While the LittleSis website is a useful tool for researchers, academics, journalists, and activists to explore and map networks of powerful people and organizations, our data is available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This means that anyone can use the data in our database for whatever they …
Tag: littlesis
Join a LittleSis training!
Look familiar? You can now join a free online training to get over the hump and start using LittleSis for your power research! The real value of LittleSis is that anyone can edit and add data to keep the information accurate, current, and most importantly, growing. The more that our community of researchers, journalists, academics, …
Regents Research Fund UPDATE
Two weeks ago I used LittleSis to look into the NYS Education Department’s shadow government, the Regents Research Fund. The Fund’s interlocks show a clear pattern among the fellows: 13 (out of seventeen researched) had worked at Teach for America, New Leaders, College Board or the NYC Department of Education before joining the Fund. Some …
Mapping Shadow Government: Regents Research Fund
Back in August we set up a Shadow Gov Working Group on LittleSis, inspired by Obama’s Open Government Working Group established in 2009 and his administration’s hot pursuit of Edward Snowden, who worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The research group investigates corporations that tend to profit from the privatization of government, first focusing …
Who’s spying on nonprofits for corporate America?
The Center for Corporate Policy recently released a report demonstrating how large corporations hire former law enforcement officials to spy on nonprofit organizations considered to be a threat to them. We added all of the firms in the report to a list in LittleSis–Corporate Espionage Firms–to take a closer look at some of the people …
How the business community works in New York
Last week Governor Cuomo was joined by John Mack and Leslie Whatley to launch Start-Up NY, which will create zones around universities where businesses can locate tax-free for 10 years. Mack, formerly CEO and chairman and currently senior advisor of Morgan Stanley, will be an advisor to the governor and to Empire State Development’s board …
LittleSis is here to help!
We are excited to roll out a new, comprehensive help center to guide our users as they add, edit and analyze data on LittleSis. We have added lots of documentation, as well as a simple layout and a search bar that makes it quick and easy for beginner and advanced analysts to find the information …
Oh, what a tangled web CCA weaves
Last week hundreds of people gathered in Arizona to protest record-high levels of deportations from the US this year. Activists shut down Operation Streamline by chaining themselves to buses carrying detainees and to the Eloy Detention Center entrance, where detainees are held. Operation Streamline is a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that requires …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …