Should you ask developers for money? And other interesting fundraising dilemnas.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:36:22 -0700

Chris Blizzard introduced me to Clay Johnson. I had such an interesting time talking to him about social networking, free and open source software, governments and fundraising that I asked if he’d share some of his points in a blog interview.

Meet Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs!

Hi Clay, you have a lot of experience with online social networking. Where’d you get that experience? It’s weird– I started out with social networking before social networking was called “social networking.” In college, back in the early days of the web, my Dad would always ask me to look things up on the Internet for him. I began to get tired of answering questions, so I built a service that would let people ask questions and answer them online– that way, I figured, he could have a whole community of people answering his questions. That was KnowPost.com, the first “social network” I built on my own. A few years later, I found myself working on the same kind of project with some friends called ZeroDegrees.com, which was a social networking service built into Outlook. And shortly thereafter, the Howard Dean Campaign hired me to be their lead programmer and build Dean Link, a privately branded social network. Then quickly found myself starting the company that created My.BarackObama.com– yet another social network.

Social Networking on Stormy Peters

Should you ask developers for money? And other interesting fundraising dilemnas.