Start by identifying what you might be good at. If you love solving puzzles, geolocation challenges might be perfect for you. Do you speak another language? Perhaps you know a lot about the military or finance? Discover your specialist field by evaluating your existing skill set.

Find your community! Creating lists on Twitter of, or making an effort to follow on any social media, key researchers in the field you’re interested in can be really helpful to find new tools or techniques. Malachy Browne from the NYT has a great publicly available list of over 200 open source researchers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/lists/839124356638904320

We also have a community of open source researchers from different experience levels in our discord server. It’s free and easy to join via this link here: https://discord.gg/bellingcat
Don’t forget to introduce yourself upon joining!

We asked our discord community, what are the open source research tools you couldn’t live without. The most common answers were Google search and Google Earth Pro. Free and easy to use, these are often the tools we use first in any type of research.