Meet our Grantees
Little Sis/Public Accountability Initiative
Anyone who’s ever read George Orwell’s 1984 knows what “Big Brother Is Watching You” means.
With a grant from the HF, “Little Sister” will be watching – and watching out for all of us.
The innovative brainchild of Kevin Connor and Matthew Skomarovsky and the Public Accountability Initiative, “Little Sis” brings transparency to influential social networks by tracking connections between politicians, corporate directors and executives, lobbyists, financiers, and other powerful Americans. The site serves as a platform for journalists and other watchdogs working to find connections, "follow the money," and hold leaders accountable.
The HF’s grant is helping Little Sis to fulfill a traditional function of the press by monitoring institutional power, but doing so in a unique, groundbreaking fashion.
By presenting data in a coherent social network structure, Little Sis hopes to expose pathways of influence and abuses of power that would otherwise go undetected. And it’s expected that by building a community of aspiring watchdogs around the site, LittleSis will focus more attention on these governance structures.
With the HF grant, Little Sis hopes to produce something that (believe it or not), does not yet exist elsewhere on the web: free, well-referenced, reliably up-to-date, and accessible data on public company boards and executive leadership. Right now, such information is available only for pay (currently, free sources aren’t kept up-to-date).