LittleSis + Oligrapher

LittleSis — run by the nonprofit Public Accountability Initiative — is a free, collaboratively edited database of the relationships among the people and institutions that hold power: boards, donors, lobbyists, landlords, development interests. Its embedded mapping tool, Oligrapher, turns that data (or your own) into clear network maps of who's connected to whom.

For the organizing arc, this is question four's power tool: where the 'Tracking Down the Power' exercise maps actors on a wall, LittleSis lets a tenants union or block association research the actual interlocks — which LLC owns the buildings, who sits on which board, who funds whom — and publish the map. Neighborhood groups have used it to map local landlords and development networks.

Everything is GPL-3.0 open source, and the database itself is a commons anyone can contribute research to.

Neighborhood remix: the block's landlord map — every LLC on the street resolved to its owners and their other holdings, built in an evening from public records, ready for the tenants' meeting.

Details

• maker: Public Accountability Initiative (nonprofit)
• license: GPL-3.0
• repo url: https://github.com/public-accountability/oligrapher
• remix idea: The block's landlord map, from public records to the tenants' meeting.
• cross shelf: community-organizing
• practice kind: tool