 And I want to welcome everyone to this edition of the Public Good App House. We'll be showcasing tech for your nonprofit to unlock the power of location-based data. So, the Public Good App House events like these are initiative of the TechSoups Caribbean Studios. At TechSoup, we believe technology like smartphones, internet connectivity, training, and more have the power to serve our communities better. So, today's presentation we have Munira Lakanwala, as director of tech and training at Little Sys. Munira coordinates key projects initiatives related to Little Sys technology and the program to train aspiring power researchers. She also leads Little Sys participation in Crescendo, a project with Action Center on race and economy and power change to map the corporate power structure that profits from and is complicit in Islamophobia. Thanks, Munira. I'll let you get started. Thank you. Hi, thanks so much for inviting me to join. My name is Munira Lakanwala and I work at an organization called Little Sys. We're actually primarily a research organization that does what we call power research on power structures. So, kind of our mapping is more relational. We're looking at the way that corporations and government are kind of working together and mapping the kind of relational networks between corporations and government. Some people call it kind of corporate opposition research, and our work is really focused on supporting grassroots campaigns that are kind of challenging corporate power locally and nationally in some cases. So, as an organization, we're known as Little Sys, and that kind of, I can talk a little bit about that in a second. Our other name is Public Accountability Initiative, and our work is kind of broken into three areas, producing independent research, training organizers, activists, campaigners in doing kind of power analysis and corporate research. And we do this sort of through strategic partnerships with different organizations as well as kind of general trainings to the public. And then the third part of our work which I'll focus on today is the technology that we have created and provide for free to the general public to use to do the kind of research that we do. We have two technology offerings. One is the Little Sys.org database, which is, we get our name from Little Sys. Little Sys is the opposite of Big Brother, so it's a free open source research platform for researching powerful individuals and organizations, and it's, yeah, a wiki-style tool anyone can sign up for an account and use the database and also edit the database, so add research to it. And then the second tool, Olografer, is our mapping tool, which is what I'll show you all today. And it's integrated with the Little Sys database, and it's, yeah, a way for mapping kind of relational and power networks. Just a little bit about the history of Little Sys tech, the idea sort of originated in 2008, and it really came out of this need that we saw kind of in our movements for social justice to have a place where a lot of this research that was like living independently on different researchers, Google Drives could be housed in one place. It was a way to kind of bring together so that people who are doing corporate research wouldn't have to sort of start from scratch, that there would be a kind of database where some of the relationships would already be recorded, and people could kind of build their research off of that. And then in 2014, we developed Olografer, which is our mapping tool, and the name is, you know, two parts, you know, oligarchs and graphs, so mapping kind of power structures, and it became really useful. We saw it as an opportunity to help take the research that's in the Little Sys database and bring it to life. And I'll show some examples of Little Sys maps in just a second. So we have, you know, over the years, a really large community of users. We have, you know, over 16,000 at this point, people who are using the Little Sys database or have used it, have used the mapping tool at some point, and the database itself has over 400,000 people in organizations in it, and, yeah, a million, a million and a half relationships between different entities. So I'll just actually show you all a couple of maps so you have a better sense of what the tool looks like. So just real quick, this is kind of just the homepage of the Little Sys.org database. The database is comprised of entity pages. So basically like profile pages on individuals and corporations or other kinds of organizations. Some people have referred to us as the involuntary Facebook of the 1%. It's a way that, and the data that's in the Little Sys database comes from publicly sourced data. So in order to add a relationship to the Little Sys database, you need to cite a source, and users use primarily publicly available data to do that. So, you know, for corporations, securities and exchange commission filings, other kind of primary source material is a lot of what users are using to add relationships to the database. So I'm just going to show a few examples of maps. I know that this tool is different from some of the ones that we have already looked at. So an example of the kind of map that a user might make using oligrapher is something like this to sort of look at kind of who is giving money to different hacks or different kind of business associations that are sponsoring certain kind of bills. So this is a map that was made recently, or actually, sorry, not recently, to show some of the organizations that were kind of, you know, sponsoring or supporting a certain kind of bill that was being passed locally in Florida. And it's, yeah, a way for users to and researchers to be able to kind of take maybe what might feel like wonky data or information that, you know, might not, might be hard to kind of convey to a reader in a news article and visualize it and be able to share it that way. So it's really about like the power of visualization to help tell stories about the flow of money or the way that kind of power functions. Another map that was made actually early on in oligrapher, in the life of oligrapher, is this map that actually went viral I think at some point. That's about the different banks and entities that were profiting from the Dakota Access Pipeline. And so this is a multi, this is what we call like a story map. And that's partly because it has these annotated slides that help you move through different parts of this very large map and help tell this kind of like complicated story about how, you know, different banks and financial institutions are sort of propping up this, you know, kind of environmental disaster. So these are, yeah, two kind of examples of maps that have been made by users and to help kind of translate research into a story. And there's definitely like more examples that you can look at if you sign up for an account and log into the database, you can explore more kind of user maps here and just kind of get a sense of, yeah, the breadth of research and mapping that's happening on the Little Sis database. So I'll actually stop there. Thanks so much.