• 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, 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 at 2025.newspeak.house.

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]

From 2015 to 2022 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 live off-campus; this year there are twelve non-residents and six residents.

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 to enjoy the convenience of 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.

Three core activities anchor the programme. They are:

Governance

Many people drawn to political technology already have strong views about how institutions work, or fail to work. They may arrive with a sense that existing systems are broken, with strong ideas about how they could be improved, and often with specific technologies of their own that they want to test in practice. This activity is designed to meet that energy directly by providing an environment in which participants can try out their theories under real conditions with a group of willing accomplices.

Following in a long tradition of prefigurative practice in education and social change, a core activity of the programme is participating in the governance of the college itself. For one year, fellowship candidates are invited to help shape and operate parts of Newspeak House: proposing, developing, and iterating governance and meta-governance infrastructures, making decisions about shared spaces and resources, proposing new roles and processes, developing mechanisms for coordination and accountability, and experimenting with institutional forms such as courts, metrics, currencies, forums, legislatures, and markets. In particular, this is an opportunity to experiment with the collaborative governance of the automation of these political institutions.

Concretely, this activity gives the cohort the opportunity to collectively manage some valuable resources: a centrally located facility with a variety of flexible spaces for living, working, and events; an established brand known across many communities and networks in the UK and internationally; and the organisation of the cohort itself.

This makes the college a rare kind of laboratory for institutional design. Through managing these common-pool resources, the cohort has a sandbox for prototyping and experimenting with innovative governance infrastructure, including both technologies and group processes. Fellowship candidates will have the unusual opportunity of experimenting with and experiencing very different forms of organisation, and to develop from scratch original systems for decision-making, policy development, resource allocation, and conflict resolution.

The governance activity gives fellowship candidates practical experience of the most fundamental challenge in political technology: how to build real political systems that people actually live with, trust, and use. Furthermore, if done successfully, this platform can be used to build an influential public body of work: evidence, networks, and tools that make genuinely new institutional forms visible to the world.

Fieldwork

This activity helps fellowship candidates familiarise themselves with the existing landscape of political technologies and to engage with a broad range of emerging civic and political communities of practice.

• The college hosts hundreds of events each year spanning a wide range of civic institutions, including government, political parties, activism, charities, journalism, think-tanks, NGOs, philanthropy, and academia. Fellowship candidates are encouraged to attend as many of these events as they can to gain first-hand insight into how such communities function; our calendar offers an indication of what to expect.
• Newspeak House’s library is The Civic Tech Field Guide, the world’s largest collection of political technology projects and communities. Fellowship candidates will have access to 1-1 research support and guidance from the librarian.
• The cohort will act as the judging panel for the Political Technology Awards, requiring participants to review and evaluate existing projects in the field, reflect on their own values and priorities as they relate to political technology, and design and establish processes capable of legitimately synthesising their conflicting preferences. On top of that, the evaluation process must itself be published as an open-source algorithm! This exercise is designed to be a test of all of your political technology skills - see how this year’s cohort has approached the task at 2025.newspeak.house/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.

Prototypes are assessed in August, when the faculty vote to determine whether they have met the standard required for fellowship. See profiles of past graduates at newspeak.house/fellowship.

Faculty are long-term associates of the college, many of whom are themselves graduates of the programme, that volunteer to offer spaces and guidance for fellowship candidates in exploring specific topic areas within their fields of expertise.

The faculty listed below are those serving in 2025–26; although the precise membership changes from year to year, future cohorts should expect a faculty of substantially similar character and standing.

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.

He facilitates the cohort’s core activities, works closely with faculty across the programme, and will usually be the first point of call if you’re seeking advice, context, or guidance.

Matt Stempeck

Matt Stempeck is the librarian of Newspeak House. He curates the Civic Tech Field Guide, the most comprehensive collection of political technology projects. He helps the college learn what's worked, what hasn't, and how not to be the latter, and also helps 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, but spends most of his time travelling the world for political technology conferences.

As well as librarianship and individual research support, he also offers a seminar series on knowledge production, exploring how knowledge is created not as an isolated or passive endeavour, but through interactions between individuals, communities, institutions, and their environments. The series examines the limitations of traditional hierarchical models of knowledge production, in which experts or institutions are assumed to direct the flow of knowledge, and considers alternative approaches better suited to the speed and complexity of contemporary challenges. It also supports participants in reflecting on and developing their own practices of knowledge production and management.

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 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.

For the programme, Silberman offers a seminar series called “Institution, Human, Technology” that 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.

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.

For the programme, Hannah offers regular seminars on political organising and campaign strategy, and has a deep understanding of UK politics. She also runs fortnightly hacknights focused on campaign innovation.

Theodore Keloglou

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 stake-based programmable layer-1 decentralised service.

For the programme, Theo offers sessions focused on digital protocols, the structured forms of communication that shape the digital world: html, email, social networks, instant messaging, even P2P and cryptocurrencies. The sessions will explore both their technical workings and their social and political impact.

Peyman Owladi

Peyman is director of Poteris, a not-for-profit organisation of 12 people founded in 2020 that works with charities to take care of the tech side of their business, as well as creating its own products like Chalk and Rep Coach. Recent clients include Learning with Parents, Boromi, and TUC Digital Lab. Peyman also advises nonprofits and startups on their digital strategy as a board member and CTO mentor, including Motives AI, now a Y Combinator company.

Prior to that, Peyman worked at Cisco for a decade on major projects in their router operating systems team, on a codebase with tens of millions of lines of code, including leading efforts to improve infrastructure for teams working across three continents. Since then he has been a startup CTO, tech contractor, and regular at hackdays.

For the programme, Peyman offers a seminar series about how to lead tech projects; 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.

Anouk Ruhaak

Anouk is a data governance expert, helping organizations and communities design and implement models that put people first, from data trusts to data commons, making the control of data more democratic, transparent, and fair.

Anouk is chair of Stichting Data Bescherming Nederland (SDBN), a foundation using strategic litigation to fight for privacy rights, currently taking legal action against companies like X, Amazon, and Adobe.

In past lives, she has been a Senior Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, a Fellow at AlgorithmWatch, a Visiting Scholar at the Ostrom Workshop, a political economist, a data journalist, and a software developer.

For the programme, Anouk offers seminars on data governance, exploring what kinds of institutions should be built in response to platform power, biased automation, and exploitative data collection. Drawing on emerging models such as trusts, fiduciaries, commons, and cooperatives, the series explores how data and AI might be governed in ways that rebalance power, widen participation, and protect privacy, fairness, and accountability.

John Evans

John Evans is an expert chat developer and cooperative practitioner. In 2023 he started work on Spacetube, a tool that connects groups together via their internal chat systems e.g. Slack, Discord, Matrix, Whatsapp, Rocketchat, Signal. He is the lead developer for Chat Hackers, a collaboration with Campaign Lab to build Whatsapp tools for organisers.

For the programme, John offers a workshop series entitled “Rethinking Chat”, exploring how the ways we communicate shape the ways we organise. Looking at chat as a dominant medium of coordination, from grassroots organising to state power, the workshop examines emerging tools and lived experiences in order to ask what chat might become, and how it might better support political action.

Hoagy Davis-Digges

Hoagy has worked on a number of projects in political and civic technology, working for 38 Degrees and the English National Opera, as well as as a freelance developer. He also worked at a legal technology startup focussing on contract negotiation.

For the programme, Hoagy offers a workshop series on getting data from the open web. 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! New techniques using LLMs have dramatically changed what kinds of data can be discovered, extracted, and reused.

Lewis Westbury

Lewis has been a software developer for more than twenty-five years, working in a wide variety of roles as both staff and contractor. His experience spans a number of specialist areas, including maps and geodata at Google and digital identity at the Government Digital Service.

Lewis is a senior software developer and tech lead at the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design (CCID), part of Nesta.

For the programme, Lewis offers workshops on how to build robust software and systems: exploring how to reason about the hostile conditions of the internet and how to build applications that are reliable, resilient, and worthy of users’ trust. The workshop examines both the practical threats faced by internet-facing systems and the responsibilities involved in handling user data with care.

Dr Joshua Becker

Joshua is an Associate Professor at the UCL School of Management with more than fifteen years of practitioner experience in mediation, facilitation, coaching, and event organising.

His research centres on collective intelligence, by which he means the development and testing of formal and mathematical models of human behaviour in order to understand and design decision-making processes for groups ranging from teams to institutions to societies. After a decade focused on belief accuracy, he has increasingly brought his facilitation practice into conversation with his scientific work 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.

For the programme, Joshua offers a workshop on group decision-making, approaching management as a form of engineering and exploring how group processes can be deliberately designed to support coordination, judgement, and agreement.

Dr Zarinah Agnew

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.

For the programme, Zarinah offer a workshop series on collectivity, exploring the dynamic ways groups can work together to bring about significant social and political change. Moving beyond the simple idea of individuals coming together, the workshop examines how shared purpose and collective action can give rise to new societies and futures. It considers a range of tactics for societal transformation, including experimentation and prefiguration, and asks how these might be used to build new hegemonies: new dominant ideas and systems capable of supporting diverse and hopeful futures.

James Moulding

James Moulding teaches 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 Knowledge, and a National Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion.

For the programme, James offers workshops on network development, field-building and network strategy. This workshop brings the cohort together to explore how to connect fragmented efforts into stronger ecosystems, compound learning across people and organisations, weave power and resources, and sustain leadership and infrastructure beyond individual projects. It will also consider how technology can be used to support and grow communities across different contexts.

Andreas Varotsis

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.

For the programme, Andreas offers a seminar series on evidence and impact, examining how to determine what genuinely works through the design of robust experiments and meaningful evaluation. The series explores not only how impact can be assessed in an empirical and practically useful way, but also how evidence can be turned into action. Drawing on real-world cases where evidence did and did not lead to change, it asks what is required for evidence to shape decisions, institutions, and outcomes.

Sinead Doyle

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.

For the programme, Sinead offers a seminar series that examines the shift from product to service thinking, introduces the core tools and methods of the field, and considers both the rise of service design within the public sector and the practical barriers that continue to limit its application. It also asks how the discipline might evolve to remain relevant in a changing world.

Sam Ballard

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.

For the programme, Sam offers a workshop on game design - the creation of systems intended to produce specific psychological experiences. Drawing on insights from fields such as economics, architecture, ergonomics, and anthropology, the workshop examines games as tools through which players learn to develop strategies for interacting with systems. It also considers how game mechanics can be used to understand, model, and respond to wider systemic challenges.

Alex Vince

Alex has nearly a decade of experience working across the Civil Service in the UK, covering areas such as health, education, defence, and Civil Service reform. He is currently the Deputy Head of the Collective Leadership team, which supports the Civil Service Leadership Group - comprising Permanent Secretaries and Directors General across government.

Alex has been a member of the government's wargaming community of practice for five years, specialising in engagement and facilitation. He established the Fast Stream Wargaming Network and, more recently, has collaborated with the College for National Security to develop an internal talent pipeline for Civil Servants interested in wargaming techniques.

For the programme, Alex offers workshops teaching Wargaming and the practice of Reasonable Challenge, tools to sharpen decision-making, counter groupthink, and build resilience—applicable not only to geopolitical conflict but also to organisational and social challenges. 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.

The wellbeing of participants is of great importance to us. Newspeak House engages a team of accredited psychotherapists and coaches that can 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]

We do not want cost to be a barrier to participation. Thanks to generous gifts from fellows and community members, a limited number of scholarships are available to support both programme fees and accommodation. If your participation would depend on financial support, please indicate this in your application.

The programme fee for the full year is £3000 (inc VAT), payable on acceptance of an offer. Candidates whose participation is contingent on scholarship support will not be expected to take up a place unless an appropriate scholarship can be arranged.

For those who choose to live in college accommodation, the cost is £1100 per calendar month, payable from October 2026 until August 2027 inclusive. This includes all bills, as well as a full-time facilities manager and cleaning of common areas.