• 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 think that your network may currently not be well represented 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.

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

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

Core Modules

Three core modules anchor the course. They are:

Governance

Through managing a set of common pool resources, students 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

Students will engage with a broad variety of emerging civic communities of practice and understanding how they work. Students will also familiarise themselves with the landscape of political technologies through exploring the library and undertaking a grantmaking exercise.

Prototype

The culmination of the year’s work as students 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.

Advanced Modules

The advanced modules are additional modules designed to supplement the content and experiences of the core modules. They provide additional perspectives and support for course participants as they complete the core modules and offer opportunities for participants to familiarise themselves with terms and concepts from the fields of theory and practice that political technology draws on.

The advanced modules from 2024-25 are outlined below. They are refreshed every year, but should be substantially similar.

Institutional Analysis

In this module we will explore how institutions work (and don’t work), how they change, and how we as individuals can try to participate constructively in that functioning and change.

Engineering Group Decisions

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 module is one of management as engineering. The goal is to help you think like an engineer about designing team, organizational, and social processes.

Mechanism Design

If game theory is the study of optimal decision-making by agents given a set of resources, utilities, and constraints, [i.e. given a decision architecture, how should agents behave?] then mechanism design is the study of the inverse problem, namely, given a set of desirable behaviours, how do we design a decision architecture so that agents playing this game converge to the desired behaviour?

i.e if microeconomics is the science of predicting the behaviour of optimising agents, then mechanism design is an attempt to engineer that behaviour.

Political Organising

As technology reshapes the political landscape, traditional wisdom in political strategy is being upended. In this module, you will learn about the current state of political campaigning and organising in the UK and explore how this is being changed by technology. It is designed to support students to develop and operationalise their own political strategies for the causes they care about.

How can you make change actually happen? What pressure points can you target? How does technology impact this? What opportunities are there for technologists to influence politics? This module will teach you how to navigate the realpolitik of the political system and how to make lasting systemic political change.

Open Source

Open Source software is software whose source code is open for everyone to review and change. This way of making and distributing software has come to play a significant role in today’s internet-enabled world.

The open source software movement is also interesting from a political point of view. Free software started as a socio-political movement in the 1980s and open-source governance has come to denote a political philosophy based on democratic principles championed by the open-source software movement.

In this module, we aim to contribute to existing open source software (and make new ones) with useful and meaningful impact.

Future Crafting

In this module, we tackle a range of tactics and strategies for societal transformation, including experimentation, prefiguration, envisioning, hyperstition, new hegemonies and sovereignties. This module centres on social technologies & collective intelligence for diverse futurisms.

Service Design

This module introduces students to the fundamentals of service design, exploring the entire design process from concept to execution. Students will look at how organisations meet the challenge of designing new services and iterating them, the differences between product thinking and service thinking, the toolkits, methodologies and artefacts that are used, and their strengths and weaknesses, and the barriers to good service design including structural blockers, procurement hurdles, team shape issues and skills gaps. Finally, how service design itself needs to evolve to stay relevant in a changing world.

Robust Software and Systems

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 module we’ll explore techniques for reasoning about this environment, and how to build software and systems that are reliable and protect user data.

Game Design

Interactions with systems are not only transactional, but emotional. Given an intended emotional outcome of a system, how would you build it? Political regimes in the real world are in fact also such systems, albeit for different ends. In this module, you’ll learn some game design theory from the commercial games industry, and also get hands-on experience of making game-design decisions.

Public Sector Innovation

Technology can improve our society for the better… but large public institutions like the government often fail to harness it, with seemingly simple solutions turning into colossally expensive, endlessly delayed megaprojects. How can you improve public institutions using technology? When does it go wrong, and what can we do to try and make it work?

Product Design

How do you make something people will actually use?

Network Development

In this module students explore network development as building community, as developing the spatial awareness of social interactions, helping disparate and disconnected groups to get to know each other and collaborate in common purpose.

Together, we will work to understand the building blocks of networks and a key set of practices that can enable you to better understand and weave community interaction wherever you are, including network mapping, asynchronous events, handbook practices, seeing as a network, communication channels and network leadership behaviours.

Tutor System

Each course participant 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 course 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 course participants lived on campus at Newspeak House. In 2023 we began to offer non-resident places in the cohort.

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 course of in-person activities, non-resident participants are required to live within 30 minutes’ travel to Newspeak House’s London campus. Participants are expected to be on campus several days per week. The course 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 and retains a pastoral board who are 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. 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]

The following refers to fees for the current year (2024-25); fees for next year have not yet been set, but they'll likely be in line with the current year.

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

For those who choose to live in college accommodation, the cost is £1000 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 full and partial scholarships available. 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 course.)