Politico looks at health care lobbyists-turned-staffers on the Senate Finance Committee with the aid of LittleSis. For a look at staffers-turned-health care lobbyists you can see our research here.

Former Abramoff lobbyist Kevin Ring is on trial in, perhaps, the most interesting corruption trial in Washington in quite some time. Neil Volz, another Abramoff crony and former staffer to Rep. Bob Ney, testified the other day and included tons of gory details:

Volz described his lobbying team's practice of giving tickets, meals and drinks to public officials and staffers who were deemed valuable, as well as taking those individuals on trips.

"Really we just wanted to party," Volz said about a trip he took to New Orleans with Ney, former Ney chief of staff Will Heaton, and other lobbyists. He said the group met a client and toured some homes, but those were not the main objectives of the trip, which he described as "part of the corrupt relationship" he had with Ney and his staffers.

...

Volz described a discussion he had with Ring about "getting the joke," a term used for a lobbyist getting a staffer to prioritize an issue because the lobbyist is "taking care of them," after the Abramoff scandal began to surface in 2004.

"We thought, 'Boy, it would be pretty difficult to defend the idea of getting the joke,'" he said of his conversation with Ring.

Over the weekend, the New York Times posted this great visualization of Clean Water Act violations and the lack of enforcement in all 50 states. One of the primary reasons why government data needs to be online and in accessible formats is for news organizations, designers and coders to create visualizations or databases that can concisely explain an issue, or reveal a problem, to the public at large.

LittleSis uncovers some quality dirt in the Senate Finance Committee:

Senator Max Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, has been called the “chief operating officer” of the healthcare reform process by Politico — the staffer who sets legislative deadlines, coordinates with the White House on policy, and is understood to speak for Baucus on health policy issues. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has called her the most influential health staffer in the Senate.

Fowler, as it turns out, is also fresh off a lucrative stint working for the insurance industry: from 2006 to 2008, she was VP of public policy for Wellpoint, the insurance giant.

LittleSis is running a collaborative effort to identify the key players in the health care debate. You can help them out here.

Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky, co-founders of Sunlight-supported LittleSis.org, announced yesterday they are joining forces with The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's Health Care Investigative Unit on a joint research project. They will be reporting on the congressional lawmakers that receive the most money from health care interest groups. Here's a list of those lawmakers, as produced by The Huffington Post and Maplight.org. And you can sign up with the investigative unit here.

Also, within the next few weeks, LittleSis will be launching an application programming interface (API) to provide developers and friendly organizations access to their raw data. Anyone interested in previewing the API can register for a key, and you can check out the API's documentation here.

We're delighted to invite you to participate in LittleSis, a wiki its creators, Public Accountability Initiative, appropriately describe as  "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans." This project is a Sunlight grantee.

LittleSis makes it easier than ever to see how politicians, CEOs, lobbyists, financiers and all their "fat cat" friends are connected through personal or business relationships. By tracking and finding links between everything from board memberships to campaign contributions, family ties and government contracts, LittleSis is developing a platform that brings transparency to the influential networks that exert significant power in shaping public policy.

LittleSis invites citizens to turn a critical eye on the individuals who are the powerful in and out of government today. As a wiki, (a very elegant one), anyone can sign up to become an analyst and contribute information. We hope you'll  create an account today and join in helping the folks behind this web site to create a truly comprehensive resource. Be warned: this work can be highly addictive!

It couldn't have come at a better time because it can be a particularly helpful tool to help us all get a deeper understanding and also share knowledge about the members of President-elect Obama's transition team, Cabinet appointees like Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner and powerful behind-the-scene players like Robert E Rubin.

LittleSis is an experiment -- an ambitious one -- in the world of crowdsourcing of transparency and accountability efforts. It empowers us all to be our own best watchdogs and collectively develop an unprecedented, authoritative database of information on the powers that be.

As the site is currently in beta, it does, admittedly, have some limitations -- principally its data and information isn't yet fully comprehensive.  The easiest way to fix that, of course, is to help LittleSis improve by getting an account and editing the profile pages.

We'd love to hear what you think about the site and how the LittleSis team can improve it. They have some great ideas for next steps, including one for a browser plugin to automatically highlight hidden relationships between names in the news. Of course, Sunlight's partial to making LittleSis' raw data more accessible to political geeks eager to mash it up in new ways.