What is Newspeak House?
Newspeak House, The London College of Political Technology, is an independent residential college founded in 2015. Our mission is to study, nurture and inspire emerging communities of practice across civil society and the public sector in the UK.
Newspeak House has two core activities; it hosts a busy calendar of events at its campus in central London, as well as a one year course for emerging leaders in the field. Those who have graduated from the programme - over 80 now - become Fellows of Newspeak House.
If you would like to visit the college and find out more about its work, the current cohort hosts a weekly community dinner called Ration Club. To find out more or if you'd like to attend, please register.
“It's a factory which produces transformational ideas, people, and action - the beating heart of the UK's technology and democracy scene”
Head of Policy at The Royal Society
Fellow of Newspeak House
“The first time I came to Newspeak House, I got ideas, tools, and contacts that two years later helped us deliver the highest effect ever recorded in a randomized control trial on voter turnout. I have never come across a place with a greater concentration of big new insights, practical expertise, processing power, and a focus on democracy over profit.”
Founder of Turnout Nation
Member of Newspeak House
“Everyone in the UK who has any interest in tech mixed with politics, government, journalism or social change should spend time here ASAP”
Founder of mySociety
Member of Newspeak House
What is Political Technology?
Society is made up of an ecosystem of institutions, and the sum of their actions shape the world that we live in. For better or for worse, these actions are deeply influenced by the infrastructures that they choose to use - they determine what is measured, what is decided, and what can be done. What infrastructures lead to what outcomes? How are these choices made, and by whom? How can we create new technologies that lead to the social outcomes that we want?
Political Technology is the study of institutions founded with a purpose (civic, political, public sector, charitable, activist, etc), the communities that surround them, and in particular the novel digital infrastructures that they produce and deploy. This is a diverse and dynamic field that is affecting society in complex ways. To give an idea of the range and variety of projects, some examples:
Wikidata, do-gooder, Organise, FullFact Automated Fact Checking, Open Referral, PolicyKit, GlobaLeaks, OA.Works, Polis, Prediction Markets, Sci-Hub, CrowdJustice, Loomio, They Work For You, Alaveteli, Open Collective, Quadratic Vote, Maltego, OpenSanctions, CKAN, Aragon, CoTech, Notify, Turn2us Benefits Calculator, Humanitarian Data Exchange, CharityBase, Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age, CASM, Democracy Club, 360Giving, LittleSis, Perspective, Who Targets Me?, Turkopticon, PolicyMogul, Aequitas, Bluesky, Self-sovereign Identity, 12ft, Overton, Coral, Kialo, Matrix.
Newspeak House is a home for people working on or studying projects like these. By bringing these important communities together, we hope to support the growth and sophistication of this new field.
If this sounds like you, consider studying with us!
For more examples of projects, take a look at the Civic Tech Field Guide.
Faculty & Staff
Edward Saperia
Edward is the dean of Newspeak House, responsible for setting its research direction as well as the day-to-day running of the college.
Matt Stempeck
[email protected] • mattstempeck.com
Matt Stempeck is the librarian of Newspeak House. He curates the Civic Tech Field Guide, the most comprehensive collection of democracy tech projects anywhere. He helps the college learn what's worked, what hasn't, and how not to be the latter, and also help initiatives to connect into related work being done across the field.
Matt's professional background includes stints as Microsoft's Director of Civic Technology, Hillary Clinton's Director of Digital Mobilization, and MIT Media Lab's Center for Civic Media's leftover-catering-consuming Master's student. He's based in Lisbon, Portugal, and will panel for travel.
Dr Zarinah Agnew
[email protected] • zarinahagnew.com • @zarinahagnew
Zarinah is a neuroscientist by training. After spending over a decade in academia, they left to study the science of groups of brains - that is, humans in collectivity.
Alongside their work with the college, Zarinah runs three nonprofits aimed at experimental aspects of society, collective transformation and para-institutions. The Social Science Observatory is dedicated to the study of social science in the wild, Alternative Justices works towards abolitionist community-based harm prevention and response, and District Commons engineers experimental spaces where humans can ‘be otherwise’. Together, these strands allow both the prefiguration of new social configurations, as well as the study of their transformational potential.
Dr Joshua Becker
[email protected] • LinkedIn • github • publications
Joshua is an Associate Professor at the UCL School of Management with 15+ years practitioner experience in mediation, facilitation, and coaching along with a deep background in event organizing. His research and personal interest focuses around "collective intelligence", which to him means developing and testing formal/mathematical models of human behavior to understand and engineer decision making processes for groups from teams to institutions to societies. After 10 years focusing on belief accuracy, he has begun to combine his facilitation practice with his scientific practice through negotiation theory. He's currently very interested in how groups can reach agreement on solutions to technically challenging problems when people have different preferences and priorities.
Theodore Keloglou
[email protected] • website • github
Theodore Keloglou is a software engineer with a strong interest in decentralised technologies, governance, and knowledge infrastructure. He spends most of his time working at pod.network, a staked-based programmable layer-1 decentralised service.
In addition to his role as lecturer at the London College of Political Technology, he is an organising member and teacher at Shoshin College, an experimental independent school and a publisher at Laniakea Books, a public domain publishing house. He is the author of Letters from Prison, a book about personal freedom in Western societies.
James Moulding
James Moulding is the Lecturer in Network Development at Newspeak House, and also a fellow of the 2016-2017 cohort. James is a network thinker, political campaigner and simulation and serious game designer.
James is the Network Development Lead on Involve’s UK Democracy Network, prior to which he was the Director of the Centre for Democracy, where he has been working to enhance the capacity of organisations and individuals across the UK democracy sector and increasing the strength and quality of connection between them.
James has enjoyed an eclectic career working across a range of different roles associated with technology, community development and political campaigning. He began his career developing a community of technologists working with real-time sensor open data, before co-founding award-winning air quality non-profit AirPublic. He went on to work with political fundraising startup Crowdpac, before launching the 2017 viral mobile game Corbyn Run and co-founding the pioneering UK Labour Party affiliated game development studio Games for the Many.
He is also a co-founder of Campaign Lab, co-founder of Common Knowledgeand as a National Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion.
Hannah O’Rourke
[email protected] • x.com/Hannah_O_Rourke
Hannah is a bridge builder and network maker, passionate about making politics more open, collaborative, and focused on the future. She has worked in political organising, coalition management and campaigning for over 10 years.
She is the co-founder of Campaign Lab, a community of technologists who research, test and embed new tools and new practices in political campaigns. She is co-author of the book Reorganise: 15 Stories of Workers fighting back in a digital age. She was formerly the director of Labour Together and convened the 2019 Labour Election Review.
Dr Six Silberman
M. Six Silberman is the Lecturer in Sociotechnical Systems at Newspeak House. Silberman also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, studying the regulation of algorithmic management in the ‘iManage’ Project with Principal Investigator Jeremias Adams-Prassl (and previously colleagues Aislinn Kelly-Lyth, Sangh Rakshita, and Dr Halefom Abraha). Silberman contributes to peer-reviewed research on on data protection law and worker rights, human-computer interaction and work, and the relationship between environmental sustainability and information technology.
Between 2008 and 2020 Silberman was lead developer of Turkopticon, a web application used by ‘clickworkers’ on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Between 2015 and 2020 Silberman worked at IG Metall, the trade union in the German manufacturing sector, on worker rights in digital labour platforms. This work was part of a large and international body of research, software development, organising, and policy development that contributed to the adoption in 2024 of the EU Platform Work Directive. Between 2020 and 2022 Silberman worked as a software engineer at Organise, a London-based social enterprise aiming to give people the tools, networks, and confidence to win positive change at work.
Sinead Doyle
[email protected] • X • Bsky • Mastodon • LinkedIn
Sinead is a Digital Strategist and Service Designer. As an Associate Director at Transform, she helps clients set a vision for their digital products and services. She guides multidisciplinary teams through the service design process, to produce better, simpler customer experiences. Over fifteen years in digital, she has worked across strategy, creative, and media, at agencies and consultancies, on projects spanning public and private sectors.
She was lead service designer on the Covid Vaccination Programme with NHS England, and is currently account director on the design workstream of HMCTS Reform programme, digitising citizen-facing court processes within the Ministry of Justice.
Sam Ballard
[email protected] • sunlightafterdark.com
Sam Ballard has two roles at Newspeak House. He is lecturer in game design, and also artist in residence. Sam has been designing digital experiences for over a decade, with an emphasis on user orientated design thinking methodologies to solve both creative challenges & system design. He is currently a designer at ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium.
Andreas Varotsis
[email protected] • website • github • X
Andreas is a data scientist and developer who works to improve operational delivery and services across government using technology, data, and evidence. He spent a decade(ish) in a variety of roles in the Metropolitan Police Service, including front-line operational work across London, and now works in central government, where he helps identify and build AI products.
He is a passionate believer in building communities of practice, and works to support a range of cross-government communities, including Evidence House, which works to improve the use of data and IT in government, and the Society of Evidence Based Policing, which champions research to enhance policing practices and reduce crime. Keen to do more on the intersection of AI, collective intelligence and democracy, and also to help volunteer technologists support government.
Lewis Westbury
[email protected] • website • github • Bsky • Mastodon
Lewis has been a software developer for more than 25 years, and has worked in a wide variety of roles both as staff and contractor. Amongst other things, he has worked on a number of different specialist areas including maps and geo data at Google, and digital identity at Government Digital Service.
Lewis is a senior software developer and tech lead at the Centre for Collective Intelligence (CCID), a part of Nesta. He’s never happier than when mucking around with experimental prototypes and recreational coding.
Declan Pattison
Declan is head of facilities at Newspeak House, responsible for the material components of the building and event production. He comes from a background in touring theatre, puppetry, and education. If something is leaking or on fire, let him know!
Mark Wainwright
[email protected] • interfaithfoundation.org/minister/mark_wainwright
Mark is chaplain of Newspeak House, responsible for psycho-spiritual wellbeing of its community. He trained with the OneSpirit Interfaith Foundation, and also works in a hospital chaplaincy, providing a sensitive and non-judgemental listening presence to patients and families. He is available to talk confidentially to Newspeak House residents and fellows on pastoral or almost any other subjects.