• There are wrongs in the world that you want to set right, and you feel a personal responsibility for taking action. This has affected your career decisions, or you have some track record of volunteering or organising. You worry about whether your work has impact.
• You’re in an exploratory mode. There are rapid changes happening in the world that you want to spend time reflecting on. You don't currently have a single project that you're deeply focused on, and are open to meeting and learning from people who may not obviously possess knowledge you're looking for. You’re curious about the dynamics of unfamiliar groups, communities, networks, institutions, fields, and movements. You're able to engage tactfully with many different kinds of people, whose values and approaches you may not agree with.
• You believe in the importance of technology for social change. You've worked on a product or service, whether solo or as part of a team. You're not afraid of getting your hands dirty and making things. This does not necessarily mean that you're a software developer - a lot can be done with no-code and low-code - but you're not put off by the idea that you might have to spend time figuring out how to build something.
• You enjoy meeting new people. Your best work is done in a communal setting in close proximity to others. You go to meetups for fun, perhaps you have organised one. You’re excited by the idea of spending several nights of the week attending events. You have some kind of online presence, and contribute to various online communities. You’re enthusiastic about sharing your knowledge and networks, as well as developing mentoring relationships.
• You worry as you are reading this that you might not be the kind of person typically found at Newspeak House. We are looking for a diverse, interdisciplinary group that brings a mix of backgrounds, methodologies, fields, and professions — practitioners, organisers, researchers, developers, lawyers, advocates, activists, educators, entrepreneurs, journalists, technology industry actors, field builders, those coming out of a government office or position, policy analysts, public intellectuals, and those whose practice doesn't fit squarely into conventional categories. You can see members of the current cohort  here .

If you’re not sure if you should apply, feel free to get in touch for a conversation about whether the programme might be right for you: [email protected]

Introduction to Political Technology is made up of three pillars: core activities, labs, and the tutor system.

Core Activities

Three core activities anchor the programme. They are:

Governance

Through managing a set of common pool resources, fellowship candidates have the chance to experiment with and experience different forms of governance, and develop original systems for decision-making, policy development, resource allocation, and conflict resolution.

Fieldwork

Fellowship candidates have the opportunity to engage with a broad variety of emerging civic communities of practice and understanding how they work, as well as familiarise themselves with the landscape of political technologies through exploring the library and organising The Political Technology Awards.

Prototype

The culmination of the year’s work as fellowship candidates produce an original contribution to the field of political technology, both to demonstrate their sophisticated understanding of the field and to have a lasting real world impact.

Labs

Labs provide spaces and guidance to explore specific topic areas, lead by faculty members. The labs from 2025-26 are outlined below; they are refreshed every year, but should be substantially similar.

Institution, Human, Technology

This lab explores the complex interplay between institutions and organisations; humans; and technologies. It provides a space to explore how organisations and institutions act, change, and relate to individuals, and reflects on what makes them work well, what causes them to fail, and how we can sustain healthy relationships with them.

Political Organising

As technology reshapes the political landscape, traditional wisdom in political strategy is being upended. This offers huge opportunities for campaigners and political institutions, but also challenges. In this lab, you will learn about the theoretical cutting edge of campaign technology, as well as the current state of political campaigning and organising in the UK.

Digital Protocols

Protocols are the structured forms of communication that shape the digital world: html, email, social networks, instant messaging, even P2P and crytocurrencies. In this lab, we explore both their technical workings and their social and political impact.

Leading Tech Projects

This lab is about moving beyond prototyping to build tools and apps that are production-grade, widely used, or critical in workflows, while exploring how to adapt practices to keep pace with rapidly accelerating development and AI assistance. We will share emerging approaches and paradigm shifts to help you focus on what drives projects forward, make smart tech stack choices, and stay agile as standard practices evolve.

Data Governance

We have a growing consensus on what we do not want — platform dictatorships, biased automation, exploitative data collection — but far less clarity on what kind of future we should be building instead. Emerging models like trusts, fiduciaries, commons, and cooperatives aim to rebalance power, align incentives with people, widen participation, and share benefits. As large language models bring new risks of privacy loss, labour displacement, polluted information, invasive agents, and biometric “solutions” to deepfakes, the urgent task is to govern data and AI so that privacy, fairness, and accountability are protected.

Rethinking Chat

How we communicate shapes how we organise, and how we organise shapes how we live; through our systems of communication, we prefigure the world we want to exist. In this lab, we will explore chat as the dominant medium of organisation — from grassroots to state power - examining emerging tools and experiences to imagine where chat might go next in enabling political action.

Open Web Data

Most web projects offer value to their users by offering a way to view and/or interact with some dataset. This information either has to be provided by users, which presents a cold start problem for many projects, or found in some standardised format so that it can be used… until recently!

Protecting Your Users

The internet is a hostile environment. Internet-facing applications face a constant stream of threats - ranging from casual scripted attacks through to sophisticated, targeted attacks. Asking users to trust you with their data is a big responsibility. In this lab we explore techniques for reasoning about this environment, and how to build software and systems that are reliable and protect user data.

Group Decisionmaking

There is no such thing as an independent individual: everything you do and know and think is shaped by other people. The overall framework for this lab is one of management as engineering. The goal is to help you think like an engineer about designing team, organizational, and social processes.

Collectivity

This lab explores the dynamic ways groups of people can work together to create significant social & political change. We will attempt to go beyond the simple idea of individuals coming together, and explore how shared purpose and collective action give rise to new societies and futures. We will tackle a range of tactics for societal transformation, such as experimentation and prefiguration, and how they can be used to build new hegemonies—new dominant ideas and systems—that lead to diverse and hopeful futures.

Network Development

This lab is for those who want to learn network strategies and field-building by putting them into practice. Together we will explore how to connect fragmented efforts into stronger ecosystems, compound learning across people and organisations, weave power and resources, sustain leadership and infrastructure beyond individual projects, and use technology to support and grow communities anywhere.

Knowledge Production

Knowledge creation is not an isolated or passive endeavour, but a collaborative process shaped by the interactions between individuals, communities, institutions, and their environments. Traditional, hierarchical models of knowledge production, where experts or institutions dictate knowledge flows, are insufficient to address the speed and complexity of contemporary challenges (or even reflect current realities). In this lab we will explore other models of knowledge production, and help you understand and develop your own knowledge management process.

Evidence & Impact

This lab asks how we know what really works, exploring how to design experiments and evaluations that meaningfully assess impact in a robust, empirical way. Beyond evaluation, we will look at how evidence can be turned into action — history is full of well-evidenced interventions that went nowhere — and how you can use evidence not just to test your ideas, but to drive change in the world.

Service Design

Service Design is the discipline of creating end-to-end experiences that help people meet their needs, whether through products, people, or processes delivered across time and channels. Though not always applied universally or correctly, it has become the mainstream methodology in the public sector. In this lab, we will explore the shift from product to service thinking, examine the tools and methods of the field, identify barriers like procurement hurdles and skills gaps, and consider how service design can evolve to remain relevant in a changing world.

Game Design

Game Design is the discipline of creating systems that deliver specific experiences, drawing on insights from fields such as economics, architecture, ergonomics, and anthropology. In this lab, we will explore games as a kind of tool that trains players to develop strategies to interact with systems, as well as looking at how game mechanics can be applied to understand and address wider systemic challenges.

Wargames & Challenge

In a world that is complex, dynamic, and adversarial, these techniques can help us anticipate how others might act and what strategies could succeed. They are also methods of influence that can be used to push people and organisations to change their behaviour and acknowledge problems. In this lab, we will explore both Wargaming and the practice of Reasonable Challenge as tools to sharpen decision-making, counter groupthink, and build resilience—applicable not only to geopolitical conflict but also to organisational and social challenges.

Tutor System

Each fellowship candidate will be assigned a tutor from the faculty. The tutor meets with their tutee in person at least once per month to discuss their progress through the programme and agree on any support the tutee or the faculty at large can provide. This role is analogous to the role called ‘supervisor’ in UK postgraduate programmes and ‘advisor’ in US programmes. It is largely a coaching role.

From 2015 to 2023 the programme in political technology was fully residential, and programme participants lived on campus at Newspeak House. In 2023 we began to offer non-resident places in the cohort, and now a majority of students live off-campus.

Residential and non-residential participation offer various benefits.

A principal benefit of residency is the opportunity to engage with the collegiate environment in an immersive, ongoing manner and participate in activities organised on campus.

Non-residential participation may be more appropriate for participants with logistical constraints (e.g. care responsibilities) which prevent them from being resident.

Because of the importance to the programme of in-person activities, non-resident participants are strongly encouraged to live within 30 minutes’ travel to Newspeak House’s London campus. Participants are expected to be on campus several days per week. The programme does not offer a fully remote or ‘hybrid’ participation option.

Unfortunately the lodgings offered are not wheelchair accessible, and space is not available for partners/family. Also, aside from service animals, residents are not permitted to keep roaming pets.

The wellbeing of participants is of great importance to us. Newspeak House employs an interfaith minister who is there to provide support for the emotional and psychological health of our community members.

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

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

The programme fee for the entire year is £3000, payable upon acceptance of your offer.

For those who choose to live in college accommodation, the cost is £1100 per calendar month, payable from October 2024 until August 2025 inclusive. This includes all bills, as well as a full time facilities manager and a cleaner for common areas.

Thanks to generous gifts from fellows and community members there are some scholarships available, which can help with both programme fees and accommodation. Please indicate in your application if your participation is contingent on a scholarship.

(If your participation is contingent on securing a scholarship and you are offered a spot but are not able to secure a scholarship, you are not obligated to participate in the programme.)