs open your document and click on Share (in the top right) and select ‘Publish as a web page‘ – a window should appear with further options. Select these as you wish and you should be presented with a web address to copy. More information here.
• On Flickr log on to your account, click on You and then Your Photostream to see your images. Click on the image you need and copy the address of the webpage.

Now go to your investigation and the challenge that relates to your documents (e.g. ‘Add background information’). Accept it if you haven’t already and in the Add an update box that appears type a description of your document. In the Web link box paste or type the web address your document has been published to.