133-135 Bethnal Green Road[email protected]@nwspk

“For better or for worse, technology shapes society, but we can - and must - influence the path it takes. Newspeak House is the place to tackle this head on”

Dr Rufus Pollock

Founder & President of Open Knowledge
Fellow of Newspeak House

“A residency at Newspeak House is a unique opportunity to connect with communities and ideas from across domains of politics, technology and social science”

Dr Lisa Murphy

Technology Lead for Digital Equity at The Wellcome Trust
Fellow of Newspeak House

Study With Us

Newspeak House is a hub for communities working to change society with technology, spanning all kinds of civic institutions, including government, politics, activism, charities, journalism, think-tanks, NGOs, philanthropy, and academia.

At the heart of Newspeak House is its residential programme, running since 2015. Seven residents spend a year immersed in these communities, enjoying the chance to meet thousands of people and attend events held on their doorstep.

The programme is designed to support mid-career technologists gain a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions. It’s ideal for people who have been working professionally for several years and are now looking to grow their network and spend time reflecting deeply on how they can best have impact on the world.

Residents will have the opportunity to:

A principal benefit of residency is the opportunity to engage with the collegiate environment and take an active interest in activities happening on campus. We prioritise applicants who are excited about connecting with and contributing to the work of other residents, fellows, members, organisers, and the growing communities working on political technology.

Residents should plan to spend at least sixteen hours a week focused on the course itself. This will be a mix of seminars, pair work, self-study, and attending events. Course content is re-written each year to reflect the dynamic nature of the field and the needs of the particular cohort, but broadly the first half of the year is focused on group exercises and getting an overview of the field, and the second half on developing your individual projects. Upon completing the course, you will be invited to join the Newspeak House fellowship , the start of a lifelong relationship with the institution and its networks.

You should apply if...

Key Dates

2023
March Applications Open
May onwards Offers made
Late September New residents move in
Start October Autumn Term Starts
Early December Autumn Term Ends
2024
Early January Spring Term Starts
Late March Spring Term Ends
Mid April Summer Term Starts
Mid July Summer Term Ends
End July Graduation

Fees

The course fee for the entire year is £2400, payable upon acceptance of your offer.

Living in college accommodation is a mandatory part of the residency, and costs £1000 per calendar month, payable from October 2023 until August 2024 inclusive. This is inclusive of all bills and includes a full time facilities manager and a cleaner for common areas.

Thanks to generous gifts from fellows and community members, there are some full and partial scholarships available. Please indicate in your application if your participation is contingent on a scholarship.

How to Apply

There is a short application form, primarily to give us an idea of what your interests are, and to start a conversation with us as to whether a residency might be the right thing for you. Applications are taken on a rolling basis until all spaces are filled. We encourage you to submit your application even if you're not sure if you want to take the course, or if you feel you don't have time to complete the form to your satisfaction. It should take less than 20 mins to complete.

Application Form

After you’ve submitted your application, you’ll be invited to

Newspeak House is strengthened by the diversity of our network and our differences in background, culture, experience, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, and much more. We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, women, the LGBTQIA community, and disabled people. Unfortunately though, the lodgings offered are not wheelchair accessible, and space is not available for partners/family. Also, aside from service animals, roaming pets are not permitted.

While we welcome applications from outside the United Kingdom, we are currently unable to support the acquisition of visas. If you are applying from outside the United Kingdom and are accepted, you will need to secure your own visa and, depending on your situation, work permit.

You're welcome to reapply if you don't get selected the first time.

If you have any questions about the course or the application process, don't hesitate to reach out via [email protected] or @nwspk. Questions about the opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on an application.

Pastoral Care

The wellbeing of our residents is of great importance to us. Newspeak House employs an interfaith minister and retains a pastoral board who are there to provide support for the emotional and psychological health of those who stay with us.

Even in communities where everyone has the best of intentions, things can sometimes go wrong. Our pastoral team are experienced in community harm prevention and response, and we will proactively deal with any conflicts or pastoral issues should they arise.

If you would like to know more about our pastoral provisions, please contact [email protected]

Newspeak House Fellowship

Those who successfully complete the residential programme become Fellows of Newspeak House. We now have over 90 fellows in our network and they can be found in significant positions across many prominent institutions. As fellows of the college, they have the right to attend college ceremonies and access certain special fellowship activities.

Imeh Akpan

Head of Design Research, FutureGov/TPXimpact, prev GOV.UK User Research Lead, Government Digital Service

Will Muirhead

Neurovascular Fellow at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Joseph McArthur

Director / Co-founder OA.Works, Assistant Director, Right to Research Coalition, Organiser, OpenCon

Rufus Pollock

Founder, Open Knowledge

Stephen Fortune

Code Fellow, Open Data Institute

Dr Jonathan Penn

Historian of AI; Affiliate, Berkman Klein Centre Harvard, Research Fellow, St. Edmund’s College & Department of History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge), Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

Brandon Jackson

Design & Neuroscience, Lingumi

James Knight

Climate Tech Investor

Scott Craig

Ford-Mozilla Fellow, Center for Democracy & Technology

Ben Pollard

Co-founder, Local Welcome

Josh Russell

Founder, Forward Democracy

Dr Aleksi Knuutila

Postdoctoral Researcher, Computational Propaganda, Oxford Internet Institute

Carl Miller

Research Director, Centre for Analysis of Social Media

Tamara Borine

Senior Technology Advisor, Competition Markets Authority

Sophie Chesney

PhD, NLP and news

Andreas Kirsch

Research Engineer / Machine Learning

Alex Parsons

Senior Researcher, mySociety

Areeq Chowdhury

Head of Policy, Royal Society, Councillor for Canning Town North

Josie Fraser

Head of Digital Policy, National Lottery Heritage Fund

Ekin Can Genc

Consultant & Writer on Web3, cryptowriting.net

Jacob Coxon

Applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets
[email protected]

Rich Mason

Founder, wings.coop

Dan Kwiatkowski

Charity Funding / Web Apps / Data Science

Anouk Ruhaak

Mozilla Senior Fellow, AlgorithmWatch, Data Governance Models

Nathan Young

Head of Forecasting, Zeitgeist

Lisa Murphy

Senior Policy Manager, NHSX Centre for Improving Data Collaboration

Phoebe Tickell

Systems designer, participatory and horizontal forms of governance, community catalyst and facilitator. Working on new forms of governance for a better world. Currently: DGOV Foundation, Enspiral, Edmund Hillary Fellow, RSA Fellow, Associate Lecturer Schumacher College. @solarpunk_girl [email protected]

Jo Kerr

Digital and organisational change consultant to the charity sector. Intersticia Fellow, trustee of Turn2us and chair of Trajectory Theatre. Former agency MD, board of Sadler’s Wells. #1 woman in digital under 30, The Drum 2014. Immersive digital art enthusiast. Yoga teacher. @jokerrconsults, linkedin/jokerrconsults, [email protected]

John Bryden

Executive Director & Senior Research Scientist, Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University

Lucy King

Co-Founder, InFact Digital Co-op

Lydia Farnham

Applying data science and machine learning to the root causes of environmental issues.
[email protected]

Lewis Jones

Systems, software and bioengineer; technologist; environmentalist - currently working as Head of Software at Litho to redefine the paradigm of education using AR EdTech. @la_jones21

John Sandall

Founder & Principal Data Scientist @ Coefficient

Fiona Apps

Community Manager/Developer, WT.Social, looking for ways to decrease toxicity online, Wikipedia Administrator

Abe Baldry

Head of Strategy and International, UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence

Joshua Balfour

Full stack engineer

Yonca Braeckman

Founder of Impact Shakers; passionate about the potential of entrepreneurship to change systems; humanist & technologist; zebra

Sabrina Kavanagh

Reach out if you’re interested in the future of work, food systems, platforms & communities, housing projects, adult education, ethical consumerism, representation, protest, parliament. @sabkava, [email protected]

Dee Harding

Open Tech Lead, NHS England

Jim Williams

Founder & CEO of Hatch, a start-up to connect people with ways to take action on social causes. Background in international development (especially Pakistan), conflict management, and liberal politics. Research interests: institutional information ecologies, distributed agency and user-centred design in communities and organisations. [email protected]

Derek Alton

Studying systems change at the intersection of tech, society and government. Currently working as a consultant on strategy and partnerships for Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada. @DerekAlton, LinkedIN.

Paweł Krupiński

Connection and intimacy activist, software engineer, technologist, community builder. @pawel_krupinski

Dr Ardavan Afshar

Number theory, Machine learning, Global development, Effective altruism
[email protected]

Lewis Westbury

Senior developer and tech lead with substantive experience in digital identity from my time at Government Digital Service. I founded Police Rewired - a volunteer community for technologists working on problems in public safety and crime.

@[email protected]

Shad Jahangir

Designer. Building Vouch, a new way to get hired.
@systemantix

James Moulding

Network Development Lead, UK Democracy Network

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee

Computer science researcher, with a focus on low-resource languages in Wikipedia and Wikidata. Affiliated to University of Southampton and intern at Bloomberg. Working on the Scribe project. @frimelle

Joe Reeve

Improving journalism and publishing with JoeDocs.com and HackThePress.org

Adam Shorland

Software developer, open data & knowledge enthusiast - Tech Lead for Wikidata, a CC0 licenced structured data repository sistered with Wikipedia.
Also working on a side project called WBStack, lowering the barrier to entry for the Wikibase software stack for all.
Blog, GitHub, @Twitter, LinkedIn, Email

John Cummings

I currently working as Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO, helping UN agencies share their knowledge on Wikipedia. Previously I worked at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London, I helped run Wikimania 2014, and started MonmouthpediA, a community Wikipedia project in my home town.

Isla Suddek

Coach and Facilitator. Main points of focus: the climate emergency, miscommunication both online and offline, and loneliness in cities. [email protected]

Stephen Bediako

Social Entrepreneur, Innovator, Collector, Advisor
The Social Innovation Partnership, Turning Basin Labs
@stephentsip

Manon Jones

Geospatial analysis and information management at UN International Organization for Migration, and researching protracted refugee settlements using Space Syntax methodologies at the Bartlett, UCL.
[email protected]

patcon

Coder, Canadian civil servant (talent.canada.ca)
Civic tech community organizer (civictech.ca, hypha.coop, codeacross.ca, g0v.london)
[email protected], @patcon_

Amber Rignell

Product Manager at Open Function, bringing open source process automation to governments and social-impact organizations
[email protected], @a_rignell

Irina Bolychevsky

Director of Standards and Interoperability, NHSX, Founder, Redecentralize.org

Artem Zhiganov

Governance lead @protein
Metagovernance, DAOs, Exit to Community
[email protected], @zhiganov, linktr.ee/zhiganov

Rat Park

Privacy, Climate change, Data science
[email protected]

Paul Powlesland

Barrister, Garden Court Chambers, Founder, Lawyers for Nature

Awais Hussain

Software Engineer, Wave Mobile Money

Rula Awad

Technical Project Manager, Logically.ai, using AI and OSINT to tackle disinformation at scale

Clément Briens

$whoami
Cyber, misinfosec, OSINT
War Studies BA @ KCL & Data and Society @ LSE
@clementbriens, @misinfosecUK

Ekaterina Stambolieva

CEO, Cosmos Pics

Richard Ng

climate × edtech
co-founder & CTO, greenworkx
[email protected], @richardcrng, richard.ng

Aleksandr Putilin

Techno-Buddhist, Product Engineer, originally from Siberia, lived in Moscow for 9 years, have been living in London for 6 years. Linkedin, Psychotechnology Substack.

Clem von Stengel

History of AI, Reinforcement Learning, Complexity Science, Political Theory
[email protected]

Agata Sumowska

Software developer, intersectional feminist, community builder
Finding systemic solutions to bringing more representation in technology and exploring matriarchy
@Agata_Anastazja

Andy Twelves

I’m currently the director of OrganiseLab, and I lead the media relations team at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. Follow me on 𝕏 @andytwelves and read my blog here.

Jethro Reeve

Music to neuroscience to interdisciplinarity to data science. Looking at how music can make us smarter, how data can help us think clearly about politics, and how AI can be used to bundle together complex problems in ways we can’t understand.

Ian Davis

Ethical platform / protocol engineer focused on decentralized, privacy-preserving identity and data storage solutions
[email protected], @ianconsolata

Borja Blanco Méndez

Founder at Azvai.com, an innovation and sustainability consultancy inspired by non-dualistic thinking