LittleSis is an endeavor to take all the great power structure research already being done, organize it, clarify it, and connect it so that grassroots efforts that challenge the powers that be will have a big and detailed map of the terrain they must navigate, and proper tools for adding to it as they move forward.

LittleSis seems a very interesting open government and politics initiative, here’s the explanation:

“Did you know there are thousands of people in the US, and plenty more around the world, who spend every day investigating the ties between people in the upper circles of government and business? These people have diverse backgrounds: investigative journalists, social scientists, political opposition researchers, social justice activists, public interest attorneys, and business intelligence types. There are thousands more amateur dirt diggers at the fringes, posting their findings to blogs, message boards, email lists, zines, and elsewhere.

These researchers don’t usually think of themselves as a community. They work on their own projects, occasionally encountering each others’ work and building upon it. Their work, if unpublished, is consigned to the purgatory of old filing cabinets and hard drives. As the internet has become by far the most important research and publishing tool available to them and their organizations, more of this research has found its way onto the web, but it remains scattered, hard to find, and even harder to assemble holistically.

But all these people engaged in power structure research share a common piece of wisdom: if you want to understand power, either to shift it or to attain it, you have to scrutinize the underlying relationships between powerful people. Combine this principle with another from the internet age — linked data is far more valuable than lonely data — and LittleSis is born.”