Last month, President Obama nominated Robert Hormats, a top executive with Goldman Sachs, to a high-ranking position in the State Department.

Within days, a number of blogs and news Web sites carried criticism of Hormats’ role in a $3 billion initial public offering for a company with close ties to the Sudanese government.

The Web site that first drew attention to the nominee’s work on behalf of PetroChina?

LittleSis, a project of the Public Accountability Initiative, which is based in Buffalo and is getting notice from the National Journal, France’s Le Monde and other news organizations.

“That [shows] the importance of having watchdog institutions and having vigilant citizens,” said Matthew Skomarovsky, a co-founder of the site.

LittleSis — a play on the term “Big Brother” — combines elements of Facebook and Wikipedia with a focus on the most influential players in the political process.

The site’s employees and a legion of volunteer “analysts” update profiles of business executives, registered lobbyists and elected officials with biographical and financial data.

“We sometimes refer to it as an involuntary Facebook for influential people,” said Kevin Connor, the other cofounder.

The site — http://littlesis.org/ — seeks to shine a light on the governing process by detailing the myriad personal and business interconnections that can drive policymaking.

By bringing these relationships to the public’s attention, LittleSis and other citizen-watchdog Web sites are filling a need, proponents said.

“The fact of the matter is many people in Congress have strong ties to, and relationships with, powerful corporations, lobbyists and special interests. And the public should know about them by whatever means possible,” said Dave Levinthal, a Buffalo native and spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, which operates Open- Secrets.org.

The co-founders met at Harvard University, where they worked on social justice and corporate accountability issues.

They saw the Web — particularly social-networking sites — as a platform for sharing this information with the public and recruiting people to help monitor the powerful and influential.

Numerous Web sites provide access to federal campaign contribution records and other public information.

But the founders of LittleSis say their site is different because it pulls together a wider variety of information, emphasizes the personal ties among its profile subjects and encourages input from the public.

“The more you can connect data, the more valuable it becomes,” Skomarovsky said. “That is sort of a core principle behind LittleSis.”

The name LittleSis was chosen to convey the idea that, instead of “Big Brother” government watching the public, the “Little Sis” public is watching those in authority, Connor said.

The Public Accountability Initiative was founded last year, and LittleSis launched in January.

The site has received two grants totaling $162,400 from the Sunlight Foundation.

While Skomarovsky is based in the San Francisco area, Connor and three part-time employees work out of the Grant Street Neighborhood Center.

The site relies on data from the Federal Elections Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other sources.

The profiles cover more than 28,000 people and 10,000 institutions — such as every member of Congress since 1979, top Obama appointees and the Fortune 1000 companies, their directors and their lobbyists.

The profile of Bill Paxon, a lobbyist and former Republican congressman from Amherst, for example, features a photo that could have come from Paxon’s Canisius College yearbook, a basic biography, a link to other employees of the law firm Akin Gump and a list of the politicians who received campaign contributions from Paxon.

Sometimes, the ties highlighted on LittleSis can draw attention, as with Hormats. The international vice chairman of Goldman Sachs was selected last month to serve as undersecretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs.

While reading a New York Times article about the nomination, Connor realized LittleSis didn’t have a Hormats profile.

In putting the profile together, Connor noticed his work in promoting the Petro- China stock offering.

PetroChina has close ties to Sudan, which has been accused of genocide, and Goldman Sachs’ work on the offering drew heated criticism then.

The Public Accountability Initiative put out a report reminding people of Hormats’ PetroChina work, and he now may face tough questioning from senators when his appointment is taken up at a Sept. 14 hearing.

“We published a report. We sent it out to journalists, researchers, the anti-genocide organizations; and they drew their own conclusions,” said Ellen Przepasniak, communications coordinator for LittleSis.

The LittleSis employees are bolstered by a team of about 1,000 volunteer “analysts” who, much like contributors to Wikipedia, add corrections and additions to the site’s profiles.

The analysts also are working with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund to identify former congressional staffers working as lobbyists on health care reform legislation.

“It’s a living Web site,” said Aaron Bartley, the effort’s chairman.

While Wikipedia has faced questions of accuracy, the founders of LittleSis say its anonymous contributors are limited in the changes they can make and they must cite a source for everything.

Many Web sites are trying to fill a watchdog role, said Julie Barko Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University.

But Germany said she hasn’t seen research showing that regular people — and not journalists, government staffers and other insiders — use the sites.

“The next step is to involve the rest of America,” she said.

Still, the founders say LittleSis and similar sites provide a service that the traditional media can’t — or won’t. “This is an idea that has gotten traction around the world,” Connor said.