Zack Exley

With Becky Bond, Zack is the co-author of Rules Revolutionaries Organizing Change Everything, a book about Big Organizing and the Bernie campaign. Zack served a full time as Senior Advisor to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign for grassroots organizing. Zack is an early pioneer in online organizing and fundraising. He helped bring U.S. politics online as MoveOn.org's first Organizing Director, as advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, and as the Director of Online Communications and Organizing at John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. He was the Co-Founder of the New Organizing Institute, a technology and strategy training center for social justice organizations. He has appeared in national and international media as writer, commentator, topic and target. Before joining the Bernie campaign Zack served as the Chief Community Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has lived and worked in Britain, China, India, Kenya and South Africa. He led the Organizing Practice at the global IT consultancy, ThoughtWorks, building tools for and advising NGOs, labor unions, humanitarian organizations and political campaigns around the world, including the 2008 Obama campaign. His online organizing career began in 2000, when he created GWBush.com, the first political parody website on the Internet, prompting George W. Bush to call him a "garbage man" and say, "There ought to be limits to freedom." (Really!) He appeared on Glenn Beck's FOX News chalk board twice (as two totally different characters), and served as a featured target of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and many other angry people. He began developing tools for online political organizing in the 2000 U.S. election controversy, when he used a website to allow citizens to self-organize more than 100 rallies around the United States. He began his political career working as a union organizer for nearly a decade, and has also worked as a computer programmer, factory worker, short order cook, book binder and janitor.