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 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 review our attempts at collaborative knowledge production.

​What if age brings not decline but expansion - expertise, conviction, wisdom that make us more formidable, not less? What if the anxiety we carry about ageing is culturally constructed rather than biologically inevitable?

​This workshop is for women in professional life who experience the gap between their capabilities and their visibility, for professionals working on age inclusion in organisations and public policy, and anyone building communities that challenge workplace ageism. It creates space to question the narratives about what’s supposed to happen as we grow older.

​What we will explore

​Through guided conversation, we’ll examine:

• What becomes possible when we see age as expansion rather than decline?
• How do we maintain visibility, relevance, and fearlessness in a culture that expects diminishment?

​This isn’t therapy and it isn’t a lecture. It’s an exploratory conversation among people willing to question what we’ve been told to expect - and to imagine different possibilities.

​Why this matters

​Age remains the most neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion work. While we’ve made progress on gender, race, and other protected characteristics, ageism - particularly toward women - operates quietly, systematically, and largely unchallenged.

​Your participation helps build a community of practice around age inclusion - and contributes to ongoing work rethinking how we understand ageing, authority, and professional longevity. This is how - together - we change culture.

​Why participate

​By participating in this workshop, you’ll:

• Understand that ageing is not about decline - it’s about expansion
• Connect with others challenging age-based assumptions in their work and lives
• Gain frameworks for thinking differently about age, authority, and professional longevity
• Contribute to building a community of practice around age inclusion

​About the facilitator

​After 25+ years of corporate leadership and board roles, Francesca Valli felt compelled to write about her experience of ageing purposefully.

​Francesca has led complex business transformations at global companies, serves on boards including AI startup Glia HQ, founded The Gherkin Challenge which raised close to £1.5m in aid of the NSPCC. Through deep community engagement - from building therapeutic gardens at a women’s refuge to mentoring emerging entrepreneurs - Francesca has learned that with age comes not diminishment but duty: the obligation to put life-accumulated advantages to the service of a better world. This is her aliveness.

​Her Substack publication Rethinking Age examines how fearlessness, conviction, wisdom, keep women growing into their later years formidable and visible - challenging cultural narratives that expect invisibility.

​Read Rethinking Age at: https://rethinkingage.substack.com/

This session is open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​Inspired by “shut up & write” - this is a focus hour to advance your creative content work (e.g. fellowship prototypes) - writing up research insights, shaping blog posts or explainers, polishing decks, scripting demos, editing videos, drafting updates, designing visuals… any artifact that helps you share what you’re building with the world.

​This is weekly momentum toward shipping your ideas publicly!

​How it works

• ​We’ll start with a goal-setting round.
• ​You can decide your mode - focus mode or collaborative (brainstorming or feedback)
• At the end, we’ll do a tiny check-in to share what moved forward!
• ​If you need gentle or strong accountability to publish, we’re happy to support!

Hi - this is an event by Orta Therox and Peter Steinberger. Two well respected technologists who have a strong appreciation for using Claude Code as a tool for writing production-grade software. We’re not associated with Anthropic.

​We wanted to create a space for people to be able to talk through their experiences, and understand that for some it’s hard to speak publicly about using AI / LLM tooling. Talks are not recorded, nor is there a live-stream.

This meetup will be structured as a series of lightning talks, 5-15m long with talks which start along the lines of: “I was X when Claude Code Y”

​So, “I was impressed when Claude Code figured out a bug I had been…”, “I was disappointed when Claude Code deleted my production database” etc.

​We’re looking for grounded talks about the trade-offs, places where you’ve seen usage thrive, ways you’ve helped others use it, insights from unexpected outcomes and how it has changed your perspective.

​The timing plan:

• 19:00 - People arrive
• 19:30 - Intro, COC, and talks
• 20:30 - We wrap up talks, open chat
• 22:00 - We get kicked out

​​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?