There are two great types of people to help you with your investigation on the site: people that you know, and people that you know know something. If they're the same people, so much the better.
Your friends and online contacts are usually happy to spend a little time helping you do simple or easily repeatable tasks, or offer information about people they know who might be able to help. Try to invite them to an investigation that will interest them so they get the hang of the site quickly.
People that know something about the topic being investigated are of course useful, but if you don’t already know them you’ll have to search them out. Find out where people who may be interested communicate, either offline or online. Search the web for your issue, using blog search and news search, while the people might not be active online themselves news and blogs might contain references to them — and you may be able to make contact.
Finding the right people online
Use Google News advanced search where you can use the tools to narrow your search down to individual sources, dates, or locations. For blogs Google’s blog search isn’t quite as good (it includes things written outside the articles in its search, throwing up a lot of false positives), IceRocket’s search is a little bit better.
For people that are active online forums can be a good place to look, if you find a discussion then there’s likely to be a lot of information as well as people to invite. Boardreader is a good tool for this.
For experts most universities have directories that allow you to find people based on areas of expertise (this link is what a Google search along those lines brings up. You can also try broader experts directories like ExpertSearch.co.uk, Expert Witness and Legal Hub's experts directory. Some others are listed here.
Facebook has recently changed its search and privacy settings that means you can use its search to not only look for groups where people might be discussing helpful topics, but also anything people post publicly.
Keeping updated with new search results
Apart from Facebook, all of these searches will let you subscribe to an RSS feed of the results, meaning that once you’ve tried a search that works for you you can automatically get updates any time anyone else posts anything on the web.
I’d recommend Google Reader as the best way to read RSS feeds, it also has a good guide to what RSS is waiting for you when you sign up. Using RSS means that you don’t have to keep checking back, and re-doing the searches.
It also means that more “realtime” tools — such as Twitter — where you’d have to be checking every five minutes for new information become useful. You can subscribe to the RSS of a Twitter search and then just wait for them to plop into your reader.
Tools such as Monitor This can build searches across a lot of sites, and there's even inboxlistening which attempts to give you the "RSS search" experince by email.
Wherever online you find people that could help you investigate it's normally easy to leave a message (a blog comment, forum post or Twitter or Facbook message) telling them about the investigation and offering to send them an invitation — remember you can post a link to investigations on HMI and people will be able to have a look before they decide.
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