I’m going to start posting a locality-specific version of the NameWire (let’s call it SFNewsWire) in order to shed light on recent activity and happenings affecting the Bay Area organizations we’re researching with Spot.us.

• AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah partners with IBM for Green Data Center (Routers.com)
• Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, expressed optimism about upcoming healthcare reform. According to Dean, the mostly favorable reception from business, the buy-ins on access and costs from insurance and drug companies are among the “evolutionary” forces that have come to outweigh the “minority opinions” – dissenting voices from the GOP and elsewhere. “Look how far we’ve gotten,” he said. (SFGate.com)
• San Francisco’s Sunday Streets program is now a permanent weekly event, Mayor Newsom pronounced. (Twitter.com/andrewross)
• Chevron backs ‘Energy Citizens’, an oil industry movement aimed at derailing climate-change legislation. (SFGate)
• Robert Lloyd, most likely successor to Cisco CEO John Chambers goads channel partners to wallop HP ProCurve (NetworkWorld – thanks to JZukfor the link)

After an extended period of blog lethargy, I’m making my debut on Eyes on the Ties today in order to announce a LittleSis research project: we’re working to develop a comprehensive list of all the connections between Goldman Sachs executives and influential government officials and lobbyists.

Serendipitously (or perhaps not), Senator Carl Levin has also made an announcement today: namely, that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has subpoenaed Goldman Sachs in order to comb for evidence of fraud during last year’s mortgage-market meltdown. The Daily Kos blog team was the first to pick up the story: Read more…

For several weeks beginning in late March, Tim Geithner and others on the Rubin wing of the White House expended significant political capital convincing the listless business press and the broader electorate that PPIP, the taxpayer-subsidized toxic asset removal program, was the only way forward.

Two months later, and without any PPIP toxic transfers, Geithner assured critics last week that the program would be activated in July.

During the original PPIP news cycle, Geithner argued that removing substantial toxicity from bank balance sheets was the last, best hope for restoring global confidence in the American financial system, and that the enormous social risks created by the program were preferable to the chaos that might result from a permanently contaminated banking system.

Read more…

LittleSis for Washington insiders, in this week’s National Journal:

The biggest value LittleSis offers is not so much the details it provides but the ties it highlights. “In a city like Washington that functions off of connections … having an online Rolodexing system to figure out these connections is a valuable tool,” said Scott Goodstein, who served as the external online director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

It’s interesting to see the site presented to an inside-the-beltway audience. I’m glad the article informed them that:

1. LittleSis is watching.
2. This will prove useful to insiders-looking-in.

The magazine is subscription-only, but the article is available here from Sunlight Foundation.

LittleSis has crossed the pond: Le Monde’s blog Bonne Nouvelle plugged the site today, and France’s first couple showed up soon after. Bonne Nouvelle is big into optimism, and we’re happy the site was presented in that context; LittleSis is all about political hope for our ailing democracy.

An excerpt from the post (translation thanks to Mike S):

CV’s, personal relations, financial scandals — everything is published here by vigilant citizens, who can then share information. The *incestuous relations between business and politics* are clearly innumerable! Take, for example, the Little Sis page of the much disliked George Bush, or even that of Steve Jobs. With facebook, people put their private lives on display with no taboos. But with this type of community initiative, they force the powerful to do the same. *Transparency is the same for all.*

For the record, we should note that LittleSis is not about the private lives of powerful citizens, but about their public lives; all of the data on the site is a matter of public record. Analysts are required to submit working reference links when making edits, and all modifications are logged and displayed, to ensure a transparent editing process.

The site continues to attract a lot of attention at home, too. Tim O’Reilly had this to say over Twitter yesterday:

In that vein, LittleSis.org is an “involuntary facebook of powerful Americans…profiling the powers that be.” Fascinating project!

Kottke liked the name and saw some parallels to a well-known social networking site:

Like Facebook, the site has a particular emphasis on how all these people are connected: politically, financially, socially. The best way to see what it’s all about is to check out some profiles: Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, and the list of the 400 richest Americans.

And Dirt Diggers Digest observed that the site could be very useful for grassroots organizing campaigns:

LittleSis is an exciting project that reinvigorates the tradition of power-elite research pursued in the pre-internet era by authors such as Gabriel Kolko and William Domhoff. It also builds on previous online efforts such as TheyRule. It could become an invaluable tool to help us understand the powers that be and pursue campaigns that make them less powerful.

Thanks for all the interest and feedback. Keep it coming!

All done with being cooped up in alpha land, LittleSis has been making appearances all over the internet today. We’ve been thrilled with the response. It all started with Sunlight’s post, followed by OpenCongress’s piece yesterday. Today Craig Newmark gave the site a shout out on his blog (cross-posted at Huffington Post). The Institute for the Future of the Book posted an extended entry yesterday, and today techPresident speculated: what happens when the powers that be find out they’re being followed?

And lo and behold, the microsphere is a-twitter.

The response from the Sunlight community has been impressive, and we’re very happy to see so many new analysts sign up to keep watch on the powers that be. In the next few weeks we’ll be posting tips and tricks for making edits, and pointing out profile pages that are looking good, and others that need some TLC. In the meantime, drop us a line if you’ve got questions or suggestions for the site. We’d love to hear from you.

The citizens’ intelligence community is growing by leaps and bounds. Let’s keep it up!