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 workshop invites us to come together as a community and explore how we might provide advice to others or want advice to be provided to us when posing questions that cannot be resolved rationally. Rather than searching for a single right answer, we will share our approaches to ‘unanswerable’ questions and see what collective wisdom emerges, reflecting along the way on how it feels to receive advice from a loved one, a stranger on the internet, or a chatbot.

The workshop part will take only an hour of your time (even more reason to give it a try!), but we’ll have food and drinks available before and afterwards, and hopefully participants from the previous two cohorts available to meet too.

​​​​​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.

​IF turns 10 this year and to celebrate, you’re invited to our new series of conversations. There will be insights from experts and a chance to discuss opportunities around emerging technology and trust with the IF community.

​For our first session we’re exploring the theme of ‘AI triage’.

​When you get in touch with a product or service today, there’s a good chance that an AI agent is the first thing that you communicate with. Sometimes that means accessing helpful information quickly, and sometimes it means frustration or even inaccuracies.

​We want to explore when generative AI can be responsibly used to improve outcomes in public services and when humans need to step in.

​When are human interactions important and when do people expect them? Where do we draw the line between high-stakes and low-stakes interactions? And do people always understand when they’re talking to a person and when it’s an AI-generated output?

​Joining us to discuss this and bringing in their breadth of experience from across the NHS, local government and the charity sector will be:

​Imogen Levy, Chief Digital Officer, RSPCA (previously NHS England)

​Imogen was Head of Product for ‘First Contact: Intelligent Navigation’, the national programme enabling AI-powered triage and self-referral, which is now rolling out through the NHS App.

​Lingjing Yin, Head of Product, Royal Borough of Greenwich Council

​Lingjing leads product transformation and service design at the Royal Borough of Greenwich, improving resident outcomes across services such as social care and housing. She’s also the co-lead for Greenwich’s anti-poverty response.

​The last 10 years have been transformative, and the next 10 are set to be even more so. We’d love you to help us kick off this new era, enjoy some drinks and snacks, and join us in this conversation about where things go from here.

Ben Whitelaw, founder and writer of Everything in Moderation and Georgia Iacovou, writer of Horrific/Terrific, are teaming up again for an evening event on November 5th.

​The United Kingdom has decided to follow Australia in imposing a kid-focused social media ban. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

​There’s no doubt protecting children online has become a political hot potato, and a central concern for parents and policymakers, alike.

​But does removing children from the likes of TikTok and Instagram lead to harm reduction and the creation of safe online spaces? And how will companies and regulators tackle such a complex digital policy topic at a time of heightened domestic and international political uncertainty?

​The event will bring together leading voices, on both sides of the argument, for a frank and honest conversation about children’s online safety and what will likely come next as the UK moves ahead with its social media ban.

​The event will also provide an informal opportunity to catch up with others from the UK’s tech policy community over a drink or two!

​Come for the online safety chat, and stay for the free drinks.

​TIMINGS:

​18:30 – 19:00: Doors open; grab a drink, chat, find a seat
​19:00 – 19:45: Intros, followed by lightning talks
​19:45 – 20:30: Q&A
​20:30 – 22:00: Networking — drinks and conversation to continue until close

​​​​​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.

What does it take for people to be able to adapt the computer systems they use? This question gives rise to many interesting challenges that have been researched in academia and practice for decades. Under the term “substrates”, this workshop brings together past and present research directions that explore and realise the vision of systems people truly own.

​Our values are aligned with the Malleable Systems community who consider that software should be as easy to change as it is to use – a well-received essay on malleable software coincided with our 2025 workshop. Another alignment is with the local-first community who declare that you own your own data, in spite of the cloud.

​Substrates are not limited to interactive systems with a user interface. Kell’s (2009) concept of an integration domain stretches the domain of substrates to link-time transformations of executable binaries and the lowest levels of the operating system (should there be one?). This leads us on to the core role of a substrate in establishing a relationship between the inside and outside of a running system. The notions of addressability and externalisability from Basman et al (2018) explain how to refer to and transmit the contents of a substrate from place to place, and open authorship which compiles substrate contents from an ecology of authors rather than insisting one author’s expression has authority over another. This notion of compilation derives from the data feminism framework of D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) which challenges differentials of power in data ecologies.

​The common theme amongst all of these alignments of the substrates movement is that the full capabilities of the system, whether these relate to visibility, adaptation or transmission, should be placed at the disposal of the user rather than hidden behind abstraction or implementation boundaries, which positions substrates as a political project. The framework of Ecofeminism (Shiva & Mies, 1993) provides a clear feminist lens with which to see the importance of promoting local agency and user creativity in an ecology of artefacts:

​Dominant economics is unable to take self-provision into account because it counts as production only that in which the producer and consumer are different, that means that only commodity production is production, and self-provisioning is non-productive work. This is the viewpoint that counts women’s heavy work-load as non-work.

​Our workshop seeks to broaden participation beyond those who might traditionally identify as academic researchers. It is a perennial problem in our communities that work continues in separated self-citing silos who remain unaware of each other’s work over long timescales. It is our aim to create a forgiving, welcoming venue where workers with greatly divergent backgrounds can encounter and enrich each other.

​We welcome participation from workers from academia, industry, independent scholars, and others, from any of the communities named above, and from any others who can see their goals reflected in the substrate agenda.

​To foster fertile communications and give time for the composting of our thought, we encourage people who would like to talk or demonstrate to submit their work in advance. Please submit material for a talk/demo of up to 20 minutes, although shorter presentations are preferable.

​The committee will evaluate each submission and give considered, constructive feedback contributing towards a sustained conversation. Please consult the work from previous workshops at https://software-substrates.github.io/proceedings/ before submitting.

​If you don’t have a submission, please send an email of a couple of sentences introducing yourself and your interest in the substrates community to the organisers when you apply for your ticket.

​Important dates

​November 12th: Please have your contributions sent in to the workshop EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=substrates2026b

​November 26th: Feedback will be sent by the committee and running order allocated

​Submission Info

​For textual submissions, please keep to a length of approximately 8 pages of A4 equivalent, bearing in mind the reviewers’ capacity for attention. Interactive submissions, perhaps embedded in your own substrate, are also hugely welcome but please do bear in mind archival considerations and it is recommended you deliver as much as possible in a statically hosted form, e.g. in GitHub pages. Remote participants should strongly consider sending a pre-recorded video of their talk to avoid technical issues on the day.

​In addition to the reviewed track there will be a small number of slots available on the day for short lightning talks/demos of up to 5 minutes. Remote participation will be supported.

​Looking forward to a lively event with thought-provoking discussion and great camaraderie!