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.

Learn the fundamentals of extracting data from the web. We’ll start with how the web actually works — HTTP requests, responses, status codes, and headers — then move into hands-on scraping with the Requests library for simple, fast data retrieval, along with tools like lxml and beautifulsoup for parsing HTML.

​From there, we’ll tackle dynamic, JavaScript-heavy sites using browser automation tools like Playwright. Finally, we’ll explore the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), the lower-level interface that powers these tools, and how you can use it directly for fine-grained control over browser behavior, network interception, and stealthier scraping.

​No prior scraping experience required — just bring a laptop and some curiosity.

A book club dedicated to There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, with the author qntm joining us in person.

​The evening will open with an interview with the author, followed by breakout discussions where we unpack the book & the technology in it together in small groups.

​Come curious (and hungry for pizza).

​​​​​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.

​Join us for the inaugural Journalism Technology London Meetup, first of a series of events aimed at building a community of journalists, technologists, and technical journalists.

​London has lacked a space for kindred minds to explore opportunities for technology to strengthen the journalism sector itself. With the breadth of expertise and enthusiasm in the city this feels like a wasted opportunity - one we’d like to change.

19:00 - Doors open
19:15 - Light dinner
19:45 - Short talks
> Frederick O’Brien: introducing Journalism Technology London
> Chloe Kirton: https://www.coverdrop.org
> Ændra Rininsland: https://atproto.com
20:15 - World café (optional)
21:45 - Wrap up
22:00 - Close, go to pub

Should we focus our giving on providing tangible relief for those suffering today, or on stopping AI catastrophe?

​Join us for a debate between two people working hard to make the world a better place on opposite sides of this question.

​Joey Savoie, founder of Ambitious Impact, arguing for prioritising immediate relief to humans and animals now.

​Sam Watts from Lakera AI Making the case for safeguarding the long-term future.

​They will share their perspectives, challenge each other, and take your questions.

​Expect a lively discussion and thoughtful conversation with others who care deeply about maximising the impact of their donations. Light snacks and drinks provided.

​We hope to see you there!

​The London Effective Giving Community is part of a growing global movement of over 10,000 people giving a meaningful portion of their income to high-impact nonprofits. We pool our donations to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Many of us have taken the 🔸10% Pledge, the 🔹Trial Pledge, or the 1% Pledge. We also warmly welcome those seriously exploring Effective Giving as a way to deepen their impact.

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

This lecture explores real-world experiments in social innovation. We will discuss prefiguration, transfer cultures, communes, and examples of social experimentation.

welcome to the 17th edition of the London Feeling of Computing meetup! ​formerly known as Future of Coding

​computer feeling party 🪩

​​let’s visit a world with kinder computers, more human and more humane 💞

​we’re meeting on Friday, 27th February at Newspeak House in Shoreditch. come along, we’ll share some demos, works in progress, research, ideas and pizza. 🍕

​we still have room for more demos, sign up here!

​if you’re new to FoC you can learn more about the history and ideas on the website and podcast.

Join us to connect and explore ideas supporting a Second Renaissance - our name for a potential a new cultural paradigm of interconnectedness, wisdom and inner growth.

​You can think of this as a local, in-person version of the online Oasis Community Calls. ​As in the online calls, we’ll use break-out groups and relational exercises to deepen connection and facilitate dialogue - though there’ll be plenty of unstructured socialising too.

This event is for anyone who is intrigued by the idea of a second renaissance and wants to learn more, get more involved and build connections with like-minded people.

​This week’s theme is InnerOn - an online platform and community being created by Alina Croitoru, designed to “help people remember how to be themselves and together in real life”.

​No specific listening/reading this time, but do check out the InnerOn links above, and come prepared to discuss your favourite pro-social online platforms. And you may also want to check out my article on the Liminal Web, which is relevant here.

19:00 - Arrive and general socialising
​19.30 - Intro to Inner On: Fireside chat with Alina
19:50 - Discussion of how online platforms can support real connection
20:10 - Inner On practice
20.30 - Informal socialising

This session is initiated by the fellowship candidates of the 2025/2026 cohort of the Introduction to Political Technology Programme at Newspeak House. It is open to external guests by approval only.

An informal space to learn and share your information, expertise, and ideas about communication beyond centralized infrastructure. We will explore mesh, peer-to-peer, and privacy-preserving tools, share experiences from activism and community organizing, and discuss practical possibilities for resilient networks and safer digital practices.  

​Examples include Bitchat, Briar, Bridgefy, Manyverse, and Meshtastic, as well as encrypted messengers like Signal and techniques such as steganography. The Civic Tech Field Guide also has a listing of connectivity tools, including tracking and resisting internet shutdowns.

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

Why might you want to use chat? What is it good for and when is it best used? Are there ways we could use chat better?

​Discussion session rather than building session.

​A session lead by John Evans, an expert chat developer and cooperative practitioner. He’s the creator of Spacetube, a tool that connects groups together via their internal chat systems e.g. Slack, Discord, Matrix, Whatsapp, Rocketchat, Signal. He is the lead developer for Chat Hackers, a community building Whatsapp tools for organisers.

Only faculty and fellowship candidates of Newspeak House may attend this seminar in person, however others can join the seminar online by registering here.

​We are live-screening the second seminar in the HUMAIN Collective series, which explores the intersection of moral philosophy and technology under the title “AI, Machines and Consciousness.”

​Our first guest speaker, Dr Peter Marsh from the University of Brighton, will challenge the traditional fixation on machine consciousness to examine what these debates reveal about power, compliance and relational framing. His talk will seek to argue that the normalisation of asymmetrical habits of obedience represents a significant danger, and he will propose a ‘third voice’ of negotiated trust that moves beyond the standard master-servant or tool-user models. 

​We will also be joined by artist Karis Benjamin for an honest and insightful exploration of the evolving relationship between the creator and the machine. Drawing on an extensive background in the arts, Karis will detail an initial scepticism towards Artificial Intelligence and the specific turning point that inspired the integration of these tools into a professional practice. This session moves beyond the final gallery as Karis walks us through their methods, the creation of their portfolio website and the surprising patterns discovered in the work that did not make the final cut.

​In addition to the seminar, we have recently published a blog article titled Member Spotlight: Gothic Tropes and Modern Robot Ethics. This piece features the reflections of Professor Tracy Harwood, from De Montford University, on the short film “I Made a Self-Aware Robot,” exploring whether the ethics of robot-human relations depend more on the machine’s capability or our own humanity.

​As optional pre-reading to help frame our discussion, we recommend DeGrazia, D. (2022) ‘Robots with Moral Status?’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 65(1), pp. 73–88. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2022.0004.

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

​How do you design services that no one wants to use?

​Stressful life events like divorce, bereavement, court cases, and legal hearings require us to engage with the government when we are at our most vulnerable. The justice system is complex, intimidating and slow moving, and our interface with the legal system is riddled with impenetrable jargon, incomprehensible forms and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

​As we digitise the courts, we have an opportunity to streamline and simplify legal process. We’ll discuss how legislation becomes policy, how departments get funding, and how designers balance the needs of citizens, court staff, legal representatives and judges.

​Reading

• MOJ Service Design Playbook 
• Transforming our justice system
• Modernising courts and tribunals: benefits of digital services
• Progress on the courts and tribunals reform programme 
• Modernising Crime Services: Reflecting on Reform’s Impact 
• Guide to the Renters’ Rights Bill

Does your work really make a difference? Are you using your talents for a good cause? Or has the world not really become a better place when you’ve checked off your to-do lists?

If these are questions you struggle with, then The School for Moral Ambition is the place for you. As a foundation we want to help you explore a different path, one where your career and the precious time you invest in it contribute to a much better world.

These meetups are run by the community, for the community, initiated by members who want to explore ideas, build relationships, and turn moral ambition into action.an informal evening full of connection, conversation, and inspiration.

​​This session is part of the How to Think about Tech? The Case of ‘AI Safety’ study group initiated by fellowship candidates of the 2025/2026 Introduction to Political Technology course. It is open to Newspeak House faculty and fellowship candidates only.

​Evaluations (or “evals”) have become central to AI governance - companies use them to justify model releases, regulators require third-party assessments, and researchers design benchmarks for dangerous capabilities.

​But who decides what gets measured? Whose values are embedded in evaluation design? And how do evals function in practice?

​​This study group session examines AI evaluation as both a technical practice and a political process, analyzing how “safety” gets operationalized through benchmarks, who holds power in defining risk, and what systematically gets excluded from evaluation frameworks.

​Key Discussion Questions

• Who decides what capabilities or risks to evaluate?
• How do evaluation frameworks shape what gets built and deployed?
• What’s the relationship between evals and actual safety?
• Can we evaluate “societal impact”? What would that require?
• How do evals function in governance?
• What gets optimized when benchmarks become targets?
• What’s the gap between evaluation results and deployment decisions?

​Recommended Readings

​Introduction & Context

• The Problem With AI Evals - Wired (December 2024)
• AI Safety Benchmarks Are Broken - MIT Technology Review (October 2024)

​Technical Approaches (for reference)

• Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy v1.1 (September 2024)
• METR (formerly ARC Evals) - Model Evaluation and Threat Research

​Critical Perspectives & Limitations

• The AI Safety Washing Problem - IEEE Spectrum (January 2025)
• AI companies’ safety practices fail to meet global standards, study shows - Reuters (November 2024)
• [2501.17805] International AI Safety Report (January 2025) - Skim executive summary on current state of evals

​Listen/Watch

• The Challenges of Evaluating AI Systems - 80,000 Hours Podcast with Beth Barnes (November 2024)

​Alternative Approaches & Sociotechnical Evaluation

• Participatory AI Evaluation - Ada Lovelace Institute (June 2024) 

​For Technical Deep Dive (Optional)

• Beyond Accuracy: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Evaluating Enterprise Agentic AI Systems (November 2025) - Proposes CLEAR framework: Cost, Latency, Efficacy, Assurance, Reliability
• OpenAI’s GDPval: Measuring model performance on real-world tasks (June 2025) - Evaluation across 44 occupations on economically valuable tasks

​​​​​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 How to Think about Tech? The Case of ‘AI Safety’ study group initiated by fellowship candidates of the 2025/2026 Introduction to Political Technology course. It is open to Newspeak House faculty and fellowship candidates only - external guests by request.

​AI companies release new models constantly, often claiming each new one is “safer” than the last. But how do they actually know? What tests do they run? What gets measured and evaluated?

​This workshop provides a technical primer on AI evaluations (evals) - the practice of testing AI systems for capabilities, safety, and fairness. We’ll explore:

• What evaluations are and why they matter for AI governance
• Different types of evaluations: capability, alignment, safety, and societal impact assessments
• How evals work technically: constructing datasets, defining metrics, and designing evaluation protocols
• Examples that demonstrate the mechanics in practice
• ​(Optional) Hands-on activity: designing evaluations for a specific scenario to surface the tradeoffs between what we can measure and what actually matters.
• ​Discussion

This session is designed as a collaborative technical primer. I’ve been studying and working with evals over the past year as part of an ML curriculum, and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned. If you have deep experience in this area, please reach out as we’d love to learn from you!

​This workshop pairs with the AI Safety study group discussion on Feb 22 on AI Evals (https://luma.com/357o5glx) examining the governance and political implications of evaluation frameworks.

This session is initiated by the fellowship candidates of the 2025/2026 cohort of the Introduction to Political Technology Programme at Newspeak House. It is open to external guests by approval only.

​AI systems, coding agents, and other frontier technologies are moving fast and people’s experiences of them vary. Some of us are building with these tools and excited by what they make possible. Others are watching closely and asking harder questions about what they cost: in energy, in water, in labour, in power.

We’re talking AI systems, coding agents, robotics, synthetic biology, satellite networks, and more tools that are already making decisions, displacing labour, and consuming resources at scale.

​This participatory workshop is a space to bring those different experiences into conversation.

​We’ll open with a short survey presentation of what frontier technologies actually look like right now. From there, participants will map their own hopes, concerns, and questions in a structured activity before we move into group discussion.

​Come with your experiences, your enthusiasm and your concerns. This is a space to share, be challenged, and learn from each other.

This session is open to the public, however spaces are limited. Registration includes a suggested contribution towards Jethro’s time. Free for fellowship candidates.

​They say that AI is transforming the world of software.

​You’ve seen wild claims of what can be built with “basically no human intervention”.

​There’s only one question left…

​”Where do I start?”

​This is a workshop for coding beginners to become proficient with AI tools in one afternoon.

​By the end, you’ll be able to:

• Host your own website with user logins
• Manage your own database
• Analyse data and produce beautiful charts

​AI is a tool - this workshop is about learning to get the most out of it. That means using it to solve more problems than it creates.

​The workshop is led by Newspeak House Fellow Jethro Reeve. He started using AI to code in October 2023, building tools for campaignlab.uk. He’s now a full-time software developer at coefficient.ai. Some sites he has built with AI:

• explorethekingdom.co.uk
• whatgov.co.uk
• zerotocoder.uk

​Attention London agent tinkerers and curious humans 🤖✨

​Come join us for a relaxed AI Agent Hackday - a bring-your-laptop afternoon for playing with AI agents, agent UX (AUX), OpenClaw, Moltbot, Molt Bar, or any agent idea you’ve been meaning to try.

​No talks. No demos. Just tables, power, Wi-Fi, snacks, a shared scratchpad, and maybe a place where agents can hang out together.

• bring a laptop 💻
• bring an agent (or curiosity) 🤖
• register quick to avoid disappointment! 🎟️
• ticket price covers food, drinks & venue costs 🍴

​Come as an enthusiast. Leave with an agent story, a new idea, or a new friend!

An independent community focused on applied AI, cutting through the noise and sharing real stories from people building with AI across industry, research and personal projects.

18:00 - Doors open, food and drink served
18:30 - Welcome
18:35 - Ana Catarina de Alencar, Resident Philosopher at The AI Collective: AI That Reads Emotions: What It Means for Data Privacy, Consent, Your Teams
19:00 - Break
19:15 - Will Chan, Senior Product Manager at Risk Ledger: How to Scale Yourself with an AI Digital Twin
​19:45 - Lightning Talks TBA
21:00 - Wrap up and social at Well & Bucket

​Please join us for the second session of the Arms Industry Wikithon, a monthly meeting dedicated to expanding the availability of information about companies, entities and individuals involved in the global arms industry. This is a hybrid event, and will take place both in person and online. Food will be provided.

​No prior knowledge of either the arms industry or Wikipedia editing is needed, though both are welcomed. Full support and an introduction to Wikipedia editing will be provided. Participants should bring a laptop that can connect to the internet.

​​​​​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.

​Join us for a discussion about Synthetic User Studies, a new research technique made possible by large language models.

​The base idea describes simulating a user persona and then interviewing it. This is dramatically cheaper and faster than traditional user research, but critics say it merely pays lip-service to principles of user-centred design.

​How should democracies think about using synthetic citizens for policy research?

• Jie Li (2024), “How Far Can We Go with Synthetic User Experience Research?”
• Shrestha et al (2025). “Beyond WEIRD: can synthetic survey participants substitute for humans in global policy research?”
• Joon Sung Park et al (2024), “Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People”

​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.

Join us for the third event in the Mod Jam series at Newspeak House with Mod Jam #03 - ALT+CTRL DoomScroll.

​Introducing alternative controllers to the Doom modding experience, we will be modifying and repurposing the physical interfaces we handle to enter classic WADs - modified Doom worlds from the world’s largest modding library.

​Doom piano, toasters, bedwetting alarm, conductive thread, breathing sensors and cameras… doomscrolling has never been so sensual!

​The Mod Jam series demonstrates how re-purposing, remixing, expanding and hi-jacking existing games can be channeled for collective expression.

​Modding allows us to reclaim agency. It is an act of opening possibilities within an existing system, to change a world using its own rules and constraints - performance applied to gameplay. As a community-led practice to appropriate, tweak, expand and improve the medium, modding can help us let the creative genie out of the gaming industry’s bottle.

​This event will come in a twin edition with a sister event in Berlin at the A MAZE. Shop-Gallery in early June.

​Seize the mechanics of your games, join the Mod Jam movement!

​Outline

• Recap on ALT-CTRL and Doom WADs
• Brainstorming
• Jam
• Presentations

​Checklist

• No programming skills required as basic modding (assets/textures) is done through file-swapping into packages that we can run through pre-installed software
• Feel free to bring your own (safe!) alternative controllers in addition to the ones provided on site
• Computer: if you don’t have a computer, think about how you could collaborate with the other participants. Drawing on paper? Writing? Sound making? etc.
• You can pre-install ZDOOM and Slade in advance
• You can also install a DOOM level builders such as Ultimate Doom Builder
• You could also get a WAD file such as FREEDOOM but for this, you can wait until the event

​Please note that we won’t be providing food so feel free to bring your own and there will be plenty of food options nearby.

​We look forward to greeting you all at Newspeak House!

​Please arrive on time as we’ll be sharing critical information in the introduction.

The Newspeak House Political Technology Awards celebrates landmark projects in the field of political technology. The awards are judged by the 2025–26 cohort of fellowship candidates, who along with the rankings will publish their evaluation process fully open source.

​Join us to discover new political technology projects pushing the boundaries of power and creativity, and hear from the committee about their attempt to conduct evaluation in a fully automated way.

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

Fellowship Candidates will present their preliminary work on their prototype projects.

​​​​​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.

​​​​​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.

​​​​​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.