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 data, we plan to keep rolling out new features and systematically expanding the current database in big ways when we can.

In the long run, there are a number of things we can do to address the abundance of great ideas for future development and our relative lack of time. 1) We’re going to greatly expand our fundraising efforts now that we have a live website to both show off and build upon, and that will translate into more programming power. 2) We plan to open-source the LittleSis codebase so that all the talented political techies out there can make it better. 3) Exposing our raw data to the public through an API will let others do interesting things with the data beyond our expertise and capacity.

Still, over the next few months we’ll have to be quite selective in choosing enhancements to make, and we want the LittleSis community to help us get our priorities straight. We want to put all our ideas in a single place where users can see what ideas are on our plate, rank them, refine them, and add to them. We don’t want to guess what new features and data matter most to you.

Here’s just a sample of what we’ve been thinking about:

Interface Enhancements

• visual network maps similar to TheyRule
  or NNDB mapper
• using more person/org profile pictures & summaries across the site to help users navigate long lists of unfamiliar names
• allowing analysts to import campaign finance data, photos, etc, into profiles with a click of a button
• better linking to related info on other great accountability and transparency sites in the Sunlight posse and elsewhere

Building our Analyst Community

• user-to-user messaging
• better space for commenting and discussion on profiles
• blogging tools for analysts

New Data

• private company boards & executives
• state-level campaign finance data
• foundations, their boards, and their grantees
• employment histories of corporate executives
• new members of congress

Miscellaneous

• open API for accessing our raw data
• better documentation of site features and how to use them
• breaking news feed about people and groups with profiles in LittleSis
• a browser plugin for exposing overlooked connections between names in the news

So how do we narrow these, and so many more, down to a few? We could spend a little time building a user-rated wish list tool ourselves (basically a Digg for new features, not articles), but perhaps setting up a wiki for this purpose would suffice? Perhaps there’s an existing open source app along these lines?

Engineers especially: please let us know if you have ideas about how we can best aggregate your ideas about LittleSis and where it’s heading.

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 — and that’s about it.

But now, in time for the inaugural excitement, list pages have some new tabs: Interlocks, Giving, and Funding:

Similar to the tabs that appear on profiles for organizations, they identify common affiliations of list members,  their biggest political donors, and other potentially interesting patterns.

Even though the LittleSis profiles for the new White House are still works in progress, the Obama Administration’s interlocks are already quite interesting.

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 that hurt our democracy.

From Wall Street to Washington, the need to bring transparency to powerful social networks is urgent. This has become increasingly clear over the past six months, as the economy has sunk to new depths, and leaders in business and government have formulated deeply unpopular responses to the challenges that the country faces.

By tracking the relationships of powerful Americans – everything from campaign contributions to family ties – LittleSis opens up these networks for public inspection. “Big Brother” is commonly used to describe a situation where the electronic eyes of the powers that be are vigilantly watching citizens for misbehavior. LittleSis is a website where the electronic eyes of citizens are vigilantly watching back.

The Sunlight Foundation first began supporting LittleSis.org about six months ago. At the time, the project was still a raggedy prototype. It was, and still is, a project of the Public Accountability Initiative, an emerging nonprofit founded by me, Matthew, and several other veterans of academia, activism, and the world of web 2.0. Sunlight recognized the urgency of the project and its goals and threw their support behind our project. We’re very grateful for their support.

Like all of you, and like Sunlight, LittleSis is part of a movement to bring transparency to government and open up the channels of power in this country. At a time of great crisis and enormous challenges, it’s movements like this one that will turn the page on an era of failed leadership and failed policy, and hit refresh on our democracy.

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 – font and layout tweaks, as well – in the comments.

A quick but important note about References on Littlesis.

From now on we’re encouraging Littlesis analysts to only use original sources when contributing data. Sites like Wikipedia that aggregate information from elsewhere without requiring documentation, though abundant with largely accurate information, are less useful to Littlesis users looking to verify information.

Wikipedia pages often contain inadequate documentation of the info they contain. When a reference is provided at the bottom, it’s often not directly linked to the relevant text above. Moreover, Wikipedia pages often change, and information that you source one day might be gone the next. And as we all know, Wikipedia is still considered an illegitimate source of information in many circles.

I personally love Wikipedia and use it for learning all the time. I often feel it’s the most useful public website in existence. And Littlesis probably wouldn’t be possible without the crowdsourcing success story of Wikipedia paving the way. But for documenting my work on Littlesis, it’s more helpful to others if I enter sources that will allow other users to quickly confirm my info if they so desire.

Of course, Wikipedia is often the best starting point to look for original sources. And we still encourage you to add Wikipedia pages as references to an entity’s profile directly, just not as the only source for a relationship or other important piece of info. The ‘References’ section on any profile contains a details link at the top that allows you (if you are logged in) to add new references independently of the entity and relationship editing process. For example:

http://littlesis.org/reference/list?model=Entity&id=33346

Soon you’ll see an adviso like “original sources only — not Wikipedia!” below the ‘Source URL’ field in editing forms. Understand we’re not hating on everyone’s favorite ‘pedia, just trying to keep it real.

Last winter Kevin and I were just beginning to look for funding to grow Little Sister — as the project was then named — from a raggedy prototype to a sophisticated, fast, and reliable public resource. I was living at my parents’ house and Kevin was getting by writing about the (amazingly) still-obscure subprime housing meltdown and its relation to Wall Street.

Much has happened since then. The Sunlight Foundation recognized the potential — and the urgency — of our project and moved quickly to support six months of intensive web development. We’re now putting the finishing touches on a beta that we’re proud of and excited to unveil to the watchdogging world.

These finishing touches include:

• a robust caching system to improve site performance
• more names, relationships, photos, logos, and links
• better instructions for adding content
• design and UI improvements

Once these are complete, which should happen within the next week or so, the beta launch is official. Expect a post about it from us and Sunlight soon.

For the past two months we’ve been rebuilding this site with more data, better data, a more flexible architecture, version tracking, and other goodies. Eddie Tejeda has joined the team and progress is swift.

Though in some ways unsurprising, recent events on Wall Street and in Washington are stunning and deeply troubling. It’s made us work harder. We hope to get the new (beta) site up soon. Expect more frequent updates as the launch approaches.

Littlesis is currently in active development. For the time being, please note that user contributions and edits will not last longer than a day or so, and some features may not work all the time. If all goes well, we hope to have the beta site ready for public use by November 2008.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, and our development team needs your help. If you are a data scraper or web developer and would like to tackle a fun and interesting small project, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.