Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I come from organizing background. Grew up in Santa Monica, California. My grandfather got me interested in politics. He had grown up very poor in Minnesota, a Jewish guy who sold Christian bibles door-to-door to pay for night law school. He got to be friends with [Hubert] Humphrey when he was mayor of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was a very anti-semitic place. Humphrey worked to change that. When he got elected to Senate, Humphrey did not have much money. The only luggage he had was cardboard so my grandfather and his law partners bought him his first real set of luggage and sent him off to Washington. I like that image of politicians without a lot of money.

Anyway, my grandpa moved to Beverly Hills and did well practicing law. One of the first people to successfully sue big companies for negligent damage to consumers -- very much people versus powerful. And unlike a lot of people who make it his reaction was "don't pull up the ladder". His view was he worked hard, but that society helped him, and it was everyone's job to help those who had not yet made it to have a leg up.

So that was pretty deeply instilled in me. I first got active as a senior in high school. Santa Monica had a living wage campaign -- one of the first that covered not just city employees, but everyone in our tourist zone. The campaign barely lost but we got a lot of students at our high school involved, many of whom had parents who cleaned hotel rooms in beach hotels for like 7 bucks an hour.

This is the late 90s?

2000-2001. I was class of '01. That same year I was elected to the school board. I dunno if you have ever been to something like that but the agenda is like 300 pages. Most of it is "consent agenda," which is stuff that is considered pretty normal that gets passed without discussion, like pay raises, etc. But I read the whole thing not knowing any better. And snuck in there was money for surveillance cameras at our school. My high school, Santa Monica High, was a very diverse place racially and economically. And some gangs from neighboring areas were tagging our school, as well as our own students. our own students were tagging rather. So I got the school board to put in on hold. And got students organized to prevent the graffiti without cameras. I felt like once cameras came in it abdicated responsibility. and then the whole place would go to pot. Where first really saw power of organizing. and that young people can make a difference.

Then headed off to Harvard. I worked for an LA political campaign my first summer and sophomore summer interned with Kerry in New Hampshire. And around then first saw Friendster.

Some of my friends in LA had started using it. And this clicked with me in regards to organizing. Organizing is all about social networks. You look back to César Chávez. He would go to worker cabins, very poor undocumented workers without any power and convince them they had power in their existing web of friends. He had them invite their friends over. César would get them all bought into the idea of organizing. And then a few of them would have their own meetings and the movement would grow, based on these pre-existing and strong connections.

That is also how I learned organizing from Marshall Ganz, who used to be César's head organizer and later designed the training for the Kerry campaign's field program. I was fortunate to study with him at Harvard. Social networks have completely changed online community. Before online community was very separate from off-line. You had your Internet friends you met online and your real life friends you met offline. And they were separate.

Jump ahead a few decades from few decades from Chávez, and you start to see how social networks are bringing those close connections online?

Organizing is all about helping people realize the power of their existing web of friends. When you sit down with someone to plan a house meeting you look at their Rolodex and help them figure who to invite. With a social network it is all there. So after summer of '03, I thought social networking should be applied to politics. I tried to convince my roomy to build a social net for politics. Instead he built Facebook. That was clearly a bad choice :).

Yeah, bit of a shame how that's worked out for him.

He asked me to be his partner. I instead went to work for Kerry and lost two states. But I learned a ton. Confirmed my view that good organizing was about strong social connections. People came to volunteer at first maybe because they liked Kerry or hated Bush, but stayed because of the community. I got back to school in spring '05. And managed to raise some money and build essembly, my first site. So essembly was about trying to enable large scale conversation. it has done pretty well, but never got huge.

The essembly approach is different from that Chávez/Ganz organizing model -- making the most of existing social connections. instead, user interaction is based on the townhall model, centered around users making their opinions known on "resolves" proposed by other members. And you're clearly a progressive guy, but essembly is branded at every step as "fiercely non-partisan." Why'd you make those fundamental choices when you're fleshing out your vision?

Friendster et al showed how you were socially and geographically connected, but not ideologically. Resolves let you do that in light weight way. The main problem was that it was not designed to grow. Essembly did not solve the distribution problem. I made the rookie mistake, which my partner Sean calls the "field of dreams problem" -- if you build it, they will come. We still believe that the ideas from essembly will be very useful once we have built a large user base.

As for the progressive question: I am, but I believe above all else in the power of people being more involved civically. I want to build a neutral platform. When I was at Harvard, the Institute of Politics did a survey semi-annually about colleges student political views. They found that our generation is very interested in changing the world around them, but does not know how. We feel alienated from the system, that we cannot make a difference. The system seems controlled by money and other forces we cannot hope to influence.

Let's jump to the Cause application you guys just released for the Facebook platform.

In spring '06 I teamed up with Sean Parker. who co-founded Napster, Plaxo and Facebook. He had left Facebook to be a partner at a venture fund. We looked at the broader problem of enabling activism online, both for politics and non-profits.

We both have been influenced by the book "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor. It documents the decline in social capital of the last half century. During and after World War II the U.S. was rich with voluntary organizations. Non-profits had local chapters and membership meant actual meetings. people were very involved. That has declined. Now non-profits are "check and envelope" organizations. Being a member is sending a check in.

So what happens is that it is very expensive to raise money. They pay about 30% of what they raise to raise more. Direct mail and phone is expensive. And because there is high upfront cost it hampers small organizations. It makes it not worth it to reach out to younger people, so young people are not reached out to because we do not have land lines or stable addresses and we won't give enough to make it worth it when it is so expensive to reach us. On Facebook Causes there is no upfront cost because people spread the message to their friends.

What was a bit striking to me about the Facebook Causes application is that it focuses on that hands-off activism -- fundraising and recruiting warm bodies.

This is only the first step. We started with money for a few reasons. First it is real and everyone understands it. For most people 200 letters to Congress or a petition don't really mean anything. But money does. It can make organizations compete among young people, which suddenly gives us power in the process. Suddenly non-profits and campaigns will be able to efficiently raise money from young people. It shifts their attention.

Did you guys take a look at what Howard Dean did with small donors when dreaming up your plans?

Of course. That was very powerful. But that was in the old model of community.

How so?

People met each other online. MoveOn, Meetup etc. was not pre-existing friends. With Facebook you are raising money from your real friends. The connections are much stronger. On May 24th, Mark Zuckerberg spoke at F8 about their new platform. (He was my college roomy). I helped him write his talk. And the key theme was the power of the "social graph," which is the web of connections on Facebook that mirrors real life. Facebook consists of the graph and applications built on it.

Think of photos or events as an app. Photos are inherently social offline. Most pics are of your friends. You would take pictures and leave them on your coffee table. And then with the net you would email them out. But now Facebook Photos has twice the photos of all the other leading site combined. Why? Their feature set sucks -- low-res photos, no editing. But it has the social graph. You tag photos with your friends in them and the friends see them and comment, and you get feedback which you like.

Is it fair to say that what you have in mind wouldn't work in the sort of Wild West MySpace environment?

No, not as well. But there are real connections on MySpace and we probably will try there too. Facebook just was a better opportunity to be a launch partner. The demand was clearly there. We have taken something inherently social -- organizing -- and put it on the social graph and made it more efficient, which makes people aware of the great power in what they have always had, their groups of friends.

I don't have any actual, you know, data on this, but i'd be willing to bet that the relationships between MySpace friends map a lot less well to offline relationships than Facebook friends do.

I agree. But I am biased :).

So real-world relationships are nice to have when you're trying to get social/political/organizing behavior to emerge, but not necessary?

I think that some level of real connections are very important. On MySpace, many friends are real. Many are not. It dilutes it, but there still is a lot to be done there.

This Facebook Causes is only the beginning. It's a limited release of our functionality. We will be launch a stand alone product in the next month.

We'll see a stand along Project Agape product in July? Folks are curious as to what you guys have in store.

Good :). Hopefully they will like it.

What can you share about what it will look like and do? What can we expect?

Can't talk about that. What I can say is it will use many of the same basic principles we have discussed, about leveraging personal relationships for change.

Large non-profits have models they use to raise funding. They're expensive, but they can get the job done by appealing to a mix of existing donors and a handful of big givers. A small non-profit has a more challenging time. The costs of raising small donations can a big bite out of what they take in. With the tools you guys are building, the costs are the same for big and small alike, right?

Yes. Equal opportunity activism. We are trying to level the playing field so that ideas get support based on how compelling they are and how people promote them -- not how much institutional power they have.

It reminds of something that I've been digging into -- Internet radio services like Pandora.com, where it doesn't matter if you're Justin Timberlake or a garage band. The technology is hype-agnostic, if that makes any sense.

Yup. I had not heard that analogy but is good one. Yup, very democratic.

But the democratization of the music business scares the bejeezus out of the recording industry. Have you started thinking through how you might be upending the non-profit world? Haven't, don't care, or are you thinking "good"?

We have thought about it. At first we thought that it would make non-profits worried, but they have embraced it. I think in the near term it complements existing systems. The current systems are good at getting rich 65 year-olds to donate. We are tapping into younger donors who are today untapped. This is your classic internet long tail situation. Like with YouTube. There was high cost to entry in getting video distributed because you needed to be on TV. Now you can make and distribute for pretty much nothing, so you can have many more videos each serving fewer people. Similarly we can allow for many smaller donations, because the cost to entry is so low.

I have to imagine that a rich 65 year-old and a 23-year-old making a $15 donation might have different interests.

I don't know. I think there are big non-profits that can appeal to young people and some smaller ones that you have never heard of that can use our system to get huge. I think, for example, Darfur has been shown to be a huge issue for young people, but frankly my 85 year-old Jewish grandma is on fire about it too. I am not sure if there are "young people issues". But we have never been able to know for sure cause we have not been organized. That is the cool thing about "a market for causes." We will see what works.

Can you give some guidance to someone doing online work for a non-profit who is trying to figure out how to make the most of social networks as they stand in 2007? Starting with the Facebook Cause app, of course

Of course. Set up a cause on Facebook that you think is appealing. It is not clear exactly what model will work. On Facebook, groups seem to have spread that had concrete goals like "a million strong for Obama." This may work for causes. I am not sure. The nice thing is that you can make like 10 different causes for the same non-profit and see what works.

The idea would be to build different campaigns around the same group? Hadn't thought of that.

Yea, there is a many-to-one ratio of causes to non-profits. A "marketplace of causes".

I know there's stuff you can't say, but I have to at least try. Will the stand alone product you're releasing next month center around fund-raising and volunteer-raising like the Cause app for Facebook does?

That will be part of it. The Causes app will soon also support political campaigns. At first we will let people donate to presidential campaigns.

And expand from there?

Yup. Money to PACs, etc, and then other actions.

We talked before about overhead, but how do contributions through Causes work now? Does everything raised go to the non-profit?

We explain this on our Help page and About page: 95.5% goes to non profits, 3% to justgive.org for credit card processing, 1.5% to us, though we send most of that back to justgive for check distribution. We do not even come close to covering costs.

The important thing to keep in mind is that when you donate today, under the old system, 30% goes to a fundraising company to raise more money. People assume when they give today 100% goes to the charity, which just is not true. Thirty percent is the most reliable average we can find. People do not tend to know about hidden costs, which is why i guess they are hidden. Like when you use a credit card at the store, you pay 2-3% to credit card company. People do not tend to be aware.

So I think it is easy to criticize that we take 4.5%, but it is really low. It is important to know that with us 100% is tax deductible including the fees. The laws around this are all really complex and not really designed for the net.

With the Causes app, how much of the information on the donors goes to the non-profits?

At this point, nothing. We think privacy is very important. This is a new model. Non-profits really want emails for their lists, but this model is not about top-down communication. Instead the non-profit can reach out to the cause's creator, who can communicate with cause members. It's like a bottom-up advocacy group. It's better for privacy and more efficient. We may allow people to opt in to giving their info to non-profits.

Why the name "Project Agape"?

It is a placeholder name. We will unveil our real name when we launch separate product. "Agape" is the Greek word for charitable love, pronounced 'a ga pay.' This is about making giving a more central part of people's identity. Facebook is all about identity. We want the causes you care about to be central part of that identity, just like people buy yellow bracelets.

We have a team of eight -- Sean and me, four engineers. an office manager, all based in Berkeley. And we have Randall Winston [Director of Non-Profit Relations] based in DC. If you don't mind you should put his info in, so non-profits can contact him: randall@project-agape.com. We want to be as open as possible. Is why we invested in having him there. And it's free to non-profits to utilize him. He can help them use our tool most effectively.

We support donations to 1.5 million non-profits, but we also work closely with several hundred. They have lots of good ideas. You can find a list of ten of the groups we are currently featuring for Facebook Causes.

Any thoughts on what your grandfather might think about the work you're doing?

I hope he would love it. My grandma says he would. This is our generation's chance to prove we don't suck.

[Jump to comments from this interview's original posting on MyDD.]