[p2p-research] Fwd: LittleSis, open research into power structures

[Michel Bauwens]

Info below Eddie's letter,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eddie A. Tejeda <eddie.tejeda at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:58 AM
Subject: LittleSis
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com


Hey Micheal,

I am involved in a Sunlight Foundation funded (
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/01/14/littlesis/) project called
LittleSis (http://www.littlesis.org) and I thought it might be of some
interest to you.

--
Eddie A. Tejeda

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 <http://www.littlesis.org/purpose> seems a very interesting open
government and politics initiative, here's the
explanation<http://blog.littlesis.org/2009/01/14/why-littlesis-matters/>
:

"*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 Their work, if unpublished, is consigned to the purgatory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*."









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