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.

​​This session is part of the How to Think about Tech? The Case of ‘AI Safety’ study group† initiated by some of the fellow candidates of the 2025/2026 Introduction to Political Technology (https://newspeak.house/study-with-us) course. It is open only to Newspeak House faculty and fellowship candidates.

​If the last session discussed framing ‘AI safety’ as a technical domain that should be equally preoccupied with short-term risks and more pragmatic ‘accidents’, in this session, we will explore some foundational concepts as ‘charter myths’. In anthropology, charter myths are stories that ground a society’s practices, beliefs, and institutions in a foundational narrative. The AI Safety field is defined by a powerful set of concepts, such as the ‘alignment problem’, ‘superintelligence’, ‘instrumental convergence’, and ‘existential risk’. The circulation of these concepts do not simply state a (future) fact, but create a new political reality, elevating the community’s core concern to the highest level of global governance and increasing its cultural and financial capital.

​Recommended readings:

• ​Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom
• ​Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control - Stuart J. Russell
• ​If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies - Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
• ​LessWrong blog: https://www.lesswrong.com/

​Please come prepared to share your ideas by considering questions like these: How do concepts like ‘alignment’, ‘superintelligence’, ‘instrumental convergence’ or ‘existential risk’ function to build a community? How do they define who is an ‘insider’ and who is an ‘outsider’? What kind of story do these texts tell? What is the emotional resonance of these metaphors? What feelings (e.g., urgency, fear, importance, intellectual superiority) do they seem designed to evoke? How do these concepts create a ‘new political reality’? How do they justify specific actions, funding priorities, or claims to authority? And, of course, bring your own questions.

​†The study group aims to map and explore how ideas of ‘AI safety’ are made, circulated, and acted upon. The object of study is not the technical feasibility of artificial intelligence safety ideas or the objective probability of its risks but rather the social field of ‘AI Safety’ itself (as an epistemic community, its institutions, its system of beliefs, and its power structures). We analyze the community’s texts and concepts as socio-cultural artifacts while trying to develop our own thinking about how ‘responsible AI’ can be implemented in practice.

This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​Most UK citizens will have interacted with a gov.uk website, but few are aware of the massive structural changes that enabled the UK’s service digitisation process.

​The Government Digital Service is one of the most surprising digital success stories of the last twenty years. Often emulated by other national governments, the GDS approach promised to prevent the big IT failures of the past, where third party suppliers overcharged and under-delivered for decades.

​Why and how was the Government Service Standard made in the first place? Did it lead to unintended consequences? And is it still fit for purpose?

​Reading:

• A GDS Story
• A brief history of the Service Standard
• Setting the standard: A short history of the Government Service Standard
• Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
• Service Manual
• The Post Office Horizon scandal through a service design lens
• Are there too many generalists in the civil service?

​Novels form the cornerstone of the UK’s creative industries - one of the finest jewels in the UK’s cultural and economic life. They provide the basis for innumerable films, television series, musical scores, theatre productions and much more. However, the rise of generative AI has cast unprecedented shifts and uncertainty onto the literary creatives, publishers and agents behind the novels so central to the UK’s identity, education, culture, entertainment, and wellbeing.

​Dr Clementine Collett, a fellow at Cambridge University, has recently completed a research project on the impact of generative AI on the novel, working with hundreds of novelists, publishers, and literary agents across the country for the last year to investigate the impact of AI on their work. In late November, she’ll be releasing a report titled ‘The Impact of Generative AI on the Novel’. The report presents findings on how novelists and publishers are using AI, how they are being impacted socially and economically, and how the novel form itself is changing. The report also provides policy recommendations around copyright, licensing and transparency, forming a vital and urgent call for the UK to celebrate and sustain the creative industries.

​Join us at this launch reception to hear Clemi and others from government, trade unions and academia outline some of her findings, think about policy impacts, and enjoy a drink or two!

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​Dr Six Silberman leads us in exploring the complex interplay between institutions and organisations; humans; and technologies.

The subject of this fourth seminar is TBC!

​​​​​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.

Join us for our 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 are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​​What does it mean to “work in the open”? What are digital and knowledge commons? How does co-production collide with personal preferences and design affordances?

​​In this session we’ll attempt to kickstart knowledge co-production within the cohort and beyond.

The British public is overwhelmingly in favour of taking water into public ownership. But what should public ownership mean in the 21st century? What are the different ways that water could be owned and run in the common interest?

This event, co-hosted by Compass, Abundance, Common Wealth and We Own It, will bring together the leaders of the water movement in the UK - including trade union staff and reps, members of local, regional, and national government, grassroots organisers, national campaigners, and researchers from parties and public bodies.

Hearing from leaders of water companies and movements from across Europe, we will imagine and discuss what an alternative, publicly accountable model for England’s water could look like.

Our speakers include:

• Benjamin Gestin, Directeur Géneral of Eau De Paris
• Terrassa Water Observatory (OAT), the citizen participatory body fostering democratic governance of the water supply in Terrassa, Spain (TBC)
• The Thessaloniki Kinissi 136, a campaign group organising for the social management and ownership of water in Thessaloniki, Greece (TBC)
• A short contribution from the conveners of the event: Compass, Abundance, Common Wealth and We Own It

This session will include the core communciation skills associated with conflict management. These skills are frequently known as “non-violent communciation” and I teach a particularly strict practice following on Community Mediation Maryland. This session will focus on how you can use these skills in your own conversations.

Part of a five part series on Negotiation & Conflict Management by Professor Joshua Becker, who is a practicing mediator and negotiation coach and teaches negotiation in the MBA at UCL.

Because each session builds on the previous session, and because space is limited, I am asking attendees to commit to attending all 5 sessions.

​This session is open to the public. A maximum of 10 students will be accepted. It is part of the course Introduction to Political Technology at Newspeak House, and so priority will be given to faculty, fellowship candidates, and fellows.

Please see the registration page for more information.

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

During this workshop we will explore the complexities of governing health, specifically patient’s medical records. We will delve into real-world examples where the public good (e.g. finding a cure to a disease) is at odds with the privacy rights of individual patients.

Reading:

• ​OECD Report on facilitating secondary use of health data to improve public health outcomes
• Use of Biobank UK and 23AndMe data to search for a “gay gene”
• Wired - How Earnest Research Into Gay Genetics Went Wrong

Anouk Ruhaak is a data governance expert, helping organizations and communities design and implement models that put people first, from data trusts to data commons. She is chair of Stichting Data Bescherming Nederland (SDBN), a foundation using strategic litigation to fight for privacy rights, currently taking legal action against companies like X, Amazon, and Adobe.

She has been a Senior Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, a Fellow at AlgorithmWatch, a Visiting Scholar at the Ostrom Workshop, a political economist, a data journalist, a software developer, and a fellow of Newspeak House.

​To mark our first decade, Newspeak House is hosting a 10th Anniversary Christmas Party: an evening to gather our community, reconnect with old friends, meet new faces, and celebrate everything this strange experiment has become.

Newspeak House 10th Anniversary: a decade of Political Technology

The tenth anniversary of Newspeak House marks a decade shaped by profound political and technological change.

Smartphones. Group chats. Attention algorithms. Crowdfunding. Language models. Cryptocurrencies. Collaborative documents. Streaming. Emoji reacts. Privacy laws. The gig economy. Six UK elections. Brexit. Covid. Momentum. Ukraine. Reform. Gaza. Trump (twice). Cambridge Analytica. The birth and collapse of Buzzfeed, Vice, Gawker. Wikidata from zero to a hundred million items.

In that time Newspeak House has hosted thousands of events, launched twenty books, and graduated over a hundred fellows, many now in senior positions across a spectrum of key institutions.

We have supported fledgling movements that are now part of the furniture: impact evaluation, open data, service design, election tech, existential risk, community strategy, campaign innovation, decentralised social media, digital democracy, cognitive security, prediction markets, data journalism, and many more.

Furthermore, Newspeak House has become home for the London College of Political Technology, offering a formal one year programme with a homegrown faculty and original curriculum, with a dedicated classroom and a majority of non-resident students.

​To mark our first decade, Newspeak House is hosting a 10th Anniversary Christmas Party: an evening to gather our community, reconnect with old friends, meet new faces, and celebrate everything this strange experiment has become.

Fundraiser: for the next ten years

If you don’t support your civic institutions, they go away. As well as a conference and celebration, this event is also a fundraiser to secure the future of the college and its role as a community space.

Newspeak House has weathered a series of serious challenges, not least the pandemic and its aftermath. This event is to celebrate overcoming those challenges, becoming one of the very few autonomous and independent third spaces to still be opening its doors. However, these challenges have demolished financial reserves that are difficult to rebuild beyond the college’s normal activities.

​Tickets are pay-what-you-can. If money is tight, please just come, though if you are in a position to do so and you’ve appreciated the free events we’ve hosted over the past decade, please give generously: this will still be an important fundraiser to help us keep going.

If you’ve enjoyed the programming and facilitation of Newspeak House over the last ten years, now is the time to show your support. If you can’t attend the event, you can still donate or become a member!

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House. It is primarily for faculty and fellowship candidates to start with, but if you don’t meet those criteria and are particularly interested do get in touch!

An exploration of all the different skills involved in delivering a tech project, how that can be split among a team, and how to make sure they are all kept in mind.

• What are the key outcomes you’re looking for?
• What hats are needed to achieve them?
• How do you fit it all together?

Reading: https://squirrelsquadron.com/events/2025/05-29-product-managers

This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​In this session we will examine a political technology project with an existing evaluation, working through how it was designed, what evidence it produced, whether that evidence convincingly demonstrated impact, and what lessons can be drawn for future work.

​By dissecting a concrete case, we will draw out lessons on both good practice and common mistakes, and consider how evaluation choices shape the trajectory of projects that seek to create change.

​Andreas Varotsis is a data scientist and AI engineer who works to improve operational delivery and services across government using technology, data, and evidence. He’s spent the previous decade in various roles in central government and front-line delivery, including the Metropolitan Police Service, the data-science team of 10 Downing Street, and the Incubator for AI.

​He works to support a range of cross-government communities, including Evidence House, which works to improve the use of data and IT in government, and the Society of Evidence Based Policing, which champions research to enhance policing practices and reduce crime.

​High Impact Engineers is a community of engineers working to improve the world in measurable ways.

​Effective Altruism Tech London is a community of 400 software engineers, product designers, founders dedicated to having impactful careers.

​Are you a Master’s, PhD or Post-Doc in a technical field, wondering how you could use your skills for good?

​Are you an engineering professional wanting to supercharge your impact?

​Then come along to the High Impact Engineers re-launch party on the 17th November.

​Co-hosted by EA Tech London at Newspeak House, with guests from the Shrimp Welfare Project and Amodo Design, this isn’t one to miss!

​Approximate schedule:

​19:00 - Doors Open
20:00 - High Impact Engineering use case: Amodo Design x Shrimp Welfare Project on using engineering to improve lives of the most farmed animal.
21:00 - Mingling + Other surprise events
22:00 - Close + Pub trip

Come along for some light snacks, drinks, and invigorating conversations on high impact engineering.

This session will apply the principles taught in Week 4 to the art of facilitation. You will have the opportunity to practice facilitating somebody else’s conversation.

Part of a five part series on Negotiation & Conflict Management by Professor Joshua Becker, who is a practicing mediator and negotiation coach and teaches negotiation in the MBA at UCL.

Because each session builds on the previous session, and because space is limited, I am asking attendees to commit to attending all 5 sessions.

​This session is open to the public. A maximum of 10 students will be accepted. It is part of the course Introduction to Political Technology at Newspeak House, and so priority will be given to faculty, fellowship candidates, and fellows.

Please see the registration page for more information.

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

A facilitated session to help the 2025 Cohort reflect on the progress of their group governance activities so far, and make plans for how they can be improved going forwards.

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​At the close of the autumn term, the faculty convene to consolidate insights and align on priorities. Lunch provided!

​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House. It is primarily for faculty and fellowship candidates to start with, but if you don’t meet those criteria and are particularly interested do get in touch!

What’s the point of a manager?

• Group brainstorming
• Consideration of organisation vs authority in management
• EAFP vs LBYL - proposals not problems

Do we need clarity?

• RACI, and how you’d apply it in practice
• KPIs/OKRs

Do we need documentation?

• What’s documentation for, and how long does it last?
• Minimum viable documentation
• ADRs

Reading

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix
• “Reinventing Organisations” by Laloux
• https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership

​​​​​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.

Join us for our 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 are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​​This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

This foundational lecture explores how groups of humans can exhibit emergent behaviors and intelligence that transcend what any individual could achieve alone. Drawing from neuroscience, complexity science, and social psychology, we’ll examine the mechanisms that enable collective action and decision-making. We will cover:

• ​Why the collective? going beyond the individual brain
• ​Emergence in social systems: The scientific principles behind how simple interactions between individuals give rise to complex collective behaviors - from flocking patterns to social movements
• ​Collective Intelligence: When and why groups outperform individuals, exploring the conditions that foster collective problem-solving versus groupthink and social contagion
• ​Social Technologies as Cognitive Extensions: How tools, rituals, institutions, and digital platforms extend our collective cognitive capacity and enable coordination at scale

​Key Question: What transforms a collection of individuals into a genuinely collective intelligence capable of solving problems no individual could tackle alone?