Newspeak House is an independent residential college founded in 2015 to study, nurture and inspire emerging communities of practice across civil society and the public sector in the UK. more...
Study with us
Applications for our year-long flagship course Introduction to Political Technology are now open!
This year, in addition to the six residential places, we are pleased to offer six non-residential places on the course.
Course participants spend a year immersed in a wide range of communities working to change society with technology, everything from civil servants, activists, charities, journalists, to researchers.
The course is designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions.
The course has run since 2015 and has graduated 76 fellows. 2024-25 is the second year in which the course will include content led by Newspeak House’s faculty, a group with broad experience in branches of political technology practice and theory including political organising, collective behaviour, open source software, and game design.
The course entails a commitment of approximately 16 hours per week and is designed to fit around a day job.
Events
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As part of our research we offer our spaces for civic communities of practice to convene. Since opening in 2015 we have hosted over a thousand events, including lectures, meetups, hackathons, conferences, unconferences, workshops, roundtables, screenings, fundraisers, launches, and exhibitions.
Subscribe to our Event Calendar
If you’d like to host an event in our space, you can hire it outright, or if you’re convening a civic community of practice do get in touch ([email protected]) to see if it could fit into our programme.
What's On
Edward Saperia
Each week the college hosts a community dinner called Ration Club. It's open to anyone who'd like to find out more about the college and its work. To find out more or if you'd like to attend, please register.
Register ↗Join us for an evening of learning how to use no code app builders, like appsheet.com and sheet2site.com.
If you want to come and hang out and learn/mess around with no code app builders then this is the event for you!
There will be pizza & beverages provided.
Register ↗The Civic AI Observatory (civicai.uk) is a new initiative from Nesta and Newspeak House to support civic organisations as they plan and adapt to the rapidly evolving field of generative artificial intelligence.
Join us for our second Civic AI Unconference on the 24th of April, hosted at Newspeak House. An unconference is a conference without predefined topics - discussions groups are formed dynamically based on interest and relevance as the event progresses.
We strongly recommend that you skim the past issues of the Civic AI newsletter to get up to speed:
Register ↗Attention all London Prompt Engineers! Are you ready to have some fun with AI tools and make new friends? Then join us for our next prompt jam, where you can spend the evening tinkering with AI tools like ChatGPT, HeyGen, Midjourney, Stability Audio, CoPilot, and ComfyUI in a relaxed and social setting.
- bring a laptop 💻
- ticket price covers food, drink & venue costs 🍕
- subscribe to hear about future events: meetup.com/london-prompt-engineers 🎺
Join us for “Routes to Impact in Policy,” an event tailored for professionals exploring impactful careers in the realm of policy work, particularly those who are contemplating a career shift or entrance into policy.
Through a moderated panel discussion, this event will explore the nature of work within various policy fields such as the UK civil service, intergovernmental agencies, internal policy/governance in the private sector, policy entrepreneurship, innovation agencies, think tanks, and policy advocacy charities.
Register ↗We’re hosting a local elections’ results watch party / volunteer after party!
Join us from 8pm to watch the end of polling, and the beginning of the count & results pouring in.
Register ↗Join us for the launch of Ledgernomix, and play the game with us.
Ledgernomix is a game of political economy, played on a blockchain, with real money at stake.
Played in groups of 4 to 7 people over an hour or two, each game of Ledgernomix is governed by a blockchain contract. You can think of it as a self-contained model economy and model parliament.
After a brief introduction to the game, we’ll set you up in groups, and help you get started with Metamask browser extension on your laptop.
Each player stakes $5 (£4) in the game’s pot. At the end the money will be returned to the players in proportion to their in-game points. The primary way to get points is by successfully proposing changes to the rules.
Making the rules of this game is the game - in that sense it’s inspired by the game Nomic. Playing it feels similar to social deduction games like Mafia or Werewolf, with rounds of discussion and voting, shifting alliances, persuasive rhetoric, deception and trust.
After the funds are returned to the players, your group as a whole will be graded on more subjective criteria - what kind of system have you created?
Open to all - no prior experience of anything required, but if you want to play then a laptop is essential, and the stake is £4.
Register ↗Welcome to the 33rd Racket meet-up, and the second London Racket meet-up.
This is a chance for folks who are part of the Racket community (https://racket-lang.org/#community) to present their work in progress and chat in a relaxed atmosphere.
- 6:30-7pm arrive
- 7-8pm meetup
- 8-8:30pm pack up and close doors
If you’re new to Racket you can learn more on the Racket website.
Racket is…
- a general purpose programming language — a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme
- a project to explore the emerging idea of language-oriented programming - see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3127323
- a family of programming languages — variants of Racket; student languages, Typed Racket, Lazy Racket, and more
- an implementation of the Racket Language(s) – with native code compiler,
- a set of tools—for using a family of programming languages,
- a diverse community, including professionals, researchers, students and educators using Racket in diverse ways.
Please join us at the meet-up. ALL WELCOME
Join us online at https://racket.discourse.group/ or https://discord.gg/6Zq8sH5
Register ↗Join Campaign Lab for our post-local elections hack day!
What do the results tell us? Can we make any predictions about local or regional trends? What hyperlocal tools can we build for campaigners?
Post local elections, we are creating a space for progressives and technologists to come together to analyse, share knowledge, and prepare for future campaigns. From monitoring hyperlocal news to analysing results in depth, there will be plenty of interesting challenges and problems to unpack! Whether you’re a technologist interested in how you can help the progressives win or a seasoned campaigner interested in innovation, this event offers a unique opportunity to try things out and test!
All progressive technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome! All you need is to bring yourself and a laptop!
What is Campaign Lab?
Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.
Register ↗Join us for a bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.
Snacks and drinks provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop!
All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics and technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left. Everyone welcome!
You can join us remotely at this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
What is Campaign Lab?
Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.
Any questions, thoughts or ideas - do get in touch and say hi! [email protected]
Register ↗Election technologies have had their first big test of 2024: the local elections.
What did we learn? What do we need to build for the upcoming general election?
Lightning talks followed by an unconference.
This event is brought to you by The Election Tech Handbook, a collectively-made and maintained resource for technologists, designers and campaigners working on projects around the upcoming UK General Election 2024.
Register ↗Join us for the formal launch of ‘UK trade unions: Priorities for developing technological capability’ a new report by Andy McD. Twelves (Organise Lab & Newspeak House), supported by Hannah O’Rourke (Campaign Lab) and Dr M. ‘Six’ Silberman (Newspeak House).
This report will be presenting the conclusions drawn from the consultation of almost 100 shop stewards, health & safety representatives, and industrial representatives across a range of trade unions and sectors, about levels of digital training and ability in their unions, and day to day technological requirements.
This event will include a brief talk by the paper’s author, and a panel Q&A with other relevant stakeholders across the labour movement. (Full panel to be announced shortly.)
There will be an opportunity for networking and mingling afterwards. Refreshments will be provided.
If you would like the report delivered straight to your inbox, please sign up here: https://forms.gle/zpdHEdH142ELLrQZ7.
Register ↗Join us for a bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.
Snacks and drinks provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop!
All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics and technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left. Everyone welcome!
You can join us remotely at this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
What is Campaign Lab?
Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.
Any questions, thoughts or ideas - do get in touch and say hi! [email protected]
Register ↗