And sports illustrateds s. L. Price reports on a working class town through the lens of high school football. Thats just a few of the programs youll see on booktv this weekend. For a complete television schedule, booktv. Org. Booktv on cing span 2 cspan2, television for serious readers. So welcome, everybody. Im the cofounder of civic hall, and just briefly, civic hall, i should say, is weve been here now almost two years. It grew out of an yule conference that we do focused on how technology is changing politics and government that weve been doing since 2004 which is, in fact, how i know pote of our guests. Both of our guests. Weve traveled similar paths. Two years ago we opened civic hall to be a yearround gathering point for the same people and conversations focused on civic tech, how tech can be used for the public good. And so its a pleasure to welcome everybody here. Let me just say that im really excited for the chance to get into this conversation about rules for revolutionaries, how big organizing can change everything. Because we are living in a very unusual time. And it isnt just the moment after the election. Its actually that we are living in an age where mass participation in politics now is possible at the scale of millions. And its a very confusing thing to experience, and a lot of us, i think, are right in the middle of that moment now asking what do i do. And the confusion comes from the fact that everybodys in motion. A lot of people are suddenly activated and concerned and ready to get engaged and try to do something important. And this is the classic challenge of organizers, right . And who better than, to get into this question than really two of the, our best veteran organizers in the digital arena, zacking exley, who i think ive known longer, goes all the way back to around 2000 when he built a web site that made fun of george w. Bush and got called out by the president. That was 1998. 1998. The primary, yeah. [laughter] and then he went from there, he worked for a while in the early days of moveon. Org, was sent by moveon to help president ial campaigns in the 2004 cycle, and so ended up helping the Howard Dean Campaign and then the John Kerry Campaign with their work. More recently, he worked for organizations like wick feed ya wikipedia, which is another kind of entity that involves lots of lots of people in a big, distributed enterprise. And more recently, along with beck by bond, worked becky bond, worked on Bernie Sanders campaigns distributive organizing team. Becky, if overever heard of credo mobile or before that working asset, i dont know if there are any people here, but becky has long been organizing the trenches of Progressive Movement work with credo, a phone company with a conscience, i think, is the tagline, right . And she actually built, as president of credo, a Political Action committee that kid very interesting that did very interesting work in the last offyear cycle targeting members of congress who were Tea Party Members and figuring out how to do a lot of field organizing in a way that could challenge them in a serious way. So shes really cut her teeth as well on political organizing. And she, when she left credo to go work with zack at sanders campaign, what was it, about a year or so ago . Thats certainly when i started to pay a lot more attention. [laughter] i know zack, and hes kind of a man genius. But i becky is also one of the Progressive Movements sharpest tacks ands has done a lot of really important things which maybe well get into. So its really, really a special treat to have you guys here. Sorry. Here at civic hall. And i guess i want to just open by asking you to just say a few words at the beginning. I mean, as a question thats on everybodys mind is, okay, so now what . Right . Its a week after 11 9, which say vargas has professed it as a bookend 9 11. Now what . What do you guys think . Oh, wow, okay. Well, i think, first and foremost, we are people who have been deeply moved by what has happened. And its been, you know, really emotional more us just like it has been, i would suspect, for everyone in this room. And one of the approaches that we have to politics has always been that were, that were peers with the volunteers. The volunteers are our colleagues, and were in this movement is something that were in together. So, you know, of the what now, the first thing is were experiencing, you know, and absorbing that. We have entered into an extremely dangerous period in our history as a nation, and i think that we just want to sort of acknowledge that what youre feeling, you know, were also feeling. And, but we can also see certain things more clearly because we work in politics because we were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign, so weve been traveling the country, and weve been talking to voters, and we made a different choice in the primary about who to support and what kind of campaign to run based on where we thought the country was. So we find ourselves today a week after a result that was stunning but something that in many ways doesnt surprise us because we can see how, how we got there. And in some ways some things we think, if they had happened, we would be in a different place. And so we find ourselves trying to understand how can we use the best tools at our disposal to be part of the resistance, to be part of the opposition, to resist the normalization of what is an unprecedented moment in American History. And we also in this whatnow moment, we wrote this book in august. And we wanted to take the lessons from the Bernie Sanders campaign not as highpriced consultants to big organizations and companies that would pay us to tell them how bernie, how we did the thing on the Bernie Campaign, but to actually deliver that back to people. Want a job at uber . No. [laughter] but how do we then turn that back, and how do we open source the things that we learned, because even though we didnt win, we learned some very powerful things. So we find ourselves at this moment ready our book is just literally out this week, which is, you know, helping people with very concrete ways to organize in a big way to face the urgent challenges of our time. And the challenges are just a little bit different than what we thought it would be. So thats what now at this moment is starts with conversation with you. So want to add anything to that, zack . Im tempted to start processing the election, but we said we were going to hold off, right . [laughter] yeah. To be clear, we could to that. We could do, you know, sort of relitigate the campaigns litigate is probably the wrong word to use. Okay. In the trump era. [laughter] and there will be time for audience questions if people really do want to get into that. But i think its more about lessons learned, and in particular lets start, you know, by understanding what was different about the style of organizing, the philosophy of organizing that you developed and that you now call big organizing . I think a lot of people who came up through, you know, experiencing things like the Dean Campaign and then went into things like the Obama Campaigns that were so successful in 2008 and 2012 adopted a certain model of how to you involve volunteers how you involve volunteers, how you understand the electorate and target voters. And a lot of it was, in effect, i think joe rasbar who was one of obamas chief digital strategists in 2008 said you have to sort of, basically, let the bottomup surface, but it has to be directed from the topdown. So they evolved a method of really professionally training people to be community organizers, giving people very concrete tasks and, you know, Neighborhood Team leaders and so on. That it was kind of like a big pyramid. And at its very best, it moved millions of people in a very constructive way to help obama both win as somewhat of an outsider in 2008 against hillary clinton, and then in 2012 as an incumbent. And i think that model was in large degree what was being used again in the clinton campaign. Sanders campaign did not have the same Establishment Base of support, and it also didnt have most of the people who had cut their teeth doing that style of organizing. So you were partly forced by necessity to evolve and experiment, but you also had a different philosophy that you were working on, right . So talk a bit about that. Yeah. I think we need to step back though, actually, and i want to challenge a little bit the way you describe the, you know, how that obama, how the obama organizing stuff played out. And, you know, methods of organizing, you know, they get developed, they catch on, they spread around, philosophies of organizing. And, you know, the book rules for revolutionaries, that title is kind of a swipe at Saul Alinskys rules for radicals, right . And that was when saul alin sky wrote that book and started getting funding from big organizations and started sending organizers around the country, largely because of all the Foundation Funding he got sustained the staff in Many Organizations around the country. It sort of became more and more his paradigm of organizing became a, more and more dominant pair radiodime paradigm. And it was sort of the only paradigm of organizing that was available to anybody. And when i personally became a lay or wore organizer labor organizer, you know, when i was fist out of College First out of college from the connecticut suburbs, i went out and i was train in this alinsky model. And that model, you know, its oneonone, knock on a door, have a conversation, win somebody over to the cause of getting a stop sign on the corner or Something Like that. And then this whole ladder of engagement. Ali nsky never said that, but it kind of comes from his frame of organizing. Once they get the stop sign then, you know, theyre going to get this sense of power, wow, i did something in my community. Then theyre going to want to do something else. Who knows, maybe a stoplight. And eventually people many this way of thinking, like, someday people will build up to actually having power over their whole lives. And so were rejecting that, actually, for something else. But important to note that those organizers on the Obama Campaign also were rejecting that frame. And it didnt come from, you know, joe and the digital team did amazing stuff on the Obama Campaign, but that was a whole other part of the campaign. That Neighborhood Team model came from people like jeremy burns, jodi cushman, and it was simultaneously being pushed forward on clintons primary campaign in 2008 by robby mook and Marlin Marshall who ran the Campaign Just now. And it came from deans New Hampshire primary where they had this Little Laboratory that was led by most of them and karen hicks and some other people where they kind of, they really embrace that sort of alinsky frame where its about relationships and oneonone communication, but they tried to scale it because they werent just trying to get a stop sign. They were trying to win a a primary in New Hampshire and South Carolina and north dakota. So they scaled it up, and they had these house meetings, right . And this was also very influenced by Marshall Gahn who was their adviser, and he had been an organizing director for the farm workers in california. [inaudible] yeah. And so, you know, that house party model was an evolution not party. Marshall would yell at us if we said house party. Its a house meeting. And that house meeting model that the farm workers practiced was an evolution from and a little bit of a rejection of some of the restrictiveness of the alinsky model. So it was amazing what they did in 08 in South Carolina and then all over the country. That model that was incubated in South Carolina took root as the standard, you know, obama organizing model. And so this whole generation of organizers learned how to work with volunteers, and it did start with oneonones. But then they would ask them to lead a Neighborhood Team. And and then that person would be the leader of the team, and they called it the snowflake model. So what we i think the way we looked at what we were doing was, okay, that was great. But we have in the beginning of the campaign, we had 46 states. And before we, you know, youre exactly right about how becky saved the whole operation. It would have been a mess if he hadnt come. There was about a month and a half before becky came where it was just Claire Sandberg and me. Just two of us and 46 states and, you know, hundreds of thousands of volunteers that had signed up saying put us to work. And they were furious because we were not putting them to work. And so we knew that we started going around and sitting down in coffeeshops and having oneonones with leaders saying would you form a Neighborhood Team, that would just be silly, wouldnt it . And the obama camp in 08 really didnt have there were some good experiments, some amazing stuff in the primary in california. But in general, there was not a program in, you know, that mutt people to work that put people to work all in those later states where there was no staff. So we really believed we could do something, so we tried to evolve a model that would allow us to scale it. So do you want to tribe that model describe that model . Well, you challenged, you said, you know, you were saying its not the topdown, but actually we believe in an element of topdown. We think about it in slightly different terms. Yes. So the way we think about is instead of thinking about topdown versus bottomsup, we really think about peer to Peer Movement where theres a central plan to win and we distribute the work. But the relationship of the volunteers doing the work is not just up to a campaign staffer, right . Its actually to each other, right . To the other volunteers. And this is something that hasnt necessarily been possible in the past because its been very difficult for the volunteers to talk to us and to talk to each other, you know, at scale. But what we realized was, was that bernie was such a long shot, and he started, you know the book is about organizing. Its not about the Bernie Campaign. We use bernie as an example because it was a really formative experience that shows, you know, what was possible. But bernie had 3 name recognition in the beginning. By the end of the campaign, wed captured 46 of the delegates to the Democratic National convention, okay . That was we didnt get as far as we needed to go, but we did get very close. What we always knew all along was that we would have to have a huge campaign, right, to overcome the advantages of resources and name recognition that the billionaire candidate had. So we figured out we need to have a centralized plan, right . Because we couldnt just have hundreds of thousands of people doing whatever they thought, right . Could have done that. Well, thats what they were doing, you know what i mean . [laughter] and it was beautiful. They were writing software, they were writing music, you know what i mean in they were doing all sorts of crazy things, but it wasnt thing that would actually add up to bernie winning, right . And it was our job to actually make sure that all the effort that they were putting forth was actually going to be pushing bernie across the finish line. And so it was really important for us to get a centralized plan. And, you know, the idea was that it was not let a thousand flowers bloom, but it was more like it was a modular, you know, flower factory that was, you know what i mean . Franchised across all the states, right . And so we knew we had to get them to work on a centralized plan, but we had to distribute the work so that people could do it across space and time. And we knew that we couldnt manage them to do all this work, right . That we could only divide it up, and then we would have to have them manage each other to do the work if we were actually going to get enough things done. So this was just an enormous organizing challenge that we had to, basically, figure out from scratch. Right. Say a little bit about, so one of your key innovations, you know, its a technology of how to turn a mass meeting into something that plugs almost every person attending the meeting into a really generative role of running a phone bank, right . So the barnstorm model. Unpack that a little bit for us, because thats probably the most organizing innovation in the campaign that you and you write about it a lot in the book. But what were why barnstormers . Like, ill try to put it in context. The barnstorm, there was a structure to, you know, wed get people into a room like this, wed get, like, 100 people, sometimes 500, sometimes 60, and then we had a structure that led to them getting organized. It was almost like forming crystals, you know what i mean . They came in as water, and they left as crystals, you know, that were and they were formed into teams that knew what to do. But that was the structure of how we did the meeting was just one piece of this much larger structure, and there were lots of other teams. Yeah. The barnstorm, its actually a great story which is what happened with the barnstormers is we realized we had to get everybody on the phone calling voters in the first four contests so we could find out who was for bernie. And we had all these people in california and colorado and texas that wanted bernie to win, and they wanted the election to still be going when it got to their state later, but in order to do that, we couldnt get killed in the first four states. What happened was [inaudible] and so were like, great. We have something for people to do. Wed had thousands of [inaudible] well just get them to start a phone bank. So we sent them emails, and there was nothing