Indonesia Needs Its Own LittleSis
Every five years, Indonesia chooses its leaders. And every five years, most of us vote without knowing who actually stands behind the candidates — who owns what, who funds whom, whose cousin runs the company that wins the contract.
It’s not because the data doesn’t exist. It’s because the data is locked.
The data is there. You just can’t use it.
If you want to understand power in Indonesia, three sources matter:
- LHKPN — the mandatory wealth reports of public officials. The detail exists only as PDFs. Every extraction is manual, slow, and error-prone.
- AHU — company ownership records behind the Ministry of Law. No clear public API. Want data? Open a ticket and wait.
- IDX — the stock exchange’s corporate disclosures. The API exists, priced for institutions, not for citizens.
For an investigative journalist with a budget, these are inconveniences. For a private citizen trying to understand who rules them, they’re walls.
Compare this with the US, where LittleSis — “an involuntary Facebook of powerful people” — maps the networks of the elite: their board seats, employers, donations, family ties. Or with the UK’s TheyWorkForYou, which makes parliamentary behavior legible to anyone.
The raw material for an Indonesian version already exists. It’s just trapped in formats designed to be legally available but practically inaccessible.
What a network graph changes
A list of facts doesn’t move anyone. A map does.
Model officials, companies, NGOs, and families as nodes; model ownership, affiliation, and funding as edges — and suddenly the questions become answerable:
- Who are the business partners of this candidate’s brother-in-law?
- Which conglomerates donate to both sides of a race?
- When a regulation passes, who’s positioned to profit?
Power has structure. It’s never just the faces on TV — it’s a network of ownership, influence, and alliances. And a network you can see is a network you can question.
Why it matters
News today is built to be forgotten: outrage, headline, next headline. A power map is the opposite — a persistent, queryable memory. It makes bad behavior sticky. It gives voters something to check before an election instead of something to feel after one.
Minimal transparency isn’t an abstract virtue. It narrows the gap where corruption lives, and makes accountability cheap enough to be routine.
Is one platform significant against structures that big? Honestly — maybe not. But even a partial map helps, because the first thing power loses when it becomes visible is the ability to pretend it isn’t.
We deserve to know who we’re actually voting for. The data exists. Someone should free it. If nobody else will, it might as well be us.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-07-13), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.