Hello World
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.
Welcome to the 2024 Cohort
We are thrilled to welcome our latest cohort of fellowship candidates for the 2024 program. They bring a wealth of experience and deep expertise, from space law and digital identity systems to parliamentary advocacy and AI-powered campaigning.
Hailing from 11 countries and collectively speaking more than 15 languages, these emerging leaders will bring a global and diverse perspective to some of our most pressing political technology challenges. Seven will be joining us as residents, immersing themselves fully in the Newspeak House environment, while eight will contribute as non-residents, ensuring a dynamic mix of perspectives and approaches. We look forward to the groundbreaking ideas, collaborations, and projects that will emerge from this exceptional group of thinkers and doers.
To find out more about our new fellowship candidates and their plans for the year: 2024.newspeak.house
To find out more about the programme itself: Introduction to Political Technology
Events
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 ↗The Leadership College for Government presents its first social for civil servants since lockdown.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
An opportunity to ask questions about the Network Development module and share your thoughts and network experiences with your peers.
Register ↗The official bi-annual London meetup for fans of the popular blog Astral Codex Ten (formerly Slate Star Codex) by American psychiatrist Scott Alexander.
If you’re reading this, you’re invited! Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
There will be light refreshments and an ongoing unconference. Please register if you plan to go, because ACX has many fans in London and we need to know how many people are coming. If it is fully booked you won’t be able to enter without a ticket.
To be notified of future meetups you should subscribe to ACX London, and also you might want to check out London Rationalish and Effective Altruism UK.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 1-2
- Josh Dzieza, ‘Prime and Punishment: Dirty Dealing in the $175 Billion Amazon Marketplace’, The Verge, 2018
- Molly Fischer, ‘Sarah Schulman’s Good Conflict’, The Cut, 2020
- Shawna Potter, Making Spaces Safer, AK Press, 2019, Chs. 1, 6
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
The first seminar of the Public Sector Innovation module! We will discuss what innovation in the public sector means and what it looks like, how it might apply to other modules, and discuss which case studies might be most relevant to our work in the future.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
What is Service Design? Who invented it? Does it really exist in the wild?!
We’ll explore the history of digital design movements, from the emergence of User Centred Design, through the agile revolution, to the service organisation. We will touch on the tools of the trade, and discuss the perils of fetishising design artefacts.
Reading:
- Good Services
- This is Service Design Doing
- The Service Organisation
- Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns
Democracy is an extremely saturated word. Different people meant different things. Democracy in ancient Athens was completely different than today yet we use the same word to refer to both these things. Conservatives, leftists, liberals, anarchists, communists; they all talk about democracy yet they usually mean different things. Join us in a deep yet short dive into all the different theories of democracy and how each one compares to the rest.
This is the second lecture of a 3-session course convened by Shoshin College, an experimental learning co‑operative in London, England. Please read more about us and our philosophy on our website (https://shoshincollege.org/) and our Substack (https://shoshincollege.substack.com/).
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
How do you deal with knowledge management? How do you know things?
What type of data do you need to track, access, search, store, process, output? Papers, citations, bookmarks, books, movies to watch? How does your system support you in your endeavours (or fight you?)?
Is it even worth organising knowledge when information is a search away, or can be reconstructed by AI? What purposes might a knowledge management system serve in this context?’
Where does your knowledge go? In which outputs? Can people excited by your work find you and subscribe to you?
Register ↗Spend a day working alongside other organisations working on UK democratic reform
Since March 2022 we’ve organised democracy co-working days to help bring together individuals and organisations within the UK democracy space - with more than 50 organisations joining us across our previous events, including Democracy Classroom, Civic Power Fund, Fair Vote UK, Nesta, Sortition Foundation, I Have A Voice, Radix Big Tent, Public Interest News Foundation, Unlock Democracy, Zero Hour and so many more!
So if you’re working on a democracy project or organisation, or just keen to meet people that do, come along and join us for a coworking day on the 27th March.
Feel free to drop in at any part of the coworking day, for all of it or just part of it - the more the merrier. We’ll be putting on tea & coffee, snacks and refreshments.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at [email protected]
Democracy Network are a network of people and organisations working on issues of power, democracy and voice throughout the UK. We aim to connect and work with others to build a stronger democracy fit for the 21st century. We do this through connecting people and supporting collaboration, increasing knowledge, skills and resources, and coordinating influencing strategies and action. Join the network here.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 3-4
- Elinor Ostrom, ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems,’ American Economic Review, 2010
- Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, Introduction & Ch. 1
- Edward Hallowell, ‘The human moment at work’, Harvard Business Review, 1999
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! 🙂
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.
Join remotely at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
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 ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
The first session of the Future Crafting module, where we will talk about real-world experiments in social innovation.
Register ↗It’s over 10 years since we started Redecentralize.org to explore and advocate for a more accountable, resilient and decentralised web and net.
In that time we’ve seen big tech platforms enshittify (and got this word for it now), we’ve seen the crypto-currency hype come and go, we’ve seen the political power of platforms become a mainstream worry.
Meanwhile decentralisation has snowballed into a whole scene, and some great alternatives have flourished. The fediverse appeared, new protocols such as Matrix and IPFS developed, and CRDTs gave rise to local-first software. Even in established institutions, open source is slowly becoming the new normal, and some legislation we wanted (e.g. on data protection and interoperability) is happening.
Join the Redecentralize team Francis, Ira and Gerben for a drink to catch up, compare notes, look back and wonder where it (and we!) will all go next.
Register ↗Democracy is an extremely saturated word. Different people meant different things. Democracy in ancient Athens was completely different than today yet we use the same word to refer to both these things. Conservatives, leftists, liberals, anarchists, communists; they all talk about democracy yet they usually mean different things. Join us in a deep yet short dive into all the different theories of democracy and how each one compares to the rest.
This is the third and final lecture of a 3-session course convened by Shoshin College, an experimental learning co‑operative in London, England. Please read more about us and our philosophy on our website (https://shoshincollege.org/) and our Substack (https://shoshincollege.substack.com/).
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
A workshop for developing your network development and field building practice.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 3-4
- Elinor Ostrom, ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems,’ American Economic Review, 2010
- Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, Introduction & Ch. 1
- Edward Hallowell, ‘The human moment at work’, Harvard Business Review, 1999
Open source licensing might seem straightforward from afar. One can choose to allow people to use their software for free or with a fee or with any limitations they want. But, unsurprisingly, the reality is much more complex.
In this event Theodore Keloglou will talk about all the different licenses that exist in the realm of open source software and how each one differs.
We’ll mainly talk about MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL (and variations), MPL and the case studies of Elasticsearch and Redis, which have caused quite a bit of drama the last few years.
Presentation link for the agog attendee:\ https://sirodoht.github.io/open-source-licenses-presentation
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Most political organising happens in group chats. Yet little attention is paid to how to constructively manage them. How do we managed these online spaces productively to produce actual outcomes? What are the practical strategies you can use to manage them? What difference does the platform make? Join this seminar to discover practical strategies for managing group chats effectively and explore what works and what doesn’t.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 3-4
- Elinor Ostrom, ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems,’ American Economic Review, 2010
- Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, Introduction & Ch. 1
- Edward Hallowell, ‘The human moment at work’, Harvard Business Review, 1999
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! 🙂
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.
Join remotely at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
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 ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 5-6
- Felicity Edwards and Michael Gibeau, ‘Engaging people in meaningful problem solving,’ Conservation Biology, 2013
- Patricia Shaw, Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, Routledge, 2002, Series Preface & Ch. 1
- Charles Lindblom, ‘The science of “muddling through”,’ Public Administration Review, 1959
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
How do you know things? What do you track, access, search, store, process, output? How does your system support you in your endeavours (or fight you?)? Where does your knowledge go? In which outputs? Can people find you and subscribe to you? Is it even worth organising knowledge when information is a search away, or can be reconstructed by AI? What purposes might a knowledge management system serve in this context?
In this session, we will review results from the first session, and see how they relate to your research.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 5-6
- Felicity Edwards and Michael Gibeau, ‘Engaging people in meaningful problem solving,’ Conservation Biology, 2013
- Patricia Shaw, Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, Routledge, 2002, Series Preface & Ch. 1
- Charles Lindblom, ‘The science of “muddling through”,’ Public Administration Review, 1959
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! 🙂
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.
Join remotely at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
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 ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
A workshop for developing your network development and field building practice.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 5-6
- Felicity Edwards and Michael Gibeau, ‘Engaging people in meaningful problem solving,’ Conservation Biology, 2013
- Patricia Shaw, Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change, Routledge, 2002, Series Preface & Ch. 1
- Charles Lindblom, ‘The science of “muddling through”,’ Public Administration Review, 1959
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.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Join us for an interactive session where we’ll explore and map the UK’s political landscape. This workshop will cover key actors, data sources, mechanisms, and points of influence within the UK political system. Participants will also gain insights into available data sources that shape political dynamics.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Exploring how institutions work, some difficulties that arise in them, how they change, and how we each can try to participate constructively in them.
Readings:
- Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, and Matthew Wood, Making Policy in a Complex World, Cambridge University Press, 2019, Chs. 3-4
- Elinor Ostrom, ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems,’ American Economic Review, 2010
- Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, Introduction & Ch. 1
- Edward Hallowell, ‘The human moment at work’, Harvard Business Review, 1999
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! 🙂
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.
Join remotely at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
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 ↗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 discuss results from the previous session, including challenges of interacting with others’ systems and benefits of networked knowledge discovery.
Register ↗This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
In this hack night, we’ll explore the inner workings of an MP’s office, focusing on how its processes operate and identifying opportunities where technology can streamline and improve efficiency. This session will provide practical insights into the daily functions of an MP’s office, with a forward-looking view on innovation.
Register ↗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’ll dive into the world of political technology, exploring what makes certain tools effective. We’ll examine three key campaign technologies, discussing their successes and weaknesses and the reasons behind them. We’ll also cover how to identify opportunities for innovation within campaign processes. This is a great opportunity to understand what works in political tech and how innovation shapes the future of campaigning.
Register ↗