Jon Sackett attended PyCon with his department and faced challenges in getting messages out to the entire group. He used Twilio SMS to solve this problem and created MassText, a group text messaging system that uses a single Twilio phone number to forward messages to all users on the team. The application works by sending an SMS to a Twilio number, which then forwards the message to all users in the list through a Twilio XML response. Jon successfully deployed MassText for PyCon and reported high response rates, with most people receiving messages within seconds of someone sending a message out. He also made modifications to the application to prevent spammers from sending unwanted messages.