What’s next: help us prioritize!

During the building of the LittleSis beta, many good ideas for future projects were brainstormed by the development team and the dozens of colleagues and friends from whom we received advice and feedback. Although much of our time over the coming weeks will be devoted to fixing bugs, improving basic usability, and cleaning up existing …

Read More

New Administration, New Feature

Previously, user-created lists in LittleSis, such as Bush II Administration Officials, had limited value. They basically behaved like meta tags, but clunkier. If you added Paul Wolfowitz to the Bush II list, then the list name would show up on his profile, and someone browsing through members of that list would see Wolfowitz on it …

Read More

Welcoming the Posse

A big welcome to friends of the Sunlight Foundation! Today’s Sunlight post marks LittleSis’s first real steps out into the wide world of the internet. We’re very happy that transparency’s posse is getting a first peek at the site, because we designed it for people like you: people focused on breaking through the information barriers …

Read More

Design changes

We rolled out some design changes this afternoon, in preparation for our soft launch tomorrow. Folks who got comfortable with the hemmed-in headers and logo might find the blue sky a bit jarring, but we think you’ll come to like it. If you feel the urge, let us know what you think about it all …

Read More

References and Wikipedia

A quick but important note about References on Littlesis. From now on we’re encouraging Littlesis analysts to only use original sources when contributing data. Sites like Wikipedia that aggregate information from elsewhere without requiring documentation, though abundant with largely accurate information, are less useful to Littlesis users looking to verify information. Wikipedia pages often contain …

Read More

Excited About 2009

Last winter Kevin and I were just beginning to look for funding to grow Little Sister — as the project was then named — from a raggedy prototype to a sophisticated, fast, and reliable public resource. I was living at my parents’ house and Kevin was getting by writing about the (amazingly) still-obscure subprime housing …

Read More

Quick and Dirty

For the past two months we’ve been rebuilding this site with more data, better data, a more flexible architecture, version tracking, and other goodies. Eddie Tejeda has joined the team and progress is swift. Though in some ways unsurprising, recent events on Wall Street and in Washington are stunning and deeply troubling. It’s made us …

Read More

Project Status

Littlesis is currently in active development. For the time being, please note that user contributions and edits will not last longer than a day or so, and some features may not work all the time. If all goes well, we hope to have the beta site ready for public use by November 2008. We have …

Read More