Thread by @EliotHiggins

This is a good piece, but there's one big piece of the jigsaw that I think a lot of people covering the role of the open source community in the coverage of Ukraine are missing...

https://twitter.com/leomschwartz/status/1500897999249149961

I've been doing open source investigation for over a decade now, starting with arguing with people on Internet forums about the Arab Spring to collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine for international accountability purposes, and things have changed dramatically.

Back then, the community was just a handful of people from places like Storyful, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and me and my blog, and no-one outside of that group had a clue what open source investigation or things like geolocation was.

In fact, we pretty much just nicked those words from preexisting fields, because in effect we were creating a new field of investigation from scratch. Open source investigation had existed for decades, but it was the digital component that revolutionised things.

It wasn't even that people didn't know how to do online open source investigation, it was they hadn't even heard of it to know it was a thing they didn't know about. The last decade has been a long process of educating everyone about it and getting them to take it seriously.

The current conflict isn't the first conflict that's produced vast amount of open source material, Syria produced literally millions of photos and videos, but when the conflict started no-one really knew what to do with them. We had to learn to do that, then teach others.

Partly this was done by leading by example, the work we did around MH17 was particularly influence, and the JIT investigation that ran parallel to our own investigation helped build trust in the process and brought it to the attention of the accountability community.

But it also meant doing a lot of work going to events, hosting trainings, meeting with people from all sorts of communities and professional backgrounds, and convincing people that this wasn't just a magic trick, but something real, that they could do.

For Bellingcat that's involved training over 4000 people from a variety of background, attending hundreds of conferences, events, lectures and workshops to talk about open source investigation, and demonstrating our work.

And what this has built over the past 10 years is a trust in the field of online open source investigation that means that from even before today's conflict started material gathered through open sources had an impact in those varied communities.

There's been a huge amount of coverage of the conflict that's based on open source material, but quietly in the background there's been a great deal of work to make sure that open source material is also available for future accountability processes.

That's only possible because of the trust that's been built in the process of online open source investigation because of a decade of work, and my hope that this is the first of many conflicts where online open source investigation plays a major role in our understanding of it.

What has been especially gratifying to see is how, even as the field has become more professionalised, that the input of individuals, spending their own free time geolocating videos or counting vehicle loses, has been part of that understanding, not something pushed to the side.

What we're seeing now is the network growing & developing further, so next time there's a conflict there's more chance that open source evidence of war crimes and atrocities that emerge from the conflict will count towards the public's awareness of the conflict & accountability.