Help Me Investigate is going open source, the site's blog announced. Help Me Investigate is a UK-based platform where users can ask, as well as answer, questions of public interest that they think should be investigated.

It is not a discussion forum, nor a news website - the site states - although you might have discussions or links to stories elsewhere. It is a community of curious people, and a set of tools to help those people find each other, and some answers.

Even if it is not a news website, it is run by journalists: the founder Paul Bradshaw and a former BBC journalist, Nick Booth. It is an effectively an example of crowdsourced investigative journalism.

Going open source means that the code behind the site will be released so that anyone can install their own crowdsourcing investigation platform, the announcement said. The site will be down for a while during the time of this transposition.

"Going open source addresses a number of legal weaknesses and geographical limitations that the project has encountered, as well as providing an opportunity to improve the technology that we simply don't have in our current form. We've had dozens of requests to join the site from people in South America, Australia, the US, Middle East and South Africa that we couldn't comply with for legal reasons. There have also been those who wanted private investigations, or completely public ones. Now there is a way that those people can use and change the technology accordingly", Bradshaw explained.

The idea behind the crowdsourcing journalism is that users can cooperate to generate information and find answers which they could not find on their own. Clay Shirky, speaking at a Microsoft conference in Paris, gave the example of Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping platform created during the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan general elections to allow people to report on violence and rigging that occurred, as a way to demonstrate his theory of "Cognitive Surplus."

The potential for crowdsourcing information emerged also during the Haiti's earthquake. In that occasion a brainchild of Ushahidi, SwiftRiver validated crowdsourced information during the disaster.

While Help Me Investigate does not aim to be used in times of crisis, it takes the same idea of many-heads-are-better-than-one and tries to find a way to make use of this. Will taking it open source significantly increase its usage?

Source: Help Me Investigate