Little Sis - "An Involuntary Facebook of Powerful Americans"

Check out LittleSis.org. It's a new wiki-based site to track the social networks of America's political and economic elites. When you're done checking it out, start using it.

To check out the site, go here. To sign up to contribute to it, go here. To familiarize yourself with what the site is supposed to do and why the heck it matters, go to the site's "purpose" page, read the text pasted below, or, if you've got some time on your hands and want the deluxe version, read this very eloquent post on the site's blog by LittleSis's E.D., Matthew Skomarovsky, about "Why LittleSis Matters". (It's long but well worth the read).

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LittleSis brings transparency to influential social networks from Wall Street to Washington. The site is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by an online community of analysts.

Profile pages catalogue important relationships between politicians, CEOs, financiers, lobbyists, and other important folks. By tracking everything from board memberships to campaign contributions, family ties to government contracts, LittleSis opens up elite networks for public inspection. Why do this? Because whether you like them or not, they play a crucial role in shaping public policy; they make decisions that affect our lives in profound ways.

LittleSis is an ambitious experiment in "crowdsourcing" transparency; though the site's core data sets are built and maintained by the LittleSis team, anyone can sign up to become an analyst and contribute (well-sourced) information.

Unlike more traditional wikis, LittleSis is optimized for tracking relationships. Add a relationship between two people and it shows up on both profile pages. For example, Eric Holder and Valerie Jarrett are close. This makes it a good tool for tracking power and influence.

Structured data of this nature allows for some interesting analysis. Go to the "interlocks" tab on each profile and you can see a list of shared organizational affiliations. For instance, oil companies appear to dominate the Augusta National Golf Club. Go to the "giving" tab on each profile, and you can get an interesting window onto the giving patterns for the organization or individuals you're looking at. People on the Obama Transition Economic Agency Review Team seem to have split their contributions between Obama and Hillary.

A disclaimer: since LittleSis is a beta and just starting to make its way out into the world, there are gaps and holes in the data and application. Don't use it as a definitive resource, but consider its potential, especially as people begin contributing more information to the site.

The site is a project of the Public Accountability Initiative (public-accountability.org) a research and educational 501(c)3 focused on corporate and government accountability. We have backgrounds in investigative research, political action, and web development, much of it from within the labor movement (SEIU, Harvard Living Wage, Freelancers Union). The site has been supported by Sunlight Foundation, a leader in the government transparency movement.

In case you're wondering about the name: "Big Brother" is commonly used to describe a situation where the electronic eyes of the powers that be are vigilantly watching citizens for misbehavior. "LittleSis" is a website where the electronic eyes of citizens are vigilantly watching back.

Are you a journalist or blogger? An activist? A politics junkie? A concerned citizen? Are you tired of shaking your fist at the powers that be without letting them know you're watching?

Sign up now to become a contributing analyst at LittleSis. Once you receive the proper credentials, you will be able to edit the profile pages of your favorite (or least favorite) fat cats.