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
-31d91b5eeaca31ebe4bb1764864ec0b939f2ae7ce37c4d28d542260d26d0dd02.jpg){kind=spacer}
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 ↗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 ↗Qualia Research Institute is non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings. This is an unofficial informal meetup for the community around QRI in London.
Asher Soryl (AsherSoryl.com; @aaarataki on twitter) is a PhD candidate researching wild animal well-being & animal sentience. He’s visiting London for a couple of days — and this is our chance to hang out with him. Asher will give a 30-minute talk titled “The ‘Hard Problem’ of Valence: Efforts to Date and Why More Research is Needed”. Then we will socialise for a few hours.
The talk will be based on the paper Asher co-authored with Chris Percy and Andrés Gómez Emilsson. The ‘hard problem’ of valence: why do some experiences feel better or worse than others, and what mechanism(s) might ground such differences in perceived affect? Asher will collate 11 main variants of solution across four categories so far: algorithmic, low-level physical features, high-level physical features, and non-physical phenomena.
Note: this meetup is going to happen on the first floor of Newspeak House (one level above the hall where QRI community meetups usually happen) — expect cozier vibes and more relaxed atmosphere.
Please bring your own drinks and snacks.
- 18:00: Meetup starts. Socializing.
- 19:00: Asher gives a talk on his most recent paper, Q&A
- 19:30 till late: hang out and socialise
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 ↗Many of the highest-impact people in history have been communicators and advocates of one kind or another. Communicating ideas can have a disproportionately large impact on solving problems, whether through social advocacy, becoming a public intellectual or working in marketing and public relations to spread important ideas.
By building up skills for communicating ideas, you may find yourself in a position that inspires many others to accomplish far greater good than you could achieve alone. This event is for anyone who is interested in pursuing impactful roles in communications and would like to hear from others who are in similar paths.
Speakers:
- Anna Gordon, Reporter at TIME
- Jack Hancock-Fairs, Online Creator at Humane Hancock
Agenda:
- 6.30pm: Arrival and networking
- 7pm: Talks begin
- 8pm: Q&A and networking
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 ↗Psocial is a community creating positive change in the world through the support of psychedelic healthcare, research and education.
Unlike traditional conferences, an unconference is a participant-oriented meeting where the attendees decide on the agenda, discussions topics, and workshops.
At this event we will discuss, debate and try to find practical solutions for the wider integration of psychedelics in healthcare around the world.
Food and drinks will be provided and there will be the usual informal psocialising post-unconference activities.
To register for this event, you will need the password “NEWSPEAK”.
Register ↗Happy 10th birthday Founders and Coders!
Join us to celebrate this milestone with stories, laughs, reunions, speed FAC networking and cake 🎂
We CANNOT wait to welcome you all to celebrate 10 years of inclusive, accessible tech education. Here’s to 10 more years!
Register ↗A monthly London-based meetup for members of the rationalist diaspora. The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement.
You don’t have to identify as a rationalist to attend: basically, if you think we seem like interesting people you’d like to hang out with, welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited.
Our reading list for this time is:
- An Alien God (https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Alien-God)
- On Puberty, Identity, and Sex (https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/on-puberty-identity-and-sex)
We’ll start to discuss these around 3. If you have articles you want to suggest for future readings, you can do that at https://redd.it/v3646u.
Register ↗Interested in understanding the differences between the various ways open source (and non-open-source) software is licensed? Great! Come to this event!
There has recently (eg. Elasticsearch and Redis cases) been a resurgence of discussion on how we license and how we can fairly license software we create — which is people’s work.
We’ll talk about the cases of Elasticsearch and Redis but also we’ll explore the history of licenses and compare the most popular licenses, eg. MIT, Apache, GPL family, et al.
Come to learn and reflect, to think and discuss!
- 6:30 Hellos
- 7:00 Presentation
- 7:30 Q&A and Discussion
- 8:30 Goodbyes
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 ↗In this session, we’ll look at what makes an effective political system. From feudalism and authoritarianism to direct and representative democracy.
Participants are invited to bring their own ideas as to how society should be organised and we’ll discuss the virtues and failings of each.
This event takes as its premise the evident failure of our political system. We’ve inherited a medieval democracy, too inefficient and corrupt to organise our complex reality. Bound by bureaucracy, we don’t build anything, or believe anything. We squander our collective potential and look to the gutter, not the stars.
What will succeed this failed state?
Register ↗Would you like to participate in the AI, Animals, and Digital Minds Conference sort of in person?
Join others at Newspeak House for a livestreaming of the conference and stay for dinner with the in-person attendees who will come over an join around 7pm.
- 10:00 - 10:30: Arrival
- 10:30 - 10:45: Welcome and Introduction
- 12:15 - 13:15: Lunch on your own
- 19:00 - 21:00: Dinner provided and casual networking
See speaker information.
Drinks and food will not be provided until dinner. There are many restaurants and shops in walking distance.
This will be followed by a retreat the following 2 days at Newspeak House.
Interested in getting more involved with the animal advocacy movement? Join the Hive Slack.
Register ↗Network with others who are interested in advancing the field of how to steer AI to benefit Animals and Digital Minds.
Join us at Newspeak House for 2 days of an unconference. Participants will be able to create their own topics of discussion or do freeform networking throughout the event.
Many of the speakers from the conference the day before will be in attendance to further discuss their work.
Light drinks and snacks will be provided throughout the day. There are many restaurants and shops in walking distance for meals.
See the more detailed guide here.
Interested in getting more involved with the animal advocacy movement? Join the Hive Slack.
Register ↗