 OK, so we're going to have a quick change of speakers. Would the next panel please just come up? We just have to do some quick mic-ing. So don't go anywhere. And I'm actually in the interest of economizing on time as our next panel comes forward with their mics. So I'm just going to say a little bit about what we're doing in this next panel. I want to make clear to everybody this panel is, in terms of the political actors in this election, we're really blessed that we have people from four of the major presidential efforts in 2016. And I've told all of them that we are not going to relitigate the election. I've told everybody that we are not going to try and relitigate the election in this panel. But we are going to try and hear from the people inside the campaigns who had major responsibilities for using technology, data, and blending that in with strategy to figure out how to get their voters. The joke, if you read my daily first post, was this was supposed to be the Meerkat election. Does anybody remember Meerkat? There are always these, every four years, ever since technology became a factor in our election process. People would say, is it going to be the Facebook election? Is it going to be the Twitter election? And I think it was two years ago that Dan Pfeiffer, the outgoing communications director at the White House, discovered Meerkat and said, it's going to be the Meerkat election. Well, that didn't happen. But I do hope that what we get into with this panel is, what was the role of tech? And in particular, what were its most innovative and encouraging uses that we can use not just in campaigns, but in other arenas where we seek to engage people and involve them in the process? So it's really a chance to hear from four top digital campaigners. One who, in the case of Mindy Finn, was a digital strategist for the RNC until she decided, as part of her never-Trump advocacy, to become the vice presidential candidate of Evan McMullen's independent campaign. So we now actually have a candidate who even knows digital in her bones, who will be on the panel with us. So give us a second. Are you guys ready to come up? Almost. OK. It's the lavaliers. So give us one minute. Get your thoughts and your questions ready. And we'll be starting. People who are sitting all the way in the back, by the way, there are lots of seats up front, chatterboxes back there. So I urge you to come up front. It's always nice for the speakers when they can see your reactions and in real time gauge how they're doing. Of course, that's where the coffee is. Come on up. So as with before, I'm going to leave the work of introducing and managing our panel to our excellent moderator, Nancy Skola. I just have to say that it is always a treat for me to welcome Nancy back here to her home stomping grounds. Nancy was with me, one of the founding editors at Tech President. And for many years wrote what you still get, our first post. She left us to greener pastures in Washington and has written for a number of top political publications, including the Atlantic. But right now, you know her for her byline in Politico. So Nancy, take it away. Excellent. Thank you, Mika. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. As Mika mentioned, my name is Nancy Skola for Politico. Thank you for coming today. I think we have a fascinating, timely topic on the role of technology in the campaign. You might have noticed we recently had an election. And we have a terrific lineup of panelists to discuss the topic. It's sort of the perfect group of people to dig into this area. So to my left, we have Becky Bond. Becky was a senior advisor on the Sanders campaign, working on offline online organizing, bridging the gap between online and offline organizing. To Becky's left is Jess Morales-Rochetto. She was the director of digital organizing for the Clinton campaign. And then we have, yep, to Jess's left we have Molly Schweikert. Molly is the head of digital at a firm called Cambridge Analytica that did work on the successful Trump campaign. And to Molly's left, we have Mindy Finn. Mindy is a veteran of Republican politics, who was herself a vice presidential candidate this time around on an independent ticket. So I think, as Mika mentioned, we're going to have some opening remarks. And then we're going to take moderator's prerogative, ask a couple of questions. And then I'd love to turn it over to you all. So if you can be thinking about things you might want to ask our panelists, talk about with our panelists, that would be great. So we are going to get started with Becky. Thanks, Nancy. So I'm Becky Bond, and I was a senior advisor for organizing on the Bernie Sanders campaign. There I was part of the distributed organizing team. A lot of campaigns called this digital organizing, but we called it distributed organizing, because digital is just something that we used to organize people. It really wasn't what we were organizing people to do. And so when I joined the Sanders campaign back in the late summer of 2015, the campaign had put mostly almost all of its resources rightly into a traditional field operation in the first four contexts. So what do you do with the other 46 states? And I think that's the right slide. What do you do with the other 46 states? Well, that was in the territories in Washington City. That was our territory for a very small team of people without a whole lot of resources. So we were an outpost on the fringe of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but we were a vast outpost, as you can see by the map. Our turf changed over time as the campaign calendar went on, but we always had literally hundreds of thousands of people that we had to organize with just a few staff and mostly consumer software. I'll go back. All right, so we had to do something different because we had so much territory to cover and so many people to organize, and we had not a lot of resources besides a travel budget and a lot of consumer software mostly and some really dedicated staff that were digitally native but really cared about organizing people in person. So we developed a model that had never been used at scale before in a presidential primary campaign before and the model that emerged was something that we call big organizing. And Zach Exley and I, we wrote a quick book about this called Rules for Revolutionaries, How Big Organizing Can Change Everything because we wanted to share this model with others. Now of course we lost the primary, but we did take a candidate with 3% name recognition to win 46% of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Now how we did that was in part on the distributed organizing campaign, the team, was that we harnessed a volunteer movement of hundreds of thousands of people to a low cost, large scale voter contact machine that was run mostly with consumer software and volunteers as managers. That's how we made a big change. Now what is necessary to make this big organizing model work where you can harness the power and the work of all these volunteers? Well at the heart of big organizing is this idea that I deeply believe in is that there's a huge but largely untapped capacity in the grassroots and they're ready to work for change if people can plug them into a strategic plan to win a significant victory. And these volunteers, they can't just be given low level or manual tasks, but they need to be given, some of them need to be given real responsibility and included at high levels of management. And so big organizing is big in more than one way. It's big because there's a really big goal and that's what we need to motivate people to participate. People have to feel like winning is really gonna be worth their time. It's big because we get as many people as possible engaged in the work because that's what it's gonna take to win a big change. And so big organizing, it has mass participation by the people at its heart. And it's also big because we ask people to do big things, to step up and take big responsibility and play a big role. Now, in the current climate, we really do have people that are more willing to do something big, to win something big, than wanna do something small to win something small. And mass participation campaigns, I'm not saying that this is new to the Bernie Sanders campaign and it wasn't something that we invented but and of course, most social movements that win big things succeed because of mass participation. But on the Bernie campaign with the distributed organizing team which uses a lot of digital tools, we learned how to harness this untapped capacity in the grassroots by combining mostly consumer technology, Slack, Google Apps, Facebook, with in-person organizing meetings. So we really brought online digital tools and people doing things in real life together in a pretty seamless way. And along the way, we developed a system of tactics and values that I think it's not just for campaigns but civil society groups and social justice movements, can adopt a fight for big change at every level from the local level to the state level to the federal level to the international level. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about this, where the intersection between this digital organizing technology and this in-person meetings led to this ability to harness hundreds of thousands of volunteers. It was called the Barnstorm. This is just a picture of a meeting. This was probably the greatest innovation the digital staff had on the entire campaign and it was an in-person meeting. It was one that we designed and we iterated to create volunteer teams on the spot and put strangers to work together immediately with other people from their community. These teams would take on what we call rinse and repeat tasks that they could do on a recurring weekly or even daily basis during the campaign. So once we put them in motion, there was a very high payoff because they would do a lot of voter contact over time. So we called this the Barnstorm meeting and the vast majority of voter contact events on the campaign had their genesis in a meeting that was just like this. Now the Barnstorm meeting, which started in a digital email that went out, incorporated many of the rules that we learned over the course of the campaign, that people are just waiting to be asked to do something big to win something big, the converse of which is you don't get a revolution if you don't ask for one. Don't ask who wants to lead, ask who wants to get to work. We had to learn to fight the tyranny of the annoying and we also learned that our movement isn't just bottom up, it's really peer to peer. It's really people working together as peers to do things. So here's how the Barnstorm works. We would send out an email, that's the digital part, to everyone within 60 miles of a city where we wanted to hold the meeting and get people to work. And we'd just say a staffer or a super volunteer was gonna come to that town and meet with people about how they could get to work to help burn you in, you could insert any other big goal. And in the meeting, and this is very reductive, we would just briefly lay out the principles behind the national field plan. We would explain the mechanics and impact of volunteer voter contact and then we would ask for 10 to 20% of the people in the room to stand up and volunteer to hold an event. Okay, so you have a room full of people. Some of these meetings had 400 people, some of these meetings had 40 people, they averaged 75 to 100 people. All right, so people would come up to the front of the room and we would make them right then fill out a form saying when they would hold the event and where it would be. This took about five minutes because we'd have a bunch of volunteers and went to clipboard so everybody could grab a clipboard and commit. Okay, then we would turn to the audience and then we would say, okay, now you have to sign up for these events, right? So 18 to 19 of the people that were sitting down, they would have to sign up for one of these events that was being pitched by one of these people that's standing like a deer in the spotlight at the front of the room. Okay, and so what happened was that when we asked these people to sign up for these people who stood up, right? Then we had individuals that were committed to each other, not just the campaign. So the hosts said they were gonna do this thing, they commit on the spot to holding it, all of a sudden they've got two people signed up. Or the people who signed up, they've met the person that they're gonna be, the stranger that they're gonna be standing up if they don't go to the house, right? So then what we did was we would take all this information that you see on the screen and we would upload it to a day, launch your data entry bank and then they would basically plug it into the website just as if someone had signed up online. Now this may seem old fashioned and it was in many ways but it was also integrated into our digital user flow. We treated the paper form just like a landing page on the website and we iterated it to increase conversion rates. It was probably the piece of technology that we argued about most in the distributed organizing department on the campaign was where things were on this paper form. What we were essentially doing was replacing a user flow where we would send an email with a link to a person. They would click on that link and they would fill out a form on the web to either agree to host something or to agree to show up at something, right? But then we replaced that with an email asking someone to an in-person meeting and then we would ask them in-person in front of their peers to either host or to show up at something and then we would have them sign up and then we would push it back into our CRM program. In the process we literally created tens of thousands of volunteer led voter contact events far, far more than we had been able to do when we were relying on email and the web alone. Now there's tons of logistical support that it took to run this to pull this off. Nearly all of it was run by volunteer teams that were doing massive amounts of data entry that were calling hosts and reminding them, there were Google live streams to train them to follow up after these events. There was texting to remind people to show up. We had to get it into the web where we could email people to then fill in those voter contact events. But over the course of the campaign using this technique of going from the web to in-person and then back to the web into our text program, we held more than 1,000 of these in-person meetings. The first 350 were led by staff. The next 650 were led by volunteers. Of these 1,000 meetings, again, the vast majority of our voter phone banks, which we called over 75 million voters, and we recruited people for peer-to-peer texting where we sent 8 million individually sent text messages, came out of this. So I'm gonna stop there, but I'm gonna close by saying that we've heard a lot of interesting things today, starting from the morning session when Sally Busby talked about we need more diversity in journalists about who trusts institutions and who does not, different levels of that. And then we also heard from Eli Pariser and from others about how we need to, and from Tony Marks from the New York New Republic Library, about how we actually need to trust people, right, to come forward. And I think that we as digital people, we really have to move towards trust because if we're going to change things as they are today, it's gonna take a lot of us together to do it. And to make a big enough movement to actually win some of the fights that we're facing today is gonna take a lot more people exponentially more than are involved today. And so I think with a series of values and tactics combined with a much more radical trust in allowing people to participate in and lead our campaigns that we could see a really new way of doing politics. Excellent, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. As Molly gets that up, I do have one quick question. You mentioned the tyranny of the annoying. Can you give us 10 seconds on what the heck? Yeah, so, you know, okay, as digital people, the fact that we spent most of the campaign flying around meeting in person with volunteers is crazy, right? So, but that's what it took to actually get these volunteer voter contact events going. But a lot of people who go to digital, it's because they don't want to deal with the messiness of people in real life, right? And so, and so, and the tyranny of the annoying is there's almost always one, there's a bunch of amazing people show up to do something and there's one person with too much time on their hands. No matter how well-intentioned and they dominate it, the event, and they drive everybody else away. And it also makes staff not want to involve regular people in the things that they're doing. And this is something that we feel like we have to face up to and we have to overcome it as opposed to letting it drive us away from involving the people in our work. Okay, excellent, thank you. Thanks. Thank you and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I'm Molly and the head of digital Cambridge Analytica. We're a global communications agency and most recently had the privilege of working for the Trump campaign. Wanted to take this time to view some tactics that were used and some learnings from them. I have been, having been involved in the 2008 and 2012 election, I'm very aware of what it's like to be on the other side of winning as well. And, you know, the old kind of saying if you happen to lose, you did everything wrong. And if you won, you did everything right. So, want to definitely approach this with the understanding that there was a fantastic use of technology this year and what can we learn from that and what can we look at? So, we worked with the Trump campaign in a few key ways. One was polling and research, one was data science and one was digital marketing. And as we started with the campaign, one underlying principle that I want to look at is one, the value of predictive analytics but as it relates to understanding humans. We are not a pile of data points sitting here, we're humans with emotions and feelings. And when used well, predictive analytics can actually help us understand those people better. The process we undertook to work through this was first going into the field on a weekly basis to collect large amounts of direct hard ID responses. This looked like thousands of responses coming in from battleground states through which we were able to score individuals on a few key things. One was their candidate preference, as you can see on the axis here. The particular issues they cared about if it was the economy, jobs, et cetera and then also their likelihood to turn out. Even more important than possibly who they cared about was if they actually intended to vote, if they did not, then that's a problem we needed to tackle as well. So through the end of the process, we then had every voter in each battleground state scored on these particular things that then helped us, one, understand how to talk to them based on where they were in terms of if they would turn out, what issues were important to them, but also helped on the prediction side so that it could give us the ability to understand, you know, we're seeing a trend in this particular area. Some people are very concerned about particular issues. We're going to advise the candidates to actually travel there. And when he's there, these are the issues that are on people's hearts and mind and this is what he should be speaking about. This was activated in terms of kind of technology and delivering on the digital advertising side through a process here, sort of this life cycle that you see in the circle here. One, in the beginning, while the researchers were out in the field collecting these data points, they then give it back to our data scientists who created algorithms to extrapolate out models based on these training sets collected from the hard IDs, which would then be segmented into various universes for digital contact. We would then take the learnings from the briefings that they gave us to one, go to the content team and say these are the particular issues we're going to be talking to people about this week, overlaid with information about them. So the issue here we're talking about is jobs, but it's particularly young women. So we want to put this subject in that context. We would then go to our digital media partners as well. We executed a very cross-platform campaign, essentially any way you could be online consuming content we were there to meet you. And we'd put together a strategic media plan to activate on both who we knew we needed to talk to, as well as what to talk to them about. And then also throughout this continual process, we were always holding some controls to do measurement, to understand if this was actually working. And if it was, how could we make it better and who was particularly responding to this? And we collaborated very closely with a number of the platforms, Facebook, Google, being some of them, to ensure that we were really understanding who we were talking to to be able to better measure that. Another aspect is that people are, in our daily lives, we're interacting with technology and online platforms in so many ways. We're not just looking at TV commercials. We are looking at to find out what our friends are doing, to get ideas on what to do this weekend. And we have, in some ways, we can do people a disservice by just trying to blast them with 30-second TV ads. So one extraordinary way that we were able to take advantage of those platforms to really widen the tent and increase participation was looking at other ways that we could be engaging with people. One of these being crowd-building for events. Obviously, political schedules are very volatile. We only had, often, a few days to fill up an arena. So we would go into the area and talk to our supporters through online platforms. This was a relatively small use of manpower resources, but an incredibly large reach. So we were able to then find these people. There were our supporters that might be interested in an event. Also things such as app installation. The Trump campaign had an app called the America First App through which you could do a number of different things, including shopping online, sharing with your friends, encouraging that peer-to-peer contact. That was a very valuable tool for the campaign that needed to increase its active users. And so we invested some resources into increasing the usage of that. Also, absentee valley, absentee voting, early voting, and get out the vote. Through Google Civics API, we had a website that was that we directed people to, wherein you could put in your address, find your particular polling location, or request an absentee ballot. A tremendous amount of resources were dedicated towards bringing people to that site. And through the studies and measurement we held, we were able to increase people's likelihood to show up to vote or send in their absentee ballot by about 2%. So a tremendous increase in using the tools available to increase participation in the civic process. Also other aspects of ways to reach people online. We found a very interesting use of things such as Snapchat. Not just necessarily a way for people to see a video, but in this instance, we had an ad type where people could swipe up in the bottom as a call to action. Brought you to a mobile optimized webpage where you could submit your name to get more information to stay involved with the campaign. We had thousands of responses through this. Clearly young people that were very interested to hear more from Mr. Trump and be involved in a different way. And then also some examples of the different ways of facilitating voter participation through directing people to their polling locations. Finally, the true goal of technology here is to amplify a message, right? Technology on its own is dead. It can't necessarily produce a message. It can't produce a movement. It's only as powerful as what it's producing. And this election showed us that by kind of breaking some of the standard operational rules by creating your own blueprint for what works for resonating with your supporters, technology can then become an extremely powerful means. But it's only in collaboration with understanding the human behavior, understanding individuals we're talking to, and then figuring out how we can best use technology to facilitate that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Mindy? I think you're next. Yeah. Molly, I do have a follow-up question for you. If you mentioned some of the tools you used to fill a stadium in some part of the country with a couple days' notice. If you had to pick one of the tools that you had available to you, which one, only one of the tools you had available to you, which one would that be? So I'm going to say Facebook because there was such a large audience there. Yeah. One, I'm Mindy. Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate Mika and Andrew inviting me. I first met them 12 years ago when they came to meet with me at the Republican National Committee to implore us to get involved in the Personal Democracy Forum. And they're just true visionaries in this field. I've been proud to be part of this community since then. This is also exciting to be here because I gave a lot more speeches this past year than I really anticipated. But most of them were not on digital politics. So it's exciting to get back to this topic and hone in on specificity. I will say, though, because I've been a candidate, I'm no longer conditioned to talk about anything really in deep detail or how to talk about exactly how it works. And in TED, I'll largely give you aspirational and lofty ideas about how we move forward. But I hope to do a little bit of both today. So just a bit of a background because I think it's important for what I'm going to say. I came to digital politics accidentally the same way I came to run for Vice President. And after some early work as a journalist and Capitol Hill staffer, whereas a function of my age and the fact that I was a basic level coder, I took on the new media duties in the office. And that led to joining the Bush 2004 e-campaign and to lead digital programs at the RNC, the Romney presidential campaign in 2008, to work at Twitter, to run a consultancy, and work with dozens of campaigns. And actually to be back at the RNC last, well, not last year, in 2015 in an acting role to lay the foundation for the infrastructure and data architecture that would power the 2016 campaign. So what excited me the most about tech and politics in this field was the opportunity to open up the process of politics and governing and to engage more people in the process. Ultimately, I'm driven by a passion to give a voice to more Americans in our political process. And the idea that we could meet voters where they are and engage them and through their volunteer time and financial contributions and direct communications that would have infinite possibilities for changing politics for the better. So after 15 years now in this field coming at it from the media side and the politics side, the technology side, and most recently as a candidate, I've been part of and observed the iterative transformation from politics by the few to politics by the many. And I have a few reflections and that's kind of what I wanna talk to you today, largely focused on specific examples from this most recent campaign. So the first is we have a tendency to over-learn lessons. Molly referred to this when she talked about what we, the kind of idea that whoever wins did everything right and whoever lost did everything wrong. I hope that after this last cycle we can take a different approach to that because I don't think it's serving the industry or politics at large. For example, we're too quick to assign credit and blame tools and not enough to credit the product being sold. So we'll look at the factor that created a marginal difference and the losing party will double down on the program to catch up to their opponent. In 2008 it was the organizing and social media power of the Obama campaign that Republicans sought to emulate and they did fairly quickly on the back of the Tea Party movement. In 2012 it was big data and modeling to drive schedule and media decisions. We've been moving forward but instead certain things have been left behind. So what I would suggest here is that we look for nuance not absolutes in terms of what works. And because I'm not currently a vendor I can tell you that while we love vendors and platforms they're highly motivated to tell you that they are the killer app, which by the way I feel stink is email in many regards. They offer really valuable information but it's important to consider what they have to say in the proper context. If you have to point to one factor that makes a victory or not in a high exposure campaign it's the candidate. This is why, and again Molly referred to this, playbooks offer lessons and guidance but are not transferable from one campaign to the other. They're not a blueprint, they're a guide. In 2014 I ran a program for the National Republican Senatorial Committee which set digital and data standards for the committee's targeted Senate campaigns. It raised the bar for underperforming campaigns in terms of their use of technology. A couple didn't even believe, believe it or not that online fundraising really could have value or matter and have a impact on the final result. It did, yet we recognized that standards were simply guides. I saw firsthand in the most recent campaign I was part of, the McMullen for President campaign where we set records for the number of voters we gained in a short time that the candidate really did matter. Like most upstart movement driven campaigns we relied heavily on technology. It was really the very first time that running a digital first and technology driven campaign was not something to contemplate but was just a given and a necessity. But it was really the candidate's talent and message that inspired people that we never personally touched to download and print their own materials and self organize canvassing days. Our Facebook groups were self sustaining and without ever sitting foot in certain states we inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to write us in. We would often say that the key to our success and again we didn't win and didn't necessarily have an impact on the final outcome but about 22% in a single state in a three month campaign starting with no name ID and nearly a million votes nationwide that it was our selfie lines at the end of the campaign that drove our success. What that was was at the end of every speech we would allow people to line up and as many as we could get through we would take pictures with every single person we would say to them personally post it on Facebook, make sure you tweet this and that's how it spread. It was a picture of our supporters with the candidates something that they wouldn't get too often or that easily with the presidential campaign. Another lesson is live and die by data or live and die by gut. That is a debate that often happens within this community and industry. Both are insufficient and we saw that within this campaign. Living by gut, the Trump campaign was much stronger once it put a data architecture behind its decision-making and living and dying by data was something that I think the Hillary campaign and this is it to pot shots this is kind of what you read in the media so it's not a bold new idea but living and die by the data leads us to make not necessarily the savviest of decisions. Big data makes us better informed and not necessarily smarter. Again for example when I was we're putting together the architecture for the data that would power the 2016 campaign at the RNC we had solved for a robust method to determine who a voter was and what may potentially motivate them but where we needed to fill in and where I believe there's more work to do is how, when and where to reach them and that critical point of the last week in a campaign particularly where there's so many undecided voters of what's going to influence their decision at that time. People know what they want, listen to them this requires both better quantitative analysis unmoored from our personal biases as well as user feedback on how and through which channels we communicate. When building products, recognize that most often the best opportunities are often those that are thrust upon you you do not create them. So what this means is that breaking news or current events are often what allows you to raise the most money and engage more people, catch lightning in a bottle, you're building tools to prepare for those moments. A big moment on our campaign for example and unfortunate one was in the Access Hollywood tapes came out which happened to be a day after I joined the ticket was a big opportunity for new voters to take a look at us and to engage them for fundraising and volunteering. A few things I think we're getting short on time but there's no set standards for clear standards to how to engage on social. When I worked at Twitter, we wrote the playbook for how politicians and advocacy orgs should engage on Twitter. As culture norms are shattered, we may not expect that there's social media norms. That said, we are each part of the culture and shape it. Personally, my use of Twitter as a citizen, a strategist and an analyst shifted from one more prone to biting critique to one more lofty policy focus and inspirational as a candidate or at least that was my intent. We're not single story individuals and while voters see more of the whole candidate today, they only see what and who we show to them. So I will say that I've gone through a lot of pondering in the last couple of year in particular whether digital democracy has been good or bad for America and the world and I always come back to the same idea that technology is not good or bad, it's a tool. It can be used for good or evil. It's a little bit of both. Technology without policies that assign values and principles to it will be abused. From the community of technologists who came together around the idea that technology would fix politics, the imperative going forward, at least for me, is how we fix the technology to strengthen our democracy. Now, those whose only goal is winning in the immediate term are not necessarily incentivized to tackle this problem, but for the rest of us and for anyone who wants to see America thrive in the future, it's a critical mission. Thank you. Excellent, thank you very much. A quick question for you is, what's the more difficult job being a staffer or being a candidate? Being a candidate, I definitely have newfound respect for being a candidate and that's as a candidate who was able to avoid a lot of the worst parts about being a candidate because I was in it for such a short time. Excellent, thank you. Jess, do you want to sit or? I'm not really a podium gal, so I'm hoping that those of you in the cheat seats can see me. I thought I'd start by introducing myself because I found myself being introduced to new people here, so I suspect I may be a new name for many of you. I'm Jess Rales-Rocchetto and I'm the former Digital Organizing Director at Hillary for America, but although I did, I think, spring from the womb fully formed in loving Hillary Clinton, I didn't just start there. My career has spanned a bunch of different lanes, but in particular, I spent a lot of time at the AFL-CIO helping build kind of a state-of-the-art digital team there was one of the folks who, one of the first 30 employees on Obama 2012's re-election campaign and also worked at a little outfit called Rebuild the Dream, which was an economic inequality group headed by Van Jones and before that, I was a professional dancer, so I have a sort of lengthy lane here that's a little bit untraditional from a normal organizer. But my resume is like an extremely small part of who I am, so I thought I'd tell you a little story about how I came to work for Hillary Clinton. When I was eight or nine years old, I told my mom that I was gonna be the first woman president in the United States except if Hillary Clinton was the first woman president, and then I was gonna be the second woman president and I was gonna work for Hillary Clinton, so I have wanted to work for her and specifically once I got old enough to think about what my dream job would be was to be the digital organizing director for Hillary Clinton. I truly believe in the power of digital organizing and think that what we'll see in future cycles is not digital organizing but actual organizing. We've been saying that for like a decade. I think it'll actually happen in the next 10 years. So I was the honor and privilege of my life to walk into our headquarters in Brooklyn every day. I used to like legitimately pinch myself. And I had three goals when I went to do that job. One, I wanted Hillary Clinton to say Black Lives Matter. Two, I wanted to register millions of black and brown people to vote. And three, I wanted to build lasting technology that we could give to the party afterwards so that down ballot candidates could use it. The Democratic Party just for clarity's sake. And the reason that I wanted to do that was because I had worked on some of the technology on the Obama 2012 campaign. And I felt like such a travesty because right after the campaign, it went on the shelf and it stayed there until 2016 when people were sort of like, hey, do you wanna take a look at this four year old code? No, we didn't because at that point it was pretty outdated. And that felt like so much time and resources and energy and exciting ideas that didn't get used. So I was always looking towards after win or lose because I'm really interested in, I'm team unsexy, team infrastructure. I wanna do everything I can to build up the kind of things that don't get written up in articles but actually contribute to winning. I think that's a choice that we have right now in this moment. Obviously we lost in the Hillary Clinton campaign. I don't know if you've heard. But I do think that many of the ideas that we were trying to put forward as a digital organizing team are ideas that are absolutely still relevant. And I'll talk a little bit about those and then about sort of where I think the vision is longer because the Hillary Clinton campaign is over but the challenges that we face are only beginning. My overarching philosophy as a digital organizing director was actually to go as small as possible. I wanted to have as many one-to-one conversations to be as intimate and personal as we possibly can and a lot of that frankly was inspired by our candidate. If Barack Obama was the guy who could make you feel like in a million people, he was the only one talking to you. Hillary Clinton was really only talking to the person right there. And some of her best moments were behind the scenes on the rope line or backstage when she would have these incredible heartfelt policy-laden conversations of people who would say things like, I really need to talk about Alzheimer research because my son has, sorry, my grandfather has Alzheimer's and we have a host of challenges related to that and here's like a policy that matters. So part of that we wanted to extend all the way into what we were doing and I think that's also really critical to thinking about the internet now. Digital media and particularly the way people engage on social media is incredibly narcissistic. It's all about them. It's selfies. It's like an echo chamber of people within their network and so I think that what we're seeing is that people care more and more about the individual and it's up to us as political and technology folks to think about how that translates into civic life. You know, the great Robert Pettenham needs to talk about bullying alone. I think we're like into a whole other place where like you never actually go to bowl, you just like stage the bowl for your Instagram selfie. So I think it's really critical to understand that we operate in this incredibly large internet context where we're fighting with that sort of really intimate personal stuff and I'll talk about kind of three moments where I feel like that really worked. One was in the primary. We won the Northern Mariana Islands primary. I think there's one primary vote but I like have never been so proud of a win and it's because we won it mostly through digital organizing and it wasn't super sophisticated. It definitely didn't have any big data because much of the data about Northern Mariana Islands voters is not reliable because there isn't a huge investment in the Northern Mariana Island primary as you can imagine, which is unfortunate. So then, so we found every shred of data that there possibly existed in the voter file in the Northern Mariana primary on our email list on the Northern Mariana primary and anyone that we could figure out related to any other history we had about them that they might be connected to the Northern Mariana primary. One of my favorite things that we did is we sold store shirts in our store that were for all 50 states in the territories, including one for NMI. So we went and looked at everyone who had bought a T-shirt that was the Northern Mariana Islands T-shirt. There were 13 people. My staff personally called all 13 of those people and had a conversation with them about voting in the Northern Mariana primary. They did. We don't have complete data, but we're pretty sure that like 75% of them went and voted because of that phone call. 13 votes makes a big difference in the primary in Northern Mariana Island. And we also, we were pretty sure that most of those folks were people who no longer lived on the island but had family on the island. So we organized them to talk to their friends and family who still lived on the island. And then we went and found the private Facebook groups of people who live in the Northern Mariana Island. There are some. And we posted, including one from our NMI caucus director. And then we asked people to share. And then we found that a person on the Northern Mariana Island had made a video. It was like a supporter video. So all of our staff started sharing that supporter video. And then we, the people that we had the emails for, we sent them that video and we won the Northern Mariana primary. And that's when we sort of started seeing that like some of this very legwork, elbow grease, kind of difficult stuff could work. Another one is in, we did a first of its kind digital voter assistance. So taking our cue from like Delta, we did a, you could just tweet at Hillary Clinton or the Democrats or some of our kind of internal accounts that we had at Hillary for America, which was like our super fan account. And we would answer your questions. You could tweet, you could Facebook post. You could, we did one to one emails. And then also you could text. And we answered millions of voter's questions through that. These were individual questions. This included on the last day of early voting in North Carolina, we were answering questions from people who were actually being turned away from the polls and helping them in real time navigate their problems. And then the last thing I'll talk about is a peace technology I'm really in love with called Megaphone. And Megaphone was our internal organizing technology. At the very beginning of the campaign, I said that I wanted to solve a problem that we have in a life cycle of volunteer. So what happens when you sign up at hillaryclin.com slash volunteer? And sometimes people would say, I never heard from anybody. So we wanted to solve that problem. How do we make sure that every single person who signs up finds someone and able to talk to them? So we built a, the technology team who was an incredible, amazing team built a peer-to-peer messaging program that allowed you to every organizer to download a Chrome extension that was built on top of the voter activation network, the voter file van. And then you could go into van, put it up. It would immediately publish to our website, which is, believe it or not, a problem we've been trying to solve for multiple cycles. Then you would be able to message people via email, only the people who are CP or people in your organizer's turf. And then you were also able to send them a peer-to-peer text message. So one-to-one text message. The organizer, Jessica, would email Becky, or sorry, text message Becky and say, hey, Becky, we're having an event on Friday at three o'clock. Can you come? And we were able to go through the entire life cycle hearing from an actual human being, the organizer, who's making the decisions about the messages that we could send, when we could send them, and who we could send them to. And that's the kind of technology that I hope we're gonna be building as we move forward in campaigns, because that's the kind of technology that really gets at the people that we're trying to engage. Excellent, thank you. So what are the, I'm sorry. If you'd like to clap, feel free. Thank you very much. So you talked about transferring one of the challenges on the Democratic side of the ticket, the Republican side too, in the past has been transferring technology that a lot of money and time has been invested in during the campaign cycle back to the party. What are the megaphone? Where does that go from here? Yeah, it's a question we're definitely still figuring out. One thing that succeeded my wildest expectations was that we actually were able to do some of that technology for the party and for down ballot races during the election. So we partnered with Tessa Simon's amazing digital director at the DNC, and worked with her to actually use megaphone in down ballot races, which was, you know, I actually cannot believe we were able to do that level of coordination. Okay, excellent. So I'm sure you all have some questions. If you can be thinking about them, I'm gonna ask one quick question myself. And then I think we're gonna pass a microphone around. So I think I am gonna ask one question first, and then we'll go to the audience. If you trace the rise of data-driven digital-enabled technology back to the dean campaign, which I think is sort of a natural starting point, we're about a dozen years into this era. Is it better to be an American voter now than it was 12 years ago or worse? Does that make sense? Who's up? Molly? Sure, so I think it relates to the overall experience of consuming information, and in the same way that much advertising has become more targeted, the whole goal of that is making your internet experience more relevant. And so I think that also relates to the political sphere in that the information you're exposed to and are consuming are becoming more relevant to you, which makes it then ideally, you're better equipped to make your decisions about the election. I think it's better to be a white voter. Say more. You know, all of our, most of our programs are really optimized for white voters, especially older white voters, because those are what people call the most reliable voters. And I think that that is also what skews what we think of as best practice or turn up models, because if the data never included you, it's difficult to understand how to engage. So my hope is that as we move forward, we'll put a renewed emphasis on black, brown, queer, poor and working class voters. I think it's a mixed bag, but on balance, it's better. One of the reasons that I agreed to run when I did is for the people who were not planning to vote, because they felt dissatisfied with the options in the process and what was so inspiring all along throughout the campaign in the last month that I was, the candidate was the number of people that we would hear from that would say, this is the first time that I've engaged as a volunteer. This is the first time I've really gotten involved in a campaign. I know it happened for other campaigns, my personal experience that because, and it was so accessible, the ability for them to do that is accessible in a way that would not have been obviously before the internet. And they could get involved instantaneously and they were meeting in the candidate and they were volunteering. So I think on balance, it's better from that perspective. And there are some people again, who I would hear that this was the first time they had ever, they hadn't even voted and they were going to vote. So I think we forget about that. We look at communities that didn't vote or didn't turn out because they're dissatisfied. At the same time, there's others who are inspired and able to engage and get the information they need and get skin in the game. And this is all still going to be worked out. I'm very optimistic that we all could be able to continue to say it's better as the years come as even though it looks a little messy right now. Well, I think it's a terrible time to be a voter. I mean, we've gutted the National Voting Rights Act and we've just seen a couple of decades of serious, systematic disenfranchisement of poor people, low income people, people of color, seniors and other things. I think it's a technology that's made it a good time to be a volunteer and a staffer because there's so much consumer and good technology that helps people work together over across space and time and there's internet on airplanes, so. That's a good thing, I'm not sold on that. Excellent, okay, so I'm sure we have some questions. Who's got a question? And if you could identify yourself if it's relevant anyway. Shekhar Pradhan, DocuneXus. So I'm a great fan of technology and campaigns. I develop it myself. But I worry about hackers taking over the technology and turning it against the candidate and that could have immediate damage. How much of a concern was it to you guys? Did anybody come close to hacking one of your tools and using it against the candidate? And I'm not talking about Russians and so on, I'm talking about, apart from that. So people are actually messing with technology. They're sending a message that is damaging, for instance, in your peer-to-peer communication, for instance. Okay. It's a tremendous concern and actually the CTO of the RNC who is also very involved with the campaign, his background was from Silicon Valley protecting companies against that type of cybersecurity. So tremendous opportunity for danger there that has to be faced just like a multi-billion dollar company would face it. If you've been doing this work for a while, has there been more investment in that sort of protection than there has been in the past? I mean, were people worrying about that in 2008, 2012 in the same way? I would say they were worrying about it but to the same extent that the threat has gotten greater, people are also, it used to be two-step authentication was a big deal. Now we know we need to get a lot farther than that. Hackers have gotten more sophisticated so you come up with patches and cybersecurity measures and they've gotten more sophisticated but it's long been a concern. I mean, going back to, I don't know, it's weird to feel like that I'm like the historian of digital politics now but anyway, going back to 2000, getting really old, going back to 2004, we had a serious attack that brought down our entire system and website and the presidential campaign and we had to engage several additional servers across the country and balance out our infrastructure that way so that that attack couldn't happen again and then now that wouldn't be sufficient because hackers would figure out how to get through that and we go to two-step authentication and platform. So it's a continuous challenge but it's long been a challenge. 2004 was the Bush campaign? I mean, I think we have to focus way more on getting people in and keeping people out. I think it's a concern but I think we have a much greater challenge with having systems that let lots of people in to be part of campaigns as opposed to sort of focusing on security measures to keep people out and that comes from campaigns that are, that allow volunteers to do the work of contacting the voters and getting access to the data and that sort of thing. We really sort of decided that we would default to trusting people because we needed to let people in and the more we worried about security beyond a certain level, the more it limited the scale that we could get to. So we just, we really focused on getting to a mass participation campaign and we had to take some risks on the security side to do that. Yeah, and I wouldn't even, I would say plus one to Becky and I wouldn't even think about it as a risk as much. Like there's really valuable data in knowing if somebody, so let's, our call tool is a really good example. You can make calls from anywhere using your computer and a phone. We did have people who would call and enter in false data. So we built in checks who would, were you making calls too fast? Were you doing like no 100 times in a row? Perhaps you're a nefarious person. But part of that was also like, you have to make an account, like log in, verify your account, read our script, log the data. You're an extremely motivated anti-person. That's a valuable thing to know about you as much as it's valuable to know when people who are extremely motivated, positive actors. You've all talked about building or using internally facing tech when you're doing an internal R&D build. What are your top priorities? Can you please say the question just for those of us who are, not at this point? Well, that's like, yeah. So, when you're doing your internal research and development, when building in-house technology tools, what are your concerns? And for us, I would say it's time. Campaign has an expiration date. So a really good example, when we did our roadmap, we did it in early 2016 for all the way through the rest of the campaign and we set hard deadlines for when we would not roll out new technology because at that point, there just wasn't real benefits in rolling out technology out. Actually, you probably heard us. So I would say that like most decisions get decided by the amount of time it either is going to take to hire the engineers because you're still hiring engineers or the time it's gonna take to do the user research or the time it's gonna take to actually do the coding. I always think like, what would it be like if a campaign was 10 years long? Like we would solve basically every civic problem. So I agree with that. I'd also say usability and that we're in this interesting time where the parties have recognized you can't wait, if you're in a primary, you can't wait to the general election. So the parties have done a lot of work to build the architecture and the infrastructure to plug into a presidential campaign. And in doing so, our calculation is a lot around, okay, you have, well, look at the Republican field, there were 17 candidates. How do we build something that we can ensure can plug into anything that they're using? Well, how old did that work? I know it's a great question. So along those lines of scalability, it has to go from zero to 100 in this instance about six months because of the drawn out primary process. So you have to be practical, your point about time, understanding and ensuring that it's something that can be done on time and to be used at the volume to be beneficial for this type of operation. Yeah. I mean, our bias was always just use consumer software and connect it with custom coding because consumer software, it already has hundreds of millions of users and it's battle tested. The usability is way better than anything you can build, customize. Custom stuff rarely comes in on time and at the quality that you need to have hundreds of thousands of users. So really, I think consumer software has gotten to a level now, especially because it's been developed to help people work together on teams when they're not co-located for work. It's amazing, stuff that helps multinational corporations run teams are great for campaigns. Stuff like Slack, Google Apps, Facebook groups, Trello. If you don't start with almost free stuff, that's amazing and try and figure out how to build a campaign around that. You're spending a lot of time and resources on building something that could be really subpar, even if it's more custom to your uses. Okay, excellent. Thank you all so much. Thank you. We're unfortunately out of time. Okay, we're gonna thank you to that panel. We're gonna take a 15 minute break, coffee if you need to recharge a little bit, restrooms on either side and please be back in your seats by 10 to four. 15 minute break.