Newspeak House is an independent residential college founded in 2015 to study, nurture and inspire emerging communities of practice across civil society and the public sector in the UK. more...
Study with us
Applications for our year-long flagship course Introduction to Political Technology are now open!
This year, in addition to the six residential places, we are pleased to offer six non-residential places on the course.
Course participants spend a year immersed in a wide range of communities working to change society with technology, everything from civil servants, activists, charities, journalists, to researchers.
The course is designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions.
The course has run since 2015 and has graduated 76 fellows. 2024-25 is the second year in which the course will include content led by Newspeak House’s faculty, a group with broad experience in branches of political technology practice and theory including political organising, collective behaviour, open source software, and game design.
The course entails a commitment of approximately 16 hours per week and is designed to fit around a day job.
Events
As part of our research we offer our spaces for civic communities of practice to convene. Since opening in 2015 we have hosted over a thousand events, including lectures, meetups, hackathons, conferences, unconferences, workshops, roundtables, screenings, fundraisers, launches, and exhibitions.
Subscribe to our Event Calendar
If you’d like to host an event in our space, you can hire it outright, or if you’re convening a civic community of practice do get in touch ([email protected]) to see if it could fit into our programme.
What's On
Edward Saperia
Each week the college hosts a community dinner called Ration Club. It's open to anyone who'd like to find out more about the college and its work. To find out more or if you'd like to attend, please register.
Register ↗Take a break from re-imagining the future and let someone else do the imagining for a while at this book club for philosophical science fiction.
Our first reading will be “Five Ways to Forgiveness” by Ursula K. Leguin, a book of 5 short stories.
Join the WhatsApp group to vote on books/dates for future meetings and generally stay up-to-date: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JnVUxsRGKYr3ItbXndvBJx
Register ↗Join us for a bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.
Snacks and drinks provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop!
All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics and technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left. Everyone welcome!
You can join us remotely at this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
What is Campaign Lab?
Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.
Any questions, thoughts or ideas - do get in touch and say hi! [email protected]
Register ↗Part of the Network Development Module of the course in Political Technology at Newspeak House, open to fellowship candidates only.
This session is an opportunity to develop your network development and field building practice.
James will share some thoughts on Network Weaving as a core network development practice.
Register ↗Qualia Research Institute is non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings.
Come if you are interesting in understanding consciousness, meditation, spirituality, psychedelics, neuroscience, neurotechnology, spirituality, the nature of pleasure and pain.
This meetup will have Ethan Kuntz, QRI’s visiting scholar, as our guest start. At QRI Ethan worked on visualizing tactile sensations and mettanealing — a meditation technique that combines Neural Field Annealing principles with metta (loving-kindness) meditation.
At the meetup Ethan will give a 20-minute talk “The thermodynamics of consciousness”. Then we’ll have a Q&A with him on the topic of the talk, his work with QRI in general, as well as any other relevant topics.
We’ll have soft drinks and snacks. We’ll also have food upstairs on the floor above for our regular community dinner Ration Club — feel free to move between these events at any time.
- 7:00 PM: Doors open. Socializing.
- 7:30 PM: Ethan gives a talk “The thermodynamics of consciousness”, Q&A and discussion with Ethan on stage
- 8:45 PM: Socializing, more informal Q&A with Ethan
- 11:30 PM: Ends
Potential topics for discussion:
- Psychedelics. What do exotic states of consciousness can tell us about it? From models of how they work (e. g. QRI’s neural annealing) to writing rigorous trip reports to personal experiences.
- Meditation. Why does it work? What does it say about the consciousness? What does Buddhism get right?
- AI consciousness and sentience. The binding (boundary) problem.
- Valence. The nature of pleasure and pain. Why do some experiences feel better than others? Symmetry Theory of Valence.
- Logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. How much worse are the worst experiences? How much better are the best experiences?
- Formal theories of consciousness. How do we create one? What do we want from a theory of consciousness? Is integrated information theory a pseudoscience?
- Whatever you come up with!
In this second Election Tech Handbook Meetup, we’re bringing together organisations from across UK civic society and technologists.
A quick round of talks from experts will be followed by a speed-dating-type event, pairing technologists up with campaigners and organisations who need their skills.
Register ↗Welcome to the eleventh edition of our London Future of Code meetup!
This is a chance for folks who are part of the Future of Coding community (futureofcoding.org) to present their work in progress and talk shop over a few drinks. If you’re new to the space you can learn more on the FoC website, or by listening to the podcast.
We’re meeting at Newspeak House in Shoreditch. There will be beer, non-alcoholic drinks, and pizza provided. Kindly sponsored by nlux. (If you’re a company who would like to sponsor future events, please email me)
We’ll have community members give a mix of longer talks , demos, and lightning talks. If you would like to do one of these, fill in this airtable form!
Demos/talks can be anything from showing off your side project, to philosophical musings on naming conventions, to a speed tour though a piece of computing history that we can all learn from.
Afterward the talks we’ll have ample time to have a few drinks, eat pizza, ask speakers questions, and hangout. If you are working on something and want feedback, bring your laptop! You can either demo in an open slot, or show people during hangout time.
Rough schedule:
- 18:00 Arrive, get drinks, hang out
- 18:30 First round of speakers
- 19:15 Snacks & drinks break
- 20:00 Second round of speakers
- 20:30 More drinks, ask speakers questions, hang out
- 21:30 Head home / migrate to the pub
Please read and abide by our community Code of Conduct if you plan on attending: github.com/futureofcoding/code-of-conduct
Register ↗The official bi-annual London meetup for fans of the popular blog Astral Codex Ten (formerly Slate Star Codex) by American psychiatrist Scott Alexander.
If you’re reading this, you’re invited! Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
There will be light refreshments and an ongoing unconference. Please register if you plan to go, because ACX has many fans in London and we need to know how many people are coming. If it is fully booked you won’t be able to enter without a ticket.
To be notified of future meetups you should subscribe to ACX London, and also you might want to check out London Rationalish and Effective Altruism UK.
Register ↗Join us for a bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.
Snacks and drinks provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop!
All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics and technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left. Everyone welcome!
You can join us remotely at this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82959644687?pwd=cG9BdEFha3dmNzVjcFd2RUFTWGVNZz09
What is Campaign Lab?
Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.
Any questions, thoughts or ideas - do get in touch and say hi! [email protected]
Register ↗