Help Me Investigate is a site that enables you to find out the answers to tough questions and investigate things that you think deserve the attention of many but aren’t things that your local or national newspaper would have the resources to check out.

It works by enabling easy collaboration with other people who also care about the same thing that you do:

I start an investigation on the site, say “Why was the tree outside my house cut down?” (something that really annoys me, but I don’t know how to find out).

Once I’ve started the investigation I get my own investigation area on the site and I can invite other people to be co-investigators. Over time, we each contribute small parts to a shared investigation area on the site, adding links, documents, articles, updates on conversations I’ve had with the council, and so on.

The end result is that someone with particular skills in dealing with the council could join in and say “Well I know Geoff has responsibility for trees, and I just spoke to him. Your best bet is to give Juliet at Active Tree Surgery a call on XYZ”, or someone else could make a Freedom of Information Request and post up the response on the site.

This is the kind of information that is not easy to find on the web but is very valuable, and with many people collaborating around a subject, each contributing in their own way, anyone could potentially get to the bottom of things that frustrate them.

The team

Paul Bradshaw, who’s idea this project was, has more on his blog, and talks about how the site is an example of a potential model for Slow Journalism, as well as providing a potential model for how investigative journalism could look in the future as newspaper revenues fall and fewer local and regional papers are able to do this kind of low-level investigation any more.

The third co-founder of ‘Help Me Investigate Team’ is Nick Booth, whose experience of working with people who are active within their local community means he has the hardest job – getting the site out to people who will find it most valuable and helping them to use it while we adjust it to suit everyone’s needs.

Heather Brooke, who instigated the high court campaign to get MPs second home allowances information into the public domain, joins us as our resident expert and will be on the site offering guidance, advice and suggestions for making investigations successful.

Paul Henderson is on hand to support the site’s small, but growing, community – answering questions, offering support, resolving disputes and whatever else emerges while we test it.

Hopefully we’ll be going into Public Beta in the next few weeks and I can say more, but suffice to say we’re really excited about this project and so are 4IP and Screen West Midlands who’ve funded the project so far.

My role in all of this is to turn a great idea into reality. No pressure then.

Developing the site

I’m a big advocate of Ruby on Rails, but I’m pragmatic and only use it appropriately. The great thing – it’s absolutely perfect for a project prototype of this kind. I emphasise prototype. We only have funds initially to see if we can make something work here – it’s experimental. So the best way to do that is using a rapid development framework and develop in an Agile way. I’d love to say I’ve been doing Test Driven Development, but actually it’s worked better using human testing rather than automated testing – I can’t find much documentation on using early user testing over sitting in an office and writing tests. Anyway…

With Help Me Investigate I seem to have found a beautiful combination of tools for rapid development. Here’s what I’m using:

• A Macbook – you no longer need a big, fancy computer or a local server for developing something like this.
• Ruby – comes pre-installed with the mac
• TextMate – I’ve never been a big fan of Dreamweaver and all of those development environments. Simple text-editing works best.
• Rails 2.3 – a beautiful MVC web development framework that has a steep learning curve but pays off with about your third project.
• Brightbox – a little bit expensive, but a high quality, lovely way to get Rails applications online relatively painlessly
• Passenger – Quite the revolution in getting rails applications online easily
• Subversion – Yes I know I should be using Git, but it comes pre-installed on Brightbox. This is where I store all of the code for the project as I’m working on it – when others collaborate we can use this code repository collaboratively, and it gets backed up to…
• Amazon S3 – Automated backups running nightly mean that if we suffered a catastrophic server failure it’s recoverable.
• Capistrano – a tool for ‘deploying’ websites that
• Firefox – a great web browser you may have heard of
• Web Developer Toolbar - a handy plugin to Firefox that gives you options for debugging the page’s CSS
• Firebug – a wonderful debugger if you’re doing Javascript
• YSlow – a tool by Yahoo that grades your site on how quick pages will download and tells you what you can do to fix it.
• Prototype – a javascript framework for doing AJAX/page effects (I’m also a fan of JQuery)
• Scriptaculous – easy animation and javascript page effects
• Attachment Fu – automatically scale images and host them on Amazon. Paperclip seems to be an improvement on some functionality but I haven’t used it on this project.
• HAML – This absolutely revolutionised the way that I structure pages. Rather than marking pages up in HTML you use simple tab formatting. Feels like writing haiku instead of code. Lovely.
• SASS – And on top of HAML this is a beautiful way to write page styles. It’s a meta-language that sits on top of CSS. Brilliant.
• Compass – And topping off SASS, Compass is a compiler that runs in the background as you work, writing out the CSS files. A wonderful find and I can see this getting popular very fast for web developers who want to write semantically sensible pages but using popular web frameworks, such as…
• YUI or Blueprint – two great web CSS frameworks that make building pages so much quicker. Compass has its own versions of these and other frameworks meaning you can use more semantic code styles but still benefit from the way they work
• Resources Controller – sketching out controllers in an MVC with common REST methods automatically added for you means some of my controllers consist of three lines!
• Asset Packager – squash your CSS and Javascript into one file each, making your pages load faster
• Community Engine – a great way to get a quick start with a community site. Yes – I have to trash loads of the code whenever I use it, and end up moving over to my own versions of the code but it gives a project a kick-start early on by handling common tasks – users, profiles, login, sessions, security, all the stuff you need on any multi-user site so you can concentrate on the stuff that matters. Ace.

There’s more – but maybe I should do this is as a talk at one of the many Birmingham meetup events. I’d love it if there were more people around using Rails in the area – it feels a bit lonely out here sometimes!

If you’d like to be part of the private beta, please fill out the form on the Help Me Investigate site.