Help Bellingcat Decide Which Open Source Tools to Build

Online researchers and investigators, Bellingcat needs your assistance! Could you give us 10 minutes of your time to take part in a survey? We’re offering places at a four-hour Bellingcat online training to two lucky respondents.

Bellingcat’s Investigative Tech Team wants to build free (!) tools for digital researchers.

But first we want to find out more about how the researchers we hope to help work and what they really need. As such, we’ve created a short survey, which you can find here. We would be grateful if you could find the time to fill it out.

You can indicate in the survey whether you would be open to being contacted by Bellingcat for a short call to further discuss your research workflows and any possible challenges you face – although, this is not mandatory. 

In order to make the information we gather useful to the wider open source community and other digital tool developers, we will look to publish the results of our survey on our website. 

However, to be clear for those who are security conscious or prefer privacy, it is possible and absolutely acceptable to fill out the survey anonymously. 

We are a nonprofit organisation and will not use the survey results for any commercial purposes. 

For those who do provide an email address for us to potentially further contact them, we will enter you into a prize draw for two free places at a four-hour Bellingcat online workshop. The winners will be selected by the end of March 2022.

Bellingcat’s Investigative Tech Team has already produced a number of tools, which you can find on our GitHub page. These include an Instagram location search tool that pinpoints Instagram IDs near specified locations, a Telegram phone number checker that lets you see if a phone number is connected to specific Telegram accounts and a Google Earth Engine application that searches for Sentinel-2 images that are cloud free in particular areas of interest.

We want to create more helpful tools like this and are keen to tailor them to the needs of the open source community. 

Many thanks for your responses in advance and we appreciate your time and support!