Joe Green is one of two partners at Project Agape, which is the group behind the new Facebook Causes app that was released last week (?). With Causes, any of Facebook's 20 million users can direct cash and volunteers to their favorite non-profit group. Joe's been trying to crack the puzzle of how social networks can be used in the political context for a while now, ever since he discovered field organizing work and Friendster at roughly the same time. I had the chance to interview Joe this weekend for my MyDD Hearing Progressive Voices series. We went deep, all the way back to how his love of politics is connected to Hubert Humphrey's suitcase:
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.Won't you go on and have a read? (I'm working on getting better at asking people to read my stuff. Think my approach still needs quite a bit of work.)
