"Maintaining An Open Source Toolkit" with Bellingcat Staff and Toolkit Guardians

This week we spoke to the people behind the Bellingcat Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit, two years after it was first launched. In the conversation, Johanna Wild, Anisa Shabir and Martin Sona explored how they assess new tools, put tools to the test and manage to upkeep the toolkit amongst a constantly changing digital landscape. They also provided invaluable tips on how you can stay safe and precise with your analysis when using open source tools. The talk was hosted by Charlotte Maher on October 8th 2026. Music featured is courtesy of Artlist.

Recorded live in our Discord Server: https://discord.com/invite/bellingcat

Links:

Bellingcat Toolkit: https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit

Contact: toolkit@bellingcat.com

Support the Toolkit work: https://www.bellingcat.com/donate-bellingcat-toolkit/

Areas in our Discord for tools: Interested in finding or sharing useful tools? ⁠tools-and-sites Need help with a tool? ⁠tool-support

Looking for help with or review of development of your own tool? ⁠tool-development

We spoke about some of these ethical issues and restrictions with AI tools last week with Craig Silverman, listen back here: https://rss.com/podcasts/bellingcatstagetalk/3202578/

Johanna previously gave a talk when the new toolkit launched here: https://rss.com/podcasts/bellingcatstagetalk/1675152/

Image/Video category in the toolkit: https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/categories/image-video

Tool Pure Ref: https://www.pureref.com/

Social media category in the toolkit: https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/categories/social-media

Tool zeeschuimer: https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/more/all-tools/zeeschuimer

Learn about our volunteer community here: https://www.bc-community.org/