Becky Bond Sabine Mirlesse for The New Republic

You organized supporters in a very different way than Obama did. How come?

We had a lot of people across the country willing to volunteer, but we didn’t have a lot of money in the early days. So we said, “What if we use all these consumer technologies—like Slack and Google apps—to turn volunteers into the staff of the campaign?” We built a virtual call center that allowed volunteers to organize their own phone banks and call Bernie supporters in key states.

Was this a system you devised on the fly?

It started with what we were using to organize ourselves in the office. We learned that even if people didn’t understand how to use Slack, they wanted Bernie to win so much that they were willing to go outside their comfort zone, learn a new technology, and teach it to others.

Did it work?