HMI Meetup – This Wednesday, Birmingham

If you’re in Birmingham on Wednesday evening (30th Sept), then the Help Me Investigate team would love to see you to say thanks for all your investigations so far and to talk about the next steps for the site.

And to buy you a drink.

The successes of the site, the Birmingham parking ticket investigation, the work on Council overspending, and others are all due to the community and efforts of the users. There’s nothing like sharing a drink and a chat to help that community work together.

We’re meeting in the relaxed surroundings of The Green Room, on Hurst Street in Birmingham City Centre. It’s  five minutes walk from New Street Station (walkit.com directions) and right by a fairly reasonably priced car park.

We’ll be there from around 7pm

Venue: The Green Room, The Arcadian Centre, Hurst Street. (Map)

How to create a form for people to add information to your spreadsheet

Rather than asking people to edit a whole spreadsheet, you can make it easier by creating a form for them to add particular information by answering questions.

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…

Allowing others to edit your spreadsheet – and tracking what happens

Following on from the previous post on creating and publishing a spreadsheet online, here’s how you allow others to add to that, and how you track what happens:

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

A new window will open – towards the bottom of that it will say ‘Sign-in is required to view this item’ which means users need a Google account to see it. Click ‘Change‘ next to that.

3 options will pop up:

• Always require sign-in – users need to be signed in to their Google account to see this
• Let people view without signing in - users do not need a Google account to see it, but cannot edit 
• Let people edit without signing in - users can edit the spreadsheet regardless of whether they have a Google account or not

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.

Creating and publishing a spreadsheet online

For some investigations it will be useful to create a public spreadsheet of information. There are 3 main reasons why:

• 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.

What to do if you have documents you want to upload

If you have a document relating to your investigation that is not already online – for instance a PDF, a Word document, a scanned document, or a letter, here is some advice on how to get it into the investigation:

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.

How to investigate

Think something is unjust or unfair – or just curious to know why something happened or how something works? Are you saying “Someone ought to do something”? That someone is you.

Society is only as good as those individuals willing to stand up and ask questions of the people in charge. I’m guessing you’re one of those individuals.

As a seasoned battler with bureaucracy here are my top tips about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to finding things out.

First, though, you might want to know the sort of mindset that helps in an investigation. The good investigator must value his or herself and her right to know. If you paid for it or it’s a public service then you have a right to know how that money is spent or why a decision was made.

An investigator should also have the ability to:

• Think independently
• Question received knowledge
• Laser through bullshit
• Find facts

What we can’t do at Help Me Investigate is do your investigation for you. And you probably wouldn’t want us to.

Your case is something about which I imagine you feel very strongly and that is always the best motivation for finding out something.

What we will do is provide an environment, tools and a community that can help.

Accessing information is a matter of persistence and will. It took me 5 years of persistent effort and even a High Court case before MPs were forced to disclose their expense receipts. It’s not going to be that difficult to find out why a tree was cut down on your road but the point is that you will need some tenacity and will. Don’t give up at the first hurdle but equally don’t be dispirited if you don’t get results overnight.

The aim of this site is empower people by giving them the tools they need to investigate for themselves and to break investigations up into lots of smaller tasks – ‘challenges’ – that people can complete in their own time. You can find advice on this website and also on my website www.yrtk.org and book ‘Your Right to Know. There’s nothing we can do that you can’t, and you will have much better knowledge of your particular situation and the people involved.

As for making Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests – I’d recommend you use this website: www.whatdotheyknow.com. You can read many other requests (including some of mine) and see how various public bodies respond. The site will also help you keep track of requests and when organisations need to respond.

If you come across a specific hurdle and think we can help, do get in touch.

Tips for creating your own investigation:

1. Be specific

If you want a concrete answer you must ask a concrete question. If you think the council has an unfair parking system try to find a way to quantify that. Ask for a breakdown of tickets issued by street, of revenue raised, etc.

Officials can avoid giving a straight answer to a general question; it’s much harder if you ask a very specific detailed question.

2. Be clear

You must first be clear in your own mind what you want to find out. Then keep your investigation concise.

Have a main point and stick to it. Don’t wander off on personal digressions or gripes. Write grammatically and use a dictionary to spell correctly to avoid being written off as part of the ‘green-ink brigade’.

3. Be reasonable

It’s not always a conspiracy. More likely you’ll find the reason something went wrong was due to incompetence or a failure of communication within the institution.

Avoid personal insults. This leaves you open to being attacked personally yourself and you should want to maintain the moral highground.

4. Manage your expectations

Think in terms of tangible things you can actually do. ‘Get rid of all evil parking attendants’ is not really a manageable goal. Instead think about what you can do: make a phone call, write a letter, send a freedom of information request, do some research, talk to people, campaign.

You should expect to come up against opposition, after all no one likes to admit they are wrong and few people willingly give up power.

You would hope that those in authority understand that in a democracy they serve at the pleasure of the people and that they would welcome the involvement of the citizenry. But I found this is not usually the case and you will have to go some way to collect enough evidence to force change.

Advice on investigative journalism (video)

Very simple and helpful video from Bob Woodward on the 3 ingredients of good investigative journalism:

• Talking to people
• Documents
• Visiting the scene