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.

​Part of the Introduction to Political Technology programme at Newspeak House, open to faculty and current fellowship candidates only.

​In this guest seminar, Harry Burdon will discuss how to design systems to allocate scarce resources, as well as the behaviour, incentives, and institutions found in such systems.

​He will outline a series of economic frameworks for understanding these situations, using the governance challenges encountered in the fellowship as case studies.

​The session will cover practical, actionable models that can be implemented by the cohort, such as tradeable permits, options, quotas, queues, auctions, and mandates, and an illustration for how these same concepts scale to bigger, real-world issues. He will also discuss design and application of social welfare functions.

​Harry Burdon is an economist with degrees from The London School of Economics (LSE) and University College London (UCL) and a decade of experience applying economic and statistical analysis in legal disputes and issues of competition between firms.

​He specialises in data analysis and econometrics.

​RightsCon was abruptly cancelled by the Zambian government (or well, China). With it, a space for cross-border organizing and solidarity vanished. That damage cannot be undone. But instead of staring at our screens in quiet desperation, we’re gathering in person for an afternoon of discussions about human rights in the digital age.

What to expect?

• We’ll host an unconference, meaning we will all set the agenda together
• Talks, discussions and other contributions focused on human rights in the digital age

Will there be snacks? Yes, but please bring more!
Will there be drinks after? Also yes, for those who’d like to continue talking.

What not to expect?

We organized this in about 24 hours, so perhaps not expect anything that would take more than a week to organize!

This session is open to Newspeak House faculty, fellows, and fellowship candidates only.

​A space for fellowship candidates to co-work on their prototypes together.

​Drawing room: Co-working and peer learning.

​Classroom: Workshops TBC - talk to Fatima if there’s a topic of interest or if you’d like to run one.

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

​Who owns your voice? And more specifically, the language you speak?

​The problem: small language communities are poorly represented on the internet. Voice assistants do not support smaller languages, neither do most websites or translation tools.

​To remedy this, various open source initiatives allow communities to upload their spoken language, which can then serve as training data for AI systems. However, while such open source systems enable the survival of small languages, they potentially also allow for their exploitation of small languages by bigger platforms.

​In this interactive session (yes, there will be role playing) we’ll explore the different complications of making language data openly available. We’ll also delve into different governance models and safeguards that might help communities retain control.

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.

​Running a community is harder than it looks. The tools we rely on are expensive, hostile, fragmented, or simply not built with organisers in mind. Meetup.com frustrates your members with constant upsells. Slack prices you out once you grow. Sponsorship and money management have no obvious starting point. Speakers fall through the cracks. New members struggle to find you in the first place.

​Most community organisers are quietly hacking around all of this, building their own systems, stitching together open source tools, sharing spreadsheets, losing institutional knowledge every time a volunteer moves on.

​This hack day is for people who want to fix that together.

​We’re bringing together community organisers, developers, and platform builders for a day of shared problem-solving and hands-on building at Newspeak House. The scope is the full community infrastructure stack: event management, promotion and discoverability, communications, member onboarding, speaker pipelines, sponsorship handling, finances, interoperability between tools, and more.

​The format is open. We’ll map the problem space together, form teams around the most compelling ideas, and spend the day building stuff.

​You can change projects, merge with another team, or start something new at any point.

​If you organise a meetup, run an online community, or build tools for people who do, this day is for you.

​Brought to you by the organisers of PyData London, AI Signals, notanother.pizza, and more.

A special series of events to open different conversations about AI, tech, and their impact on our lives.

We’ll use the typical THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS (TEiP) method of getting into great conversations: small group discussions, tiny imaginary stories, lots of questions, and many opportunities to shuffle groups.

19:00 - Arrive, organise into small groups (3-4), have a look at the thought experiments (announced on the day of the event)
19:15 - Introduction to the event
19:20 - First rotation begins: talk about the first thought experiment, but feel free to veer off topic and pursue new avenues of conversation
19:45 - Optional reshuffle: swap groups, move on to the second thought experiment
20:15 - Optional reshuffle: swap groups, move on to the third thought experiment
20:45 - Wrap up, votes to discern general views of the room; info about upcoming events; feedback/requests for future meetups
21:00 - Meetup ‘ends’, but feel free to carry on conversations.
22:00 - Close

​Ed Lewis Maklouf presents The Majority Myth: How voting really works, why it is failing and how we can fix it, challenging one of modern politics’ most persistent assumptions: that voting is rational. Starting with the evolution of voting in Animal herds, rather than in Athens, the book then breaks down the social psychology of ritualised choice. Maklouf proposes an updated description of how voting functions: using ritual and randomness to change minds, generate acceptance, and create cohesion. The choice itself is a sideshow.

​Maklouf spent years researching voting systems and legitimacy, studying group communication and collective decision-making at Stanford, founding a democracy technology startup, and travelling the world to observe indigenous approaches to consensus. The Majority Myth emerges from that journey with an unusual optimism: if we are willing to redesign how we decide, we shift how we experience politics and open up new possibilities for collective agreement.

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.

What is a healthy organisation?

• How would you know one if you saw it?
• Are there different indicators for different types of organisation (e.g., workplace, school, volunteer project)?
• What are some ways organisations you have participated in (or heard about) have been unhealthy — or notably healthy?
• How did this ‘unhealthiness’ affect you, others, and/or the organisation’s ability to do whatever it was (nominally) trying to do?
• Have you seen or heard of organisations ‘getting better’? How?
• How can individuals &/or small groups contribute to organisations ‘getting better’?
• What role does/can/might leadership play in organisations being or staying ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘getting better’ or ‘getting worse’?
  • Possibly for future discussion: What is ‘good leadership’?
• What is the relationship between ‘organisational health’ and the structure of organisations?
  • Does greater hierarchy increase the risk of and organisation becoming unhealthy?
  • Do we know examples of less- or non-hierarchical organisations?
  • Are they healthier than more hierarchical ones?

Readings you may enjoy

• Monica Worline and Jane Dutton, Awakening Compassion at Work
  • Related: from the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (E. Seppälä et al., eds., 2017)
    • Worline and Dutton, ‘How Leaders Shape Compassion Processes in Organizations’
    • D. Martin and Y. Heineberg, ‘Social Dominance and Leadership: The Mediational Effect of Compassion’
• M. Soffia et al., Work, Employment and Society, 2021, ‘Alienation is not “bullshit”: an empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs’
  • ‘we find that several factors related to th[e] concept [of workplace alienation] are indeed strongly associated with the degree to which an individual feels their job is useful. These factors include whether one’s managers are respectful, supportive, listen to workers and provide them with enough time to do a good job along with opportunities for participation and using their own ideas’
• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
• Ajeesh & Joseph 2025, ‘The compassion illusion: Can artificial empathy ever be emotionally authentic?’, Frontiers in Psychology 16
• Pugh 2024, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, Princeton University Press
  • Podcast of book talk
  • Video of book talk
• Lie-Panis 2026, ‘Guarding the guardians: good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. How do they work?’, Aeon
• More from Aeon:
  • Chayes 2022, ‘The Midas Disease — Corruption is a truly global crisis and the wealth addiction that feeds it is hiding in plain sight’, Aeon
  • Sadedin 2015, ‘Natural police — Seen through game theory, cancer and police corruption are pretty much the same thing. And for one of them, there’s a cure’, Aeon
• Sarah Meiklejohn and George Danezis, ‘Smart contracts beyond the age of innocence’, Jun 2016, on the 2016 DAO hack and fork (presented at Newspeak House 15 Mar 2026) (further background)

This session is open to Newspeak House faculty, fellows, and fellowship candidates only.

​A space for fellowship candidates to co-work on their prototypes together.

​Drawing room: Co-working and peer learning.

​Classroom: Workshops TBC - talk to Fatima if there’s a topic of interest or if you’d like to run one.

​Please join us for an evening of exciting and varied lightning talks from the Effective Altruism Tech London community!

Talks will be under 5 minutes, with the time limit being strictly enforced by gong. Topics should be related to Effective Altruism or tech, ideally both. If you’re interested in giving one then please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/n7A6kwUCW7kEKBzS9

Please have a low bar for signing up, Jonny’s talk is going to be “is Cause X finding aliens”, and surely you can do better than that. Also a good opportunity to warm up for EAG.

19:00 - doors open
​19:30 - talks begin
​20:30 - mingle
​22:00 - event ends

This session is open to Newspeak House faculty, fellows, and fellowship candidates only.

​A space for fellowship candidates to co-work on their prototypes together.

​Drawing room: Co-working and peer learning.

​Classroom: Workshops TBC - talk to Fatima if there’s a topic of interest or if you’d like to run one.