Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Teona Tomashvili (@teotomashvili) joins us as part of the European Union Civic Digital Fellowship Programme to share her work in Georgia with ForSet, including setting up the country’s Freedom of Information platform AskGov.ge, the data visualisation conference VizHack, and DataFest Tbilisi.

This is the monthly social, aimed at people already familiar with effective altruism. No specific themes, and no need to be there from the start, just come along and chat about whatever you want! :-)

Our first hack night a couple of weeks ago was more popular than expected so we thought it might be fun to do another one! But this time including other open source projects as well.

So, for this evening we focus on these projects:

• polis, an application for large scale open ended feedback, built with JavaScript, React.js, Node.js, Clojure.
• decidim, a participatory democracy framework, built with Ruby and Rails.
• healthsites, a framework for capturing, publishing and sharing critical health and sanitation related data. It’s built with Python and Django.

The plan for this event: Improve the code for one of these applications. Fix a bug or implement a small feature.

Feel free to come with your own open source project as well. This is a selection we thought might be interesting.

Event notes

• Scan through the above projects and their issues and figure out what to work on more specifically. Alternatively, this might become an event where we explore open source rather than hacking on it :D
• This event is for people who feel comfortable coding on their own.
• We are not familiar with these projects! We’ll be figuring it out as we go along with you.
• We’ll provide snacks and drinks!
• Attendees are expected to come with their own laptops. We’ll provide AC electricity.

Join online

If you’re interested in contributing but not able to attend, we will also be online in our Discord group. Hope to see some people there as well!

Notes for Polis

• We have started fleshing out some ideas in the previous event and I think it’d be nice to continue on those as well!
• Polis repository: github.com/compdemocracy/polis
• Polis issues: github.com/compdemocracy/polis/issues. It would be a good idea to scan through these before coming to the event to see if you can find something more specific to work on.
• Polis is built with JavaScript / React.js / Node.js / Clojure / Docker

For more details and stuff to work on check our previous list.

The role of a game designer is to create arbitrary systems in order to evoke specific emotions. What has the game design industry discovered that we might be able to apply to the design of social systems?

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll experience and discuss a few different games, and then participants will have a chance to design, prototype and playtest their own games. All materials will be provided, and no previous experience is required.

To register, please contact Edward Saperia via ed@newspeak.house or @edsaperia.

Optional reading:

• What drives retention?
• The Laws of Online World Design

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Kaliya Young, also known as Identity Woman, is hosting an informal gathering for folks who want to have a conversation about digital identity. At the beginning those who attend will be asked to share what they want to talk about / hope to hear about and Kaliya will share her thoughts and facilitate a conversation.

Kaliya has a broad range of expertise in “identity”:

• The history of identity systems that originated in paper based form.
• Understanding contemporary identity systems in organizations and society that she wrote about in her 2020 book - Domains of Identity: A Framework for Understanding Identity Systems in Contemporary Society (if you bring a copy she will sign it)
• A comprehensive understanding of Self-Sovereign Identity technologies and the communities building it including the Credentials Community Group at the W3C, Decentralized Identity Foundation and the Trust Over IP Foundation. She co-wrote the first book about the technology, A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity.
• She recently founded a consultancy with a partner Lucy Yang.

Tickets are free and you are welcome to make a donation. Contributions will help Kaliya cover the cost of her trip that is self funded.

Our first hack night a couple of weeks ago was more popular than expected so we thought it might be fun to do another one! But this time including other open source projects as well.

So, for this evening we focus on these projects:

• polis, an application for large scale open ended feedback, built with JavaScript, React.js, Node.js, Clojure.
• decidim, a participatory democracy framework, built with Ruby and Rails.
• healthsites, a framework for capturing, publishing and sharing critical health and sanitation related data. It’s built with Python and Django.

The plan for this event: Improve the code for one of these applications. Fix a bug or implement a small feature.

Feel free to come with your own open source project as well. This is a selection we thought might be interesting.

Event notes

• Scan through the above projects and their issues and figure out what to work on more specifically. Alternatively, this might become an event where we explore open source rather than hacking on it :D
• This event is for people who feel comfortable coding on their own.
• We are not familiar with these projects! We’ll be figuring it out as we go along with you.
• We’ll provide snacks and drinks!
• Attendees are expected to come with their own laptops. We’ll provide AC electricity.

Join online

If you’re interested in contributing but not able to attend, we will also be online in our Discord group. Hope to see some people there as well!

Notes for Polis

• We have started fleshing out some ideas in the previous event and I think it’d be nice to continue on those as well!
• Polis repository: github.com/compdemocracy/polis
• Polis issues: github.com/compdemocracy/polis/issues. It would be a good idea to scan through these before coming to the event to see if you can find something more specific to work on.
• Polis is built with JavaScript / React.js / Node.js / Clojure / Docker

For more details and stuff to work on check our previous list.

​A salon to discuss contrarian investment theses based on undervalued and under-appreciated technologies and trends that everyone else is missing. The future is not just web3, metaverse and flying taxis.

​Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, Research Partner at Lunar Ventures, a European early-stage deep tech venture fund, will provide the headline presentation. ​As part of an “unconference” approach, attendees will be invited to share their reflections on Lawrence’s insights and to add their own.

Come to meet EAs in tech in London, eat, chat about how to do the most good, and learn about current job openings.

• 7:00pm: arrive, drinks & (vegan) pizza 🍕
• 7:20pm: talk by Ari Kagan, CEO of Momentum, on their mission and their new roles
• 7:30pm: talk by Seb Becker, Lead Developer of Effektiv Spenden, on how he came to work at an EA org, and the current EA tech job market.
• 7:50pm+: drinks on the terrace 🍺

Do invite relevant people!

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

“As we move further in to the Age of Smarter Machines and Artificial Intelligence, how do we ensure that the systems we are building continue to evolve as we need them to, and that the differing speeds of change between humans and technologies can be reconciled?”

A discussion about technology and human values facilitated by Anni Rowland-Campbell, founder of the Intersticia Foundation and an observer and practitioner of web science.

You will hear what was hot on the campaigning trail, which future policies worked for the voters, which communication tools were useful and how tech was helping micro-local elections. We will also report on elections for Internet Governance and other meta global bodies.

Cross-Party Panel:

• Kian Richardson (Labour Party election candidate for Regent Park branch, London)
• Green Party and Independent candidates
• Voter Registration Week campaigners
• Dr Richard Barbrook (Westminster University)
• Chair – Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org)

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

For this session, instead of a reading list, we’ll be doing a round of “what have you been thinking about lately”. Interpret loosely, and feel free to pass if you’re shy/haven’t been thinking about things/have mostly been thinking about that one other member you have a crush on but you’d just die if they knew. We’ll start that around 3pm, so from 2-3 I guess we’re only allowed to talk about things we haven’t been thinking about lately.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

The second meeting of the “Kolokol” club.

The war in Ukraine has led to the strengthening of the repressive regime in Russia. It has had an effect on Russian universities and in particular the social sciences. Some academics had to resign and leave Russia, others were censored and persecuted. Students faced repressions, too. We will discuss these developments and strategies to resist them. The discussion will be in Russian.

If you plan to come, please email bessudnov at gmail.com.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Pol.is - the most exciting thing to happen to digital democracy?

Polis is an open source tool for gathering, analyzing and understanding in real time what large groups of people think in their own words.

The plan for this event: Let’s meet and try to improve it - fix a bug or implement a small feature!

please register

Here’s is the Polis repository: github.com/compdemocracy/polis. There are currently 255 issues open. It would be a good idea to scan through these before coming to the event to see if you can find something more specific to work on.

Notes

• This event is for people who feel comfortable working with any of JavaScript / React.js / Node.js / Clojure / Docker as these are the languages/libraries that polis is built with.
• We are not familiar with the polis source code! We’ll be figuring it out as we go along with you.
• We’ll provide snacks and drinks!
• Attendees are expected to come with their own laptops. We’ll provide AC electricity.

Selection of issues

• Good first issue
• Top priority issues
• Accessibility issues
• Bugs
• Chores
• Infrastructure

Source code

Even though we’re unfamiliar with the polis repository, after a little bit of research we have learned:

The whole polis service is composed of:

• server/, written in Node.js, is the main server app
• math/, written in Clojure, is the statistical analysis part
• client-participation/, written in Javascript, compile to static assets, is the client code for end-users
• client-admin/, written in Javascript, compile to static assets, is the client code for administrators
• client-report/, written in Node.js, is the code for detailed analytics reports
• architecture overview

One of several afterparties for Effective Altruism Global. See the other afterparties at bit.ly/EAGafterparties.

Pandemic Prevention Network is a project to build a community of individuals and organisations dedicated to preventing pandemics, as well as an open platform for access to scientific knowledge and evidence-backed strategies for pandemic prevention. This event will be a casual meetup with drinks, discussion and an update on our activities.

We are open to all EA and non-EA individuals who are interested in exploring the topic of biosecurity, existential risk, health policy and pandemic prevention. We will be joined by our community members ranging from students, civil servants, policy experts to founders, all united on the topic of pandemic prevention. We would love to connect you and spark engaging conversations with our members!

Meet-up for (aspiring) consultants and members of the effective altruism community, who want to network and discuss how to do the most good as a consultant.

We are looking forward to connecting with you in an informal setting. No previous experience required.

A meetup for fans of the blog Astral Codex Ten, as well as an afterparty for Effective Altruism Global.

Could psychedelics-assisted therapy be helpful for Effective Altruists to become more aligned and effective? What are the biggest risks we should be aware of as psychedelics become legalised?

We’re going to discuss The Best Arguments Against Psychedelics Being An EA Cause Area by Milan Griffes where he proposes his arguments why psychedelics research & advocacy is a promising altruistic EA cause area. In 2019 Milan offered a cash prize for best arguments against his proposal, all of which are included in comments and are highly recommended as a pre-read. The winner shared the link to this Slate Star Codex post, which could be a useful read to balance Milan’s perspective.

The discussion will be facilitated by Sandra Sobanska who has been exploring the potential for a safe and intentional use of psychedelics as a tool for personal growth, working with emotional blocks and improving leadership. She’s currently working at a London-based startup, developing a digital therapy platform for social anxiety based on computational neuroscience.

Everyone is welcome to this free event, whether you’re familiar with effective altruism or not.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Tech for Good London’s first event of 2022: a hybrid mini-unconference.

To us, ‘tech for good’ is the intentional use of technology to drive positive outcomes for people and planet. The tech for good movement continues to evolve and grow in the face of ongoing upheaval and transitions across politics, society and the environment.

Over the last two years, we’ve welcomed many people into our virtual events who wouldn’t have been able to join in person. We can’t wait to connect with some of you over drinks and nibbles in a physical space once more - but we also still want to include members who don’t live in London, or who face barriers to attending, because our community and collective wisdom are stronger for this diversity.

This event is for all entrepreneurs, nonprofits, funders, technologists, policy people and corporations, or folk working on or interested in tech for good. It’s your space to get to know each other and explore whatever questions, ideas and conversations feel most important to you right now.

If you haven’t been to an unconference or an agendaless meeting before, this is what to expect:

• At the outset, anyone can propose a topic or question they’d like to talk about in a 30-minute session
• Sessions can be either a facilitated group discussion or a presentation with Q&A
• People vote on the session ideas they’re most interested in
• We’ll collate, group and prioritise ideas based on the votes, and assign them to spaces (physical in the room or in breakout rooms online, running in parallel)
• If your proposed session is selected, you can either hold the space for it yourself or ask one of the organisers to help
• After 30 minutes, we’ll wrap up the first sessions and begin the second
• Once the second round of sessions ends, we’ll bring physical and virtual audiences together and hear briefly from each group about the key points they talked about.
• After that, we’ll have community announcements, which is your chance to speak for 1 minute about any project, request, an offer of help, job opening, product launch or cool thing you’ve seen. We’ll write these up and share them with our 10,000+ meetup members.

If you aren’t able to attend in person, check out our meetup page for the virtual event here: https://www.meetup.com/techforgood/events/284801356/

In 2017 Newspeak House hosted the launch party of commons.legal, now an award-winning, not-for-profit criminal law firm working towards social justice.

In 2022 they return to celebrate their 5th anniversary!

A meetup for Odin members. Odin is a community-driven investment platform on a mission to reimagine how value is created and distributed. joinodin.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

On Wednesday 6 April, local councils will release details of who is standing for the local elections. At this event, we’ll be collecting all that data together into one open database.

Stay for the whole session or just drop in whenever you can — every little helps!

We’ll provide drinks and snacks!

You’ll need a laptop, but no technical knowledge.

You might like to join the Democracy Club Slack and sign up for an account at candidates.democracyclub.org.uk before the event.

On Saturday, April 2 at 17 o’clock in London, the first meeting of the “Kolokol” club will take place. Theme of the meeting: “How and why the Soviet Union fell apart” (or in other words: the one who died, the one who died will also die). Format: round table, open discussion, exchange of opinions. The discussion will be held in Russian.

The meeting will be attended by: Viktor Veterinarov (UCL), Ilya Yablokov (University of Sheffield), Olga Solovyeva (Open University), Sergey Mokhov (Liverpool John Moores University), Alexey Besudnov (University of Exeter).

If you plan to come, please email bessudnov at gmail.com.

Welcome to Experiments in Waste, a 36 hour pop-up lab exploring a refillable future.

Bringing together artists, designers, activists, strategists, technologists and more to co-create prototypes with potential to mainstream refilling as an everyday behaviour. How can we shift to waste less and live more?

• Thursday 31st March 6:00-9:00pm
• Friday 1st April 9:30am-4:30pm

Expect inspiring talks, immersive experiences, food, music, and working in accelerated and playful ways with others.

Experiments in Waste is powered by Ecover.

Unfortunately, spots are very limited and so are by invitation only.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Short talks followed by dinner & networking. Meet other researchers, practitioners and technologists working on and with digital tools for public participation. Speakers:

Colin Megill @colinmegill is the cofounder of Polis and board president of the Computational Democracy Project, the 501c3 which maintains the codebase and the primary free instance at pol.is/home. He will lead a discussion about his lifetime ambition: transitioning representative democracies to organizing mechanisms better than parties.

Sarah Castell @sarahcastell is the CEO of Involve. She will give an overview of the public participation landscape in the UK.

Oli Whittington @oliwhittington leads democratic innovation in the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta. He will explore why we often fail to move beyond individual pilots, and designing ways in which we can mainstream and scale digital democracy — and if scale is even the right objective.

Simon Parker @SimonFParker, Director of Transformation and Policy Capability at the UK Department for Education, has been experimenting with using Polis internally in the civil service. He promises to share an astonishing new insight with us.

Akshaya Satheesh @codewithshaya is a developer at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. She will share CASMs experiments using Polis to understand issues such as Covid-19 misinformation and public attitudes on responsible technology.

Ruth Wetters @ruthwetters is a data scientist who has worked on visualisations for Polis. She’ll talk about designing democratic tools in AI, and the ways in which Polis promotes transparency, accessibility and security.

Join Campaign Lab for a hack day working on political data science challenges and designing, developing and testing election tech and campaigning innovations.

From data analysis to improve mobilisation to developing new election tools for activists on the ground, we’ll be working out how together we can create new election tech for the left.

• 25th March 7pm - Drinks, social and team forming!
• 26th March 10am till late - A day of hacking!

You will need to bring a laptop to this event.

At the hack day we’ll be:

• Hearing from Labour HQ about how we can work together
• Analysing some synthetic membership data
• Thinking about what tools we could build to better engage Labour members
• Thinking about what campaigning tools or apps we could build if we had a Labour Members Log In
• Exploring how we help activists campaigning on Facebook

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.

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.

This event is for participants in the The Food Data Collaboration, which aims to create an infrastructure that empowers local producers to list & sell their produce across multiple platforms seamlessly, nurturing diversity at scale and supporting farmer-focussed, community-led food systems to thrive.

Building on the work of The Data Food Consortium the project brings together technical platforms (Open Food Network, Ooooby, Big Barn, BoxMaster) engaged with short supply chain food sales to implement an data interoperability framework with organisations and individuals from across the sustainable, regenerative agriculture space (Sustain, Better Food Traders, the Landworkers’ Alliance) and local food producers and distributors to begin the journey of creating a commons governance process to manage the data space created by the Technical workstream.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

It’s been one year since the launch of The Centre for Democracy, founded to develop the ecosystem of organisations working towards a better democracy in the UK. In that time we’ve hosted more than thirty meetups, and as many UK Democracy Bulletins have landed in your inboxes.

We wanted to celebrate our one year anniversary the best way we know how: to create a space for democracy people to meet and work together. So if you’re working on a democracy project or organisation, or just keen to meet people that do, come along and join us for a co-working day at Newspeak House.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at hello@centrefordemocracy.org.uk. Centre for Democracy runs a fortnightly online meetup, publishes a newsletter read by more than 280+ democracy organisations, and maintains a database of sector jobs, events and funding opportunities. For more info, please see centrefordemocracy.org.uk.

The first of a weekly discussion group for Effective Altruism topics. EA is about using evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.

This week we’re discussing FTX Foundation’s Future Fund

“The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.“

There is limited numbers so if you’re interested please RSVP to david@ealondon.com.

Covid: If you can, take a lateral flow test before coming.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

A panel exploring the potential of NFTs for identity and authentication.

• Caron-Jane Lyon @PCMCreative, holder of Arts Council grant for NFTs for creative industry
• Stefan Lutschinger @lutschinger (Lecturer in Digital Media and Web3 at Middlesex University)
• Richard Boase @boaserichard (blockchain game developer Satoshi Block Dojo)
• Luka, Artur and Michal (online music streaming platform Soundoshi)
• Chair: Eva Pascoe (cybersalon.org)

The first of a weekly discussion group for Effective Altruism topics. EA is about using evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.

This week we’re discussing Mushtaq Khan on ‘using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms’:

“Anti-corruption in contexts where corruption is widespread only works if you can separate people who are violating rules for reasonable reasons from other people who are violating rules for unreasonable reasons. And if you can identify the people who are violating the rules for reasonable reasons and solve their problems so they can comply with rules, they become your allies“

There is limited numbers so if you’re interested please RSVP to david@ealondon.com.

Covid: If you can, take a lateral flow test before coming.

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Instead of a reading list, this month we’ll have a meta-meetup. The idea is to be a space to discuss what works for you about London Rationalish, what doesn’t work, what you’d like to change.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

Join us for the launch of “Democracy in a Pandemic”, a collection of essays drawing together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers, highlighting the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic, and making the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts.

Short talks will by given by contributors to the book, including the editor Graham Smith, Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy. Talks will be followed by a light buffet dinner.

This event is hosted by Involve’s new Democracy Network, and is open to anyone working in or curious about the field of democracy or civic engagement.

This is the first of a series of events at Newspeak House in support of Ukraine and Ukrainians during these hard times.

After the talks, we will give participants the opportunity to share relevant initiatives they are working on. We are particularly interested in the fight against disinformation and the distribution of verified and useful information.

We also welcome any specialists who may want to organize further events connected with the war in Ukraine - please contact [email protected]

The Economics of The War in Ukraine, by a Russian Economist

“I was born in Kyiv, raised in Moscow, and studied economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. I am Russian with many friends whose families live in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is a tragedy on many levels and it is personal for me”

Viktor Veterinarov ([email protected]) is a researcher in economics at the UCL, focusing on the political economy and labor economics of migration. The talk will provide historical context to the current war in Ukraine and an economic perspective on the consequences of war.

Historical Context: What is the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine? What challenges have they faced during the last three decades, and why has it escalated now? Viktor will explain how the Russian and Ukrainian economies and cultures are connected, the institutional differences between the two countries, and the role of propaganda and authoritarian tendencies in this divergence.

War Economics: What are the consequences of modern wars from an economic perspective? How do wars affect trade and production chains through network channels (the Donbas War study)? We will also cover the effect of refugees on host countries’ labor market based on evidence from Turkey and the Syrian War.

For curious participants, there are some references to related academic papers

Emergency Response Mechanisms and the Architecture of the Humanitarian System

Manon Jones ([email protected]) works for the CCCM Cluster in geospatial analysis and information management at the Department of Emergency at the United Nations International Organization for Migration. Manon has a background in International Development and Urban Design Research and has carried out several research projects at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) analyzing refugee settlements.

Further talks TBC

If you have a talk you would like to give, at this event or future events in this series, please contact [email protected]

Opinions expressed are solely personal and do not express the views or opinions of any employers or political organizations.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

The first of a weekly discussion group for Effective Altruism topics. EA is about using evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.

This week we’re discussing ‘It’s okay to leave EA’ by Julia Wise:

“Several times in the last few weeks I’ve seen someone saying EA has become really bad for them. I don’t have anything really profound to say here, but I think people who are especially miserable in EA should seriously consider leaving.

There are lots of ways to engage with EA, and sometimes if you’re burnt out on some aspects there are other aspects that still feel viable and invigorating. But maybe there aren’t. Maybe the whole thing makes you want to hide in bed. And if so, I think you should trust your gut. Not to hide in bed, I mean, but to get some space from EA.

I realize “take some space” might be easier said than done, especially if you work in the EA space or a lot of your social life is there. Maybe try out a small experiment first: a vacation from EA-related work, reading, or actions.“

There is limited numbers so if you’re interested please RSVP to david@ealondon.com.

Covid: If you can, take a lateral flow test before coming.

A meetup for Odin members. Odin is a community-driven investment platform on a mission to reimagine how value is created and distributed. joinodin.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Join your fellow HackThePress members at Newspeak House to hang out and continue hacking on media-tech 👩‍💻

We’ll provide power, WiFi, and somewhere warm, you bring the code! (and beer)

Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to work on. There are a few projects for you to join, or you can come with your own idea to work on.

We’ll be offering technical, design, product, and news industry support to you and your project.

The first of a weekly discussion group for Effective Altruism topics. EA is about using evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.

This week we’re discussing ‘We need more nuance regarding funding gaps’ by Joey Savoie:

“Funding gaps are a well-discussed topic in the EA movement and between funders of all sizes. The concept overall is highly relevant and useful when making decisions. However, I think the bulk of communication about funding gaps is quite unspecific and unrefined, and even carefully communicated content can lead to confusion in overall discourse. A claim like “EA has a funding gap” or “EA does not have a funding gap” is too unspecific a heuristic and can lead to a lot of confusion about the state of funding, as some strong charities receive no funding despite a consensus that the given area is considered “funding flooded.” Working with a number of early-stage charities going through the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program has really given me a more nuanced sense of where specific gaps are and how important this information can be.”

There is limited numbers so if you’re interested please RSVP to david@ealondon.com.

Covid: If you can, take a lateral flow test before coming.

The first of a weekly discussion group for Effective Altruism topics. EA is about using evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.

This week we’re discussing ‘The Most Important Century’, focusing on the first two sections, the intro and ‘All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild’.

“I think we have good reason to believe that the 21st century could be the most important century ever for humanity. I think the most likely way this would happen would be via the development of advanced AI systems that lead to explosive growth and scientific advancement, getting us more quickly than most people imagine to a deeply unfamiliar future.“

There is limited numbers so if you’re interested please RSVP to david@ealondon.com.

Covid: If you can, take a lateral flow test before coming.

A screening of the multi-award-winning documentary Bringing Down a Dictator (56m), which explores the nonviolent defeat of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, focusing on the contributions of the student-led Otpor! movement, followed by a Q&A with Srdja Popovik, leader of Otpor 1998-2002 and now a member of Serbia’s parliament.

This is a workshop on creating—all attendees together—a hypothetical software product that would help us make collective decisions.

There is a lot of prior art in this domain of collective/democratic decision making, yet we want to completely ignore it. If you have no idea about the prior art, please come tabula rasa and don’t make any research.

Motivation

Living in the same area implies some kind of coordination. This can start from agreeing that we will not build houses where roads are but also escalates to handling a situation of a neighbour having Covid and not being able to afford food.

In the West, we abstract this coordination away to the Council / Mayor / Government, yet lots of people not part of these institutions want (and do) help. Can software help them? This workshop is an investigation into how.

Details

• The goal is to design (not visually/graphically) a small software product that can facilitate decision making.
• We’ll focus on designing a solution for a local London neighbourhood with a population between 100 and 1000.
• We assume there will not be uniformity across our population. Eg, if we’d designed this for a company we could assume a certain common culture. This is not true in our case of a highly diverse neighbourhood of houses and shops.
• Non goals:
  • We are not interesting in approaching this in a deeply technical manner. This means that we are not interested in algorithmic consensus or blockchain distributedness. We are interested in the UX of the software.
  • We don’t expect people who do this as part of their day job to attend and deliver a sophisticated proposal. This is an experiment for people interested in the ideas of solving local problems autonomously, whatever their expertise (if you do this as part of your job though, please do attend, we’d love your input!)
  • We are not necessarily interested in actually building the solution we’ll come up with. If it’s great, we (or someone else) might though!

Schedule

• Introductory presentation on what we want to achieve (5 min)
• Questions and discussion on end result — opening the scope of what’s possible (10 min)
• Feature ideation and brainstorming — what could our functionality be (10 min)
• Defining an MVP — limiting the scope of our end result to a manageable size (20 min)
• Devising a strategy for extending our MVP (10 min)
• Epilogue — feedback — reflections

Note 1: In case more than 10 people show up, we might split up into two parallel teams doing the same thing.

Note 2: Please come even if you think you are or work in a field atypical for such an event!

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

Local News is broken.

We’ve partnered with two Local News organisations to help find ways technology can enhance a local community:

• Social Spider - Runs 5 Local Newspapers in London
• Clear Sky - A startup Local News company looking to deliver news differently

The core theme we’ll be exploring is enhancing local community, specifically:

• How can we build connections between members of a local community?
• How can we amplify voices within a local community?
• How can we surface information about a local community?

We will have a judging panel of 4 people from the tech and news industries who will select a winner in each of the three themes above.

For more information, see https://hackthepress.eventbrite.com

Slack workspace: https://bit.ly/HTPSlack

Doors will be open from 0900 for a 0930 start on Saturday.

If you’re new to Hackathons, take a look at this: https://hackathon.guide. Everyone is welcome, as long as they follow our code-of-conduct and have signed up on Eventbrite. Beginners are especially welcome! Attendees have a huge range of skill-sets, so you’ll have no problem finding someone to learn from. We have experts from three different fields (developers, journalists, researchers) to help you improve and build your ideas. The last two HackThePress Hackathons (2019 and 2020) were huge successes, you can read more about them here: https://hackthepress.org

Code of Conduct

Public discourse receives the blame for many of society’s problems, but also holds many of our hopes for human progress. Newspeak House presents an evening of lectures on how to think about what people are talking about.

Areeq Chowdhury: The Effect of Digital Technologies on Scientific Misinformation

​How are digital technologies changing the way people interact with information? What technologies are there that can fabricate and detect misinformation? And what role does technology have to play in creating a better information environment?

​Areeq will talk about The Royal Society’s recent report The Online Information Environment that addresses these questions, providing an overview of how the internet has changed, and continues to change, the way society engages with scientific information, and how it may be affecting people’s decision-making behaviour from taking up vaccines to responding to evidence on climate change, highlight key challenges for creating a healthy online information environment, and make recommendations for policymakers, academics, and online platforms.

​Areeq Chowdhury (@AreeqChowdhury) is a Senior Policy Adviser at The Royal Society (the UK’s national academy for science) focusing on data and digital technologies, and founded the influential technology policy think tank, WebRoots Democracy.

Luke Thorburn: Metaphors for Public Discourse

​Consider the totality of all human communication, opinion, knowledge, and the mechanisms by which these things change over time. Some people call it the “information environment” or the “marketplace of ideas”, but to use such terms is to assume that environmental or economic metaphors are appropriate. Over the past few years, Luke Thorburn has been accumulating an inventory of such metaphors.

​In this talk, he will provide an overview of the different metaphors commonly (and less commonly) used, where they fall short, and the different interventions and regulatory responses they imply—aiming to promote critical thinking about such metaphors when they are encountered ‘in the wild’.

Luke Thorburn (@LukeThorburn) is a PhD candidate at King’s College London within The Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI. His primary research interest is in ensuring that the algorithms used to mediate our shared epistemic systems are aligned with human values, as well as better understanding the extent to which this is important. Previously, he was a member of The Hunt Lab for Intelligence Research at the University of Melbourne.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

An informal in-person meetup for members of ClimateAction.tech:

ClimateAction.tech (CAT) is a global community of tech professionals using our skills, expertise and platforms to support solutions to the climate crisis.

The ClimateAction.tech mission is to empower technology professionals to play our part — to meet, discuss, learn and take climate action.

Our vision is that everyone is working on the climate crisis at all levels, and together we are driving industry and society toward a sustainable future.

Our approach is to advocate internally within tech, and to collaborate externally to support the broader climate movement from tech.

Since forming, our membership has ballooned globally, and now involves vibrant input from students and graduates, through managers, designers, developers and creatives who work in tech across a wide array of industries, all the way through to senior figures at the world’s largest tech companies.

We operate an intentionally safe and inclusive environment at all times (code of conduct), for people of any gender, identity, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status and/or other possible historically exploited differentiators. Protecting this is, and will always be, core to our community value system.

Membership is open to anyone who identifies as a tech worker. People of any geographic region, sector, skill-set, day job, seniority, knowledge or experience level are welcome.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

An informal in-person meetup for members of ClimateAction.tech:

ClimateAction.tech (CAT) is a global community of tech professionals using our skills, expertise and platforms to support solutions to the climate crisis.

The ClimateAction.tech mission is to empower technology professionals to play our part — to meet, discuss, learn and take climate action.

Our vision is that everyone is working on the climate crisis at all levels, and together we are driving industry and society toward a sustainable future.

Our approach is to advocate internally within tech, and to collaborate externally to support the broader climate movement from tech.

Since forming, our membership has ballooned globally, and now involves vibrant input from students and graduates, through managers, designers, developers and creatives who work in tech across a wide array of industries, all the way through to senior figures at the world’s largest tech companies.

We operate an intentionally safe and inclusive environment at all times (code of conduct), for people of any gender, identity, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status and/or other possible historically exploited differentiators. Protecting this is, and will always be, core to our community value system.

Membership is open to anyone who identifies as a tech worker. People of any geographic region, sector, skill-set, day job, seniority, knowledge or experience level are welcome.

A meetup to discuss founding, building and scaling crypto native companies: DAOs, chains & tokens.

• 7pm greets
• 7:10pm update on w3meetupDAO
• 7:20: Talk 1 - Daniel Tenner @swombat on the intersection of NFTs and DAOs
• 7:30: Talk 2 - Amenti Kenea @Amenti4K
• 8pm: Drinks & chat on terrace

Likely around 25 attendees including, Kevin McDonagh and Ed

This group is developing a DAO to pay for sponsored meetups. You can join the journey on yet another Discord.

Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) is Europe’s leading early stage investor in tech for good supporting ambitious tech for good ventures. We provide investment, support and intensive mentoring to great teams with new ideas for using technology to tackle big social and environmental problems.

Applications for our Spring 2022 programme are open until 9th January 2022.

This Q&A event is a great opportunity for startups considering applying to join our next cohort, to find out more about what BGV offers.

You’ll get the chance to meet some of the startups we’ve supported on previous programmes, and learn what it’s like to be part of the growing BGV community. There will also be the opportunity to talk to the BGV team about your idea and get answers to any questions you might have.

Agenda

• 5.00pm Registration and welcome drinks
• 5.15pm What happens at BGV? Who do we support? What does the 12 week programme entail? How much do we invest? Who are our mentors? What other support do we offer? What does it mean to be part of the BGV community?
• 5.45pm Stories from our startups: Hear from other tech for good founders who have been through the BGV programme. Learn from their experiences first hand and hear their tips for getting the most out of BGV.
• 6.00pm Q&A: Ask the BGV team and startup founders any questions you might have about our investment and support programme.
• 6.30pm Networking - Meet fellow founders and chat with some of the BGV startups. You can also use this time to talk with the BGV team about your startup and get feedback on your idea.
• 7.00pm Event close - Before coming to the event it may be helpful to re-read through the information on our programme here. If you’re in a team then we’d encourage you to bring your co-founders/colleagues with you.

Please note that we want to keep everyone attending safe and adhere to government guidelines for health and safety during a pandemic. If you feel more comfortable joining a virtual event, you can sign up to one of our virtual Q&A events.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@bethnalgreenventures.com

We look forward to meeting you!

The BGV team

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist. People start showing up around two, and there are almost always people around until after six, but feel free to come and go at whatever time.

Usually we have a short list of articles for discussion. No need to read them, but you may well want to. This time the articles are:

1. WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
2. Why I Am Not In Charge
3. Still Not In Charge

We’ll start to discuss these around 3. If you have a reading you’d like to suggest for future meetups, please do so at reddit.com/r/londonrationalish, or email Phil.

At 5pm, Joshua Becker will lead a discussion on Priya Parker “The Art of Gathering”.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

In our previous meetup we discussed—amongst other things—scientific magazine publishing houses. However, only few of us had an idea of how they work and most of us didn’t really know much.

There is merit in learning about them; especially if we want to propose an alternative model.

At this meetup we will hear from someone who has worked on this domain from both the side of publishing companies as well as the side of academia, who will hopefully shed some light into how all these things work, what are their objectives, how they profit, etc.

Join us to learn about all these things and talk about Open Access and scientific knowledge dissemination! (Please feel free to join even if you think you are not the usual person who’s interested in things like that).

Here is our Code of Conduct.

PS. We do not support, endorse, or contribute in any way to illegal activities. Our interest to Sci-Hub is only from a societal and research point of view.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

We are delighted to announce that Raul Espejo, the pioneer of Cybernetics and Cybersyn system will give our annual Cybersalon Xmas Lecture in person. We will discuss what Cybersyn pioneers would say about our chances of ‘bouncing back better’. To optimise or to re-boot, this is the question (or one of many).

From Stafford Beer, Janos Kornai to more modern Viable Systems Model, cybernetics can all point at solutions for our current predicament. How do you balance rapid adaptation to new circumstances with making sure you don’t fall over is the question for 2020.

Raul Espejo worked on the original Cybersyn in Chile in 1971-1973 during presidency of Salvador Allende. He has escaped safely and has since been lecturing world-wide on the future of systems. Raul is currently based in Lincoln University.

After the talk we will host a discussion on future of systemic adaptation to Climate Change with Raul Espejo, Dr Richard Barbrook (Westminster University), Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org), and Edward Saperia (Newspeak House).

CyberSanta with mince pies to follow.

Sponsors:

• Cybersalon.org – Think Tank on Digital Futures
• Patchworks.com – No 1 UK Ecom Systems Integrator
• Hydro66.com – Green Energy Data Centres

Celebrate winter with DataKind UK, a non-profit helping charitable organisations explore and unlock the possibilities within their data.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

A meetup of DeveloperDAO, a community of builders who believe in collective ownership of the internet.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

A meetup to discuss founding, building and scaling crypto native companies: DAOs, chains & tokens.

Short talks (tbc) then drinks & mingling.

Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app. Instead of using techniques like virtual DOM diffing, Svelte writes code that surgically updates the DOM when the state of your app changes. Read the introductory blogpost to learn more.

Join fellow Svelte enthusiasts for an evening of lightning talks and chatter.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Usually we have a short list of articles for discussion. No need to read them, but you may well want to. This time the articles are:

1. Online Regulation of Terrorist and Harmful Content
2. Curing insanity with malaria

We’ll start to discuss these around 3. If you have a reading you’d like to suggest for future meetups, please do so at reddit.com/r/londonrationalish, or email Phil.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO A POSSIBLE COVID OUTBREAK

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Due to high demand, this event has been moved to The Dickens Inn in Tower Hill, please re-register.

This is a social aimed at people already familiar with effective altruism, including people who haven’t been to an event before. No themes - just come along and chat about whatever you want!

If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Many people do not know what economics is about, what economists do, and why they receive a Nobel Prize every year for something incomprehensible. This small workshop with a live discussion will help you to see that economics may be clear and straightforward. It will be especially useful for people with experience in social sciences and/or data analysis.

This year Nobel laureates’ research mostly covers causal effects of policies: specifically, how we can measure the role of migration, health, and education in our society. We will discuss why we cannot answer many policy questions based on just averages, correlations, anecdotal evidence, and case studies.

Using examples of policies in migration, health and education we will get acquainted with two basic methods: Regression discontinuity design and Propensity score matching. We will discuss their basic versions and some applications.

There are three main topics:

• One more cigarette or not today? Why the impact of smoking on our health it is not straightforward
• They are taking our jobs! Or not? What migration means for natives and who should worry
• “Mom, I decided to drop out of college and start doing real things!” At what point this may be a very good decision, not only youthful frivolity

For curious participants, there are some references to laureates’ academic papers.

Viktor Veterinarov, Economist, Data Scientist, Researcher at UCL Department of Economics, Resident Fellow at Newspeak House. v.veterinarov@ucl.ac.uk, @VVeterinarov

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

We are very excited to host an extra special in-person Hattusia community meet up, as a chance to chat in person with others working in technology who also care about ethics. We’re looking forward to a really relaxed meet up, as an opportunity to meet and chat to other people who are doing the same job as you, exchange ideas on how to manage tricky problems and situations - and above all have fun. Please register if you are attending.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, run by volunteers from the community and open to members and non-members alike. A great chance to meet the fellows and get the latest tech & politics gossip.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

An in-person social for social impact driven youth. Invited youth groups include members of Global Shapers Cambridge, London, London Shapers, Shaping Horizons, and VOICES. We will be an overall of 20-25 people at max, and we will be outside, on the venue’s terrace (some areas have a roof so in case if it’s raining we can still be there). As we don’t have funding for this social please bring drinks/food that you wish to have or share during the event. If you would like to attend, please contact Zsofia.

Since February Sci-Hub has stopped adding new articles, due an ongoing legal hearing.

We’re a group of people (not affiliated with Sci-Hub) who want to talk about and exchange ideas and stories about the unique library, the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers.

Sci-Hub can be approached through many lenses:

• Practical. Making it easier to download articles, even when one has access through the official channels.
• Essential. Without Sci-Hub lots of people (and especially those from poor countries/universities) would not be able to access a wide array papers.
• Ethical. Neither does one want to be treated unfairly nor wrong someone else. Is it fair for Sci-Hub to exist?
• Political. In addition to everything else, it was our societies’ laws that motivated Sci-Hub to come to existence.
• Technical. How on earth does all this bandwidth demand from all over the world get covered?
• Legal. What do copyright laws say and how are they defined?
• Research. Does more people having access to research papers lead to science speeding up?
• …and many more we haven’t thought yet.

If you have any thoughts or comments on the above, join us—we’d love to hear them.

PS. We do not support, endorse, or contribute in any way to illegal activities. Our interest to Sci-Hub is only from a societal and research point of view.

Paolo Gerbaudo, Italian sociologist and political theorist based at King’s College London, launches his new book exploring the transformation of politics in the aftermath of the pandemic and the return of the interventionist state.

In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning.

This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity.

The book launch event will host the book author alongside other authors and academics working on related issues. It will be followed by a Q&A session.

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event, and can be bought online now.

You say wot?

This September Poles Apart by Wine and Wotsit’s founder Ali Goldsworthy is published. Poles Apart looks at why we are divided and what we can do about it when it gets to excessive levels. A key part of that is asking yourself about a time you changed your mind on an issue and why.

So we’ve got a Wine and Wotsits special. With leaders trying to answer that question in 20 slides which each take 20 seconds. The final presentation of the night will come from Ali along with co-authors Laura Osborne and Alex Chesterfield. They’ll dig into why it is so hard, and so important to understand.

So not only do we give you lighting talks from world class speakers. We give you wotsits. And a book Penguin Random House think is a timeless classic. (you can let us know if you agree)

The format will remain the one you know and love - pecha kucha. This means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, The Sunday Times, pollsters, leading academics, journalists and many more.

Wot Wot Where?

We’re going hybrid. There will be a limited number of tickets for Newspeak House, 133 Bethnal Green Road, London to keep us Corona compliant and space for others to dial in online.

Wot Wot Who?

We’ll be unveiling the full list of speakers over the next week…. but we’re ready to unveil the first three…

• Anjali Ramachandran (Director Storythings, Co Founder Ada’s list)
• Nick Barron (Deputy CEO, MHP)

plus

• Laura Osborne, Alex Chesterfield and Ali Goldsworthy, Co-Authors, Poles Apart.
  

How many tickets are there?

We are strictly limited to 60 in person - but many more can join online.

You are charging this time - what do I get?

The ticket covers a copy of the book. If you provide your address when you order we will post you a copy. If not there will be a signed one to pick up on the night. We can get 25% off the price and thats the cost of the ticket.

For those of you in person we will be providing wotsits. Those of you at home will need to get your own. Monster Munch and Onion Rings are also firm audience favourites. Yes you can bring them.

Tell me more about the book…

Poles Apart, brings together expertise on polarisation, behavioural science and communications to explain why we are so prone to be drawn into rival, often deeply antagonistic factions. It examines the shaping force of our genetic make-up on our fundamental views and the nature of the influences that family, friends and peers exert. They pinpoint the economic and political triggers that tip people from healthy disagreement to dangerous hostility, and the part played by social media in spreading entrenched opinions. And the authors help us to understand why outlooks that can seem so bizarre and extreme to us, seem so eminently sensible to those who hold them.

Above all, by meticulously showing how and why polarisation affects every part of our lives - influencing everything from our friendship circles to our approach to health issues - they show what practical and effective steps we can all take to narrow divisions, build respect for others, and create a greater degree of common understanding.

“A fascinating read which will help anyone who wants to step out of the polarisation cycle and become part of the solution.” - Jon Haidt, NYU Professor and author of The Righteous Mind

“An extraordinary achievement: fresh deeply authoritative and entertaining on every page… you’ll finish the book wiser, kinder and more hopeful than when you started” - Jamie Susskind, author Future Politics

“Asks the best questions I have ever heard. And, critically offers solutions. A Must read.” - Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair Ogilvy UK, Spectator columnist, author of Alchemy

“A fascinating and thought provoking analysis of the divisions between us, how we bridge them, how we reshape the world and ourselves too. Essential Reading” - Cathy Newman, presenter of Channel 4 News and author

I’ve already bought the book…

Congratulations on your foresight. You can buy a second or send us a copy of the receipt and say you want to come in person or dial in remotely and we will send you details.

For those attending in person, what COVID precautions are you taking?

Important question. Firstly if you have any signs of COVID and have bought a ticket, please stay home and join virtually. We’ll miss you but it is important to keep everybody safe. For people coming we are taking the following precautions

limiting attendance to 60 (50% capacity) and distancing tables more than normal you’ll need to sign an e-declaration when you arrive that you are symptom free and have a temperature check. Windows will be kept open with someone keeping an eye on ventilation circulation via new sensors. Sanitising work surfaces Wot even is a wotsit?

Oh you poor soul. a wotsit is an airy crisp that honks of cheese. American’s call them Cheetos (though they are slightly less moorish).

Who is behind this?

Ali Goldsworthy, Kate Norgrove, Usman Mohammed, Jon Date and Jess Day run Wine and Wotsits. We are very grateful to More Onion for lending us their zoom account and Newspeak House for hosting this cross between a child’s 3rd birthday party and work conference for the last six years. It’s become the most amazing beast thanks to them and a lot of others on the way.

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Assuming the weather holds, we’ll be having our first in-person meetup in over a year! If the weather doesn’t hold, we’ll sadly retreat to being online again. Due to COVID, places for meeting at Newspeak House are limited to twelve. If we go over, there are plenty of green spaces nearby; I expect we’d head to Weaver’s Fields instead.

Usually we have a short list of articles for discussion. No need to read them, but you may well want to. This time the articles are:

1. Lena (fiction; https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
2. Don’t sell your soul (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YtisDHHhpxEh4e7zr/don-t-sell-your-soul)

We’ll start to discuss these around 3. If you have a reading you’d like to suggest for future meetups, please do so at reddit.com/r/londonrationalish, or email Phil.

Please consider taking a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk.

“Knowledge Fight: We’re a Couple of Dudes Who Like To Drink Novelty Beverages and Talk a Little Bit About Alex Jones…”

Unofficial meetup for fans of the Knowledge Fight podcast. Not associated with Dan or JorDAN.

WonkFest may have been cancelled, but Policy Wonks can still meet up in a COVID safe way. BYO-everything, and come chat about Alex Jones with people who also listen to frankly absurd levels of content about the man. (Maybe try and avoid chocolate, we don’t want a Raptor-Princess attack)

If you’ve never listened to Knowledge Fight, and you’re confused about this ‘Alex Jones’ guy, the boys recommend starting with this episode. Please enjoy the wild ride.

Boring/Important COVID Info:

• Tickets are limited because we can only accommodate 16 people safely. Please don’t show up with an unexpected +1.
• You will be asked to sanitise your hands on arrival and to wear a mask when not eating or drinking.
• If you have any additional safety questions or requests please contact Fiona.

The Coronavirus Tech Handbook provides a space where technologists, specialists, civic organisations and public & private institutions can collaborate on a rapid and sophisticated response to the outbreak. It is a dynamic resource with many hundreds of contributors that is evolving very quickly. Its design is easy to read, intuitive to use, and allows for easy long term engagement. With your help, we can produce a comprehensive library of all known resources for mitigating every impact of the pandemic.

https://coronavirustechhandbook.com

On Thursday 9 April, local councils will release details of who is standing for the May elections. At this event, we’ll be collecting all that data together into one open database.

Stay for the whole session or just drop in whenever you can — every little helps!

We’ll provide drinks and snacks!

You’ll need a laptop, but no technical knowledge.

You might like to sign up for an account at candidates.democracyclub.org.uk before the event.

The Echo Chamber Club brings together various experts and specialists who want to improve information environments. You could be an academic, a journalist, a think-tanker, a technologist or a policy-maker who works on anything related to this field. This could be - disinformation, misinformation, information warfare, truth-making, conspiracy theories, data privacy, data politics, political advertising, microtargeting, transparency, mediatisation, normalisation, echo chambers, filter bubbles, herd thinking and more.

The purpose of this meet up is to meet people who are working in adjacent fields to enable collaboration. However, we will also have some exciting provocations lined up to help stimulate conversation.

The meet up will be hosted by Alice Thwaite, founder of the Echo Chamber Club. We will provide snacks and drinks. Please do give us a donation to help us fund the event and buy refreshements.

• Arrivals from 6.30 pm
• Provocations from 7pm (speakers tbc)
• The event ends when the last person exits

Every month we meet up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on at www.radicalengineers.com

The Metropolitan Police have begun deploying controversial facial recognition cameras across London. Future Advocacy, a think tank focused on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, is currently exploring the potential implications this may have for people of colour and religious minorities. Studies have found that facial recognition technology can often result in discriminatory outcomes for individuals with darker skin.

As part of our research, we are looking to bring together young people of colour at a workshop in East London to discuss their views on the technology. It will be an informal event and refreshments will be provided (including pizza).

For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with Areeq Chowdhury at [email protected]

This project is being supported by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

A recently released FOIA request made to the National Security Agency brought their internal Python training course to light…

If you’d like to learn Python direct from NSA materials, join us on March 28th in London for our first NSA Python study group session!

Click here for more details!

An event to celebrate the launch of Good Services, a new book about how to design services that work for users.

Good service is a book about what makes a good service, and how to design services that work for users. It took a lot of work to make, so we’re having a party to celebrate!

Talks by Lou Downe and Sarah Richards about all things services - good, bad and ugly - followed by a conversation between both speakers on writing books about emergent disciplines.

And if that wasn’t enough, music, a special gin from The Electric Spirit Co and an opportunity to buy posters, stickers and (more!) books.

There will be live music after the talks and a promise of a party atmosphere.

Talk by Sarah Richards

Founder of the content design movement, Sarah pioneered the standards during her 10-year career with the UK government. As head of content design for the Government Digital Service (GDS), Sarah created and implemented the content strategy for the GOV.UK website.

Talk by Lou Downe

Director of Housing and Land transformation for the UK Government, based at Homes England and author of Good Services - a book about how to design services that work. They were previously Director of Design for the UK Government, where they established the cross-government standards for good services and founded the discipline of service design, building a community of over 3,000 designers, user researchers and content designers across government.

Gin by Electric Spirit Co.

Founded by James Porteous (ex EY Seren and Engine, now distiller extraordinaire). James has been a long term service design friend through the years, and gave it up to distill amazing gin that just so happens, matches the colour of the book!

Music from a live band, followed by Sarah Drummond (aka. DJ Drummondbass).

Party and Talks Schedule

• 18:00 - Arrivals
• 18.30 - Welcomes
• 18:40 - Talk by Sarah Richards
• 19:10 - Talk by Lou Downe
• 19:30 - In conversation with Sarah and Lou, with questions from the audience
• 20:00 - Shake a leg and celebrate!

Gen:Impact was set up to connect young professionals in London working to have social impact. Our goal is to provide a casual setting to exchange ideas, build relationships, and collaborate towards social change. Whether you’re a teacher, a civil servant, an impact investor or you work in the charitable sector, our work is aligned by the fact that we work to make the world a better place. Meet similar people and hear inspiring talks from peers!

• 7:00 - 7:30 PM - Arrivals - Arrive and meet.
• 7:30 - 8:30 PM - Speakers - Learn about exciting projects in the impact space from your peers
  • Beatrix Pitel, Fawcett Society - Fawcett Society is a charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights at work. They publish research and bring together politicians, academics and activists to tackle issues such as closing the gender pay gap and secure equal political representations.
  • Anna Fraser, Social Finance - After studying Human Computer Interaction Design, Anna worked in the Home Office in user research across immigration and law enforcement. She worked to understand and champion the needs of people using the services, researching with a wide range of users including vulnerable people, and people with access needs. Since then, she has moved to Social Finance, working to embed user research in projects across a range of complex social issues.
  • More tbc!
• 8:30 - 10 PM - Networking - Chat and share a drink with your peers in the impact community

Org/speaker bios:

Join us to hear about research into the use of highly intrusive monitoring technologies in children’s lives at school, after school, and beyond the school gates. Hear what you can do to help the campaign to make all school data safe, fair and transparent.

The creeping capability of commercial school safeguarding software now includes imposed surveillance at home. Companies that once offered only filtering and blocking now monitor individuals on screen content and searches. Typing words that match keywords libraries of thousands of terms can trigger a risk flag.

Advancing technology enables ever more one-sided opaque access to information about children, building profiles, even taking their photos via the webcam.

But there is no discussion of its growing risks or transparency to schools or families about how it works.

defenddigitalme has obtained statistics using Freedom of Information requests that suggest 70% of schools in England use web monitoring software, and a growing trend to monitor personal devices beyond the school playground.

Parents want to know how these flags and watchwords are being used about their children. Under a third of parents polled believe their school use these tools. None of the 400 school policies reviewed by defenddigitalme explain it.

Will the Online Harms agenda normalise or even seek to legalise this gross invasion of private and family life?

Speaker: Jen Persson @TheABB from defenddigitalme

Further reading: https://defenddigitalme.com/2018/12/response-to-school-pupils-being-spied-on-through-webcams-and-school-web-monitoring-software

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

We’ll be unveiling the full list of speakers over the next few weeks.

How many tickets are there?

About 125. We always sell out, so please grab a ticket early to avoid disappointment, and if you can’t make it let us know so someone else can grab your spot.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. Rebels sometimes bring onion rings or monster munch.

You have a great evening, make friends with strangers and learn a bunch.

This is an event for anyone with an interest in the labour movement.

Too often in our movement, technology has been touted as the answer to all our problems. Clearly, it’s not. But clearly, in 2020, we’ve got to wield it effectively to build power and coalitions across the movement. 120 years after labour unions founded the Labour Party on the basis of collective action, are we making the most of the tools of the 21st century?

We’ll hear from Brian Young, Executive Director of Action Network in the US, where trade unions and activists got together and decided to stop buying technology owned by hedgefunds. Instead they built a coalition first and then the movement decided what technology it wanted and then they created and owned it themselves. This technology has powered the Womens March, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise Movement, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and Stop School Cuts here in the UK.

Brian will share experiences of building that coalition culture in the states, how they’ve started to change the way they think about tech so that it serves organisers and activists rather than the other way round.

It’s not about one set of tools over another, we want to think about how we build and use technology more effectively to build the power of the labour movement.

Tea & pastries from 2.30pm with a talk and Q&A to start at 3pm.

At a time when successful startups are under growing scrutiny, when too many people are being left out of the value startups create, it’s clear: we need better options. One critical leverage point is the “exit”—the holy grail for most ambitious startups—the moment when the company is sold to another company or a new set of investors. These kinds of outcomes guide startups’ mission and purpose from the very beginning. What if there were another kind of goal to aspire toward?

Already, mission-oriented startups and funds are working on making “Exit to Community” or E2C possible, one experiment at a time. Meanwhile, the likes of Uber and Airbnb are seeking ways to share equity more broadly with their worker-users. Community ownership could be a new way forward for the future of work, data, and innovation. At this workshop, we’ll pool our knowledge and experience to identify pathways for making community ownership more available in the startup economy and its surrounding mythology.

Do you want to improve your digital security? Do you keep putting it off? We’re a collective of feminist cybersecurity researchers and activists, and we want to help you access free tools and resources to protect your data. Join us for a free, practical, hands-on workshop exploring how digital security affects your life.

Please consider bringing a laptop, smartphone, or any data-collecting device you own, as the workshop includes a hands-on tech support session. Snacks and drinks will be provided!

This project is a form of “action research”—a type of research which combines research with activism to understand a problem and find solutions. In other words, we want cybersecurity to be more open, fair, and inclusive, and we’re “learning by doing.” Results from the workshop will inform ongoing research, however participation in the research aspect of the workshop is entirely optional.

No prior experience or knowledge of cybersecurity required! As a feminist organisation, we want to reconfigure the assumption that digital security is for technical experts only. While the workshop is open to all, we particularly welcome women and other groups which are underrepresented in cybersecurity discussions.

This workshop is run in partnership with TIME’S UP UK. TIME’S UP came into being following the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the widespread disclosures of abuse by powerful men via #MeToo across the entertainment industry. The global movement brought together filmmakers, actors, directors, producers and writers in Hollywood and the UK to campaign for systemic change and the ending of harassment and abuse across the sector. TIME’S UP looks forward to achieving zero tolerance of harassment, 50/50 pay parity and equal representation across the leadership of film, television and theatre sectors bringing about sustainable cultural change. https://www.timesupuk.org/

This workshop is organised by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, in collaboration with Darktrace, a cyber defence company. It is funded by a UK Research and Innovation “Citizen Science” research grant (BBSRC Grant reference number BB/T018593/1).

There’s a Climate Crisis raging around us and all that anyone seems to want to do is talk, now it’s time for action.

We’ve formed this group for everyone who is passionate about human and environmental problems and wants to collaborate to create impactful solutions.

We’ve adopted some simple techniques from the startup world and combined them with some theories on collaborative working to create a simple process for producing impactful solutions we can actually enact.

We hope from this group we’ll invent new products, start exciting projects, come up with interesting campaigns, launch innovative charities and have fun doing it.

Don’t worry! Taking part requires no specific knowledge of anything. Everything is tailored for simplicity to ensure a diverse group can come to the meeting with basically no training and leave with a Climate Crisis solution to collaborate on.

These monthly events will occur in various locations around London, please share this event with anyone else you think would like to attend. You should also sign up on our website for more information: https://cvcollective.mailchimpsites.com

Livingmaps Network was established in 2013 to develop a network of researchers, community activists, artists and others with a common interest in the use of mapping for social change, public engagement, critical debate, and creative forms of community campaigning. It now has nearly 2000 names on its subscription list, people who have attended one or more of our events over the past few years, and/or who follow our online journal. We are keen to involve more people in our activities, and to facilitate new projects and events proposed by members of our network.

Join Julie Futcher and other members of the Blue-Sky team to hear about their crowdsourcing project – generating a map of London’s Sky to document and share city-wide feelings of improved wellbeing, to better understand how a view of sky influences our lives and happiness.

Find out more about a planned exhibition and participatory mapping event at Tate Exchange (4th -5th April) where there will be opportunities to discuss your experiences with like-minded souls, put your happiness on the map and do some sky bathing. Together we will be exploring how a view of sky can generate momentary value, towards happiness, health and wellbeing. Take a photo of the sky on your phone, bring it along, and put it on the Tate Map!

The #BlueSkyHappiness project is a collaboration between London Citizens, Flourishing Lives, Inner London Ramblers, Living Maps, London National Park City, Urban Generation and Tranquil Cities.

Tickets are £5.00 to cover the cost of refreshments: Register

A gender-inclusive chat about women’s past & future in cultural & tech industries, for International Women’s Day.

We will all sit around an art table, to amuse ourselves and attending children.

The Technoprogressive New Deal (TND) builds on various ideas known as “Green New Deals” by additionally emphasising the possibility and desirability of greater liberation from the constraints of what is known as “human nature”. In this way, the TND draws on insights from the worldwide transhumanist and technoprogressive communities about the radical potential of emerging technologies.

The TND is a work in progress. This event, which is jointly organised by London Futurists and the Transhumanist Party (UK), is a chance to shape and improve this initiative, at a time when most political discussion is being blindsided by the accelerating pace of technological innovation.

In this event, David Wood, Chair of London Futurists, will review and raise questions about eight overlapping angles of the TND:

• A technoprogressive social contract: How should society be structured for a world in which many fewer people earn money by working? What preparations are needed as we move towards a “post work society”?
• A technoprogressive scorecard: What metrics should be put in place as a replacement for the GDP index as the guiding light for evaluating the success of the economy?
• The technoprogressive dividend: How will investments in measures to address inherited flaws in human nature (body, mind, spirit, and social relations) have strong and equitable economic benefits as well as strong and equitable humanitarian benefits?
• A technoprogressive regulatory framework: How should Big Tech be constrained and regulated? And what regulations should govern individual freedom of choice regarding new drugs, therapies, and treatments?
• Technoprogressive approaches to environmental crises: Green technologies offer considerable promise to address environmental risks. However, major questions remain.
• Technoprogressive approaches to international conflict: As technology raises worrying new possibilities for warfare and terrorism, how can technology be used in parallel to help establish greater peace and safety?
• Technoprogressive fundamentals: How should decisions be made, regarding which parts of human nature should be cherished and protected at all costs, which should be enhanced, and which should be overcome (transcended)?
• Building a technoprogressive alliance: Changing the world involves alliances as well as ideals. It involves compromises as well as principles. Which alliances and partnerships should the technoprogressive movement cultivate?

For each area, there will be opportunity for audience Q&A and group discussion.

David Wood is the author or lead editor of nine books, including, most recently, “RAFT 2035: Roadmap to Abundance, Flourishing, and Transcendence, by 2035”, from which many of the ideas in this talk have been developed. For more details, see https://deltawisdom.com/books

For information about London Futurists, see https://londonfuturists.com

For information about the Transhumanist Party (UK) see https://www.transhumanistparty.org.uk

Please arrive in time to be seated for the start of the presentation at 6.30pm.

The meeting is free to attend, but numbers will be restricted, so please register.

No refreshments will be provided, but attendees are welcome to bring their own.

Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?

Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on.

Come along and discuss whatever you feel like. If you’re new to effective altruism, you are very welcome too.

Please bring some vegan food to share.

Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app. Instead of using techniques like virtual DOM diffing, Svelte writes code that surgically updates the DOM when the state of your app changes. Read the introductory blogpost to learn more.

Join fellow Svelte enthusiasts for an evening of lightning talks and chatter.

• Svelte at Bloomberg - Julian Burgess (@aubergene)
• The Svelte Context API - Antony (@antony)
• Using Svelte in React 🤷 - Kevin Wenner (@kevinwenner)
• Svelte-Utils, a quick intro - Joe Reeve (isnit0)
• Your project…

There are currently spots available for lightning talks: if you have a project, or have seen a tool/library/project you want to tell the community about, message or comment to give a <5min talk (need not be your own thing).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Every month we meet up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on at www.radicalengineers.com

This will be the first of a series of activist meetups/chats around the country. They’ll be opportunities for a relaxed, open and activist-led discussion (as opposed to a panel event) on where LPV and Labour pro-Europeanism more generally could go next.

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

It has only been two months since the election defeat and the upcoming local elections are more important than ever if we want to prevent the consolidation of that Conservative victory across the country.

We made astonishing headway in the 2019 General Election, building and thoroughly testing the GOTV Dashboard, our Twitter tool and the powerful insight viewer.

With only 9 weeks to go from the hack day to the election we need to work fast, build on our existing toolsets and tackle the problems presented to us by the campaigners at our Campaigner Confession event on February 12.

All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome!

Including new people who are interested in evidence based campaign innovation and want to work out what happened and why.

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.

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome!

The London meetup for civic and political technology.

Speakers this month are along the theme of political parties and coalitions, and the tools that parties organise on.

• James Clarke, Deputy Leader of Renew UK a new political party
• Tabitha Morton, CEO of MoreUnited a coalition of MPs across the spectrum brought together by shared aims
• Flore Blondel-Goupil, Business Development Director EMEA at Nationbuilder, these are a suite of tools that have helped revolutionise campaigning.
• James Smith, Leader of Something New, a new startup political party.

Schedule

• 7.00pm – Doors Open
• 7.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 7.40pm – Speakers
• 9.00pm – Drinks

Join us in celebrating the launch of Means TV, the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service in London on 2.27.2020!

We’re kicking off the world premiere of Means TV with an evening of entertainment for the 99% with comrades, drinks, and a screening of one of our flagship films, Gaza Fights For Freedom.

Tickets are £15. All proceeds go back into making worker-owned entertainment.

Together, we can build media that empowers and reflects the working class!

About Gaza Fights For Freedom

A riveting documentary on Gaza’s Great March of Return by Abby Martin and a heroic team of Palestinian videographers.

This collaboration shows you Gaza’s protest movement like you’ve never seen before. Filmed during the height of the Great March Of Return protests, it features exclusive footage of demonstrations where 200 unarmed civilians have been killed by Israeli snipers since March 30, 2018.

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fru3tsO6dzE

About Means TV

Launching on 2.26.2020, Means TV will have a library of documentaries, movies, and shows with new programming added all the time. We’ll also have live weekly shows covering news, culture, gaming and sports.

All of this will be available to subscribers for $10/month across desktop, mobile and smart TV devices like Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV.

No advertisements or product placements. No corporate backers or VC cash ever.

We’re entirely funded by people like you.

Together, let’s build a long-standing, worker-owned media infrastructure that reflects and empowers the 99%.

Means TV is for all of us: https://means.tv

Our next data science ethics bookclub is on recommender systems. You are welcome to pick from this reading list, depending on your interest and the time you have:

Articles

• “How Recommendation Algorithms Run the World” is a Wired article giving an overview of recommender systems and associated risks by Zeynep Tufekci.
• “YouTube’s algorithms might radicalise people – but the real problem is we’ve no idea how they work” is an article from The Conversation, by Chico Q. Camargo
• Business Insider article: Former Google data scientist: Don’t blame the internet for dividing the country

Academic journal articles

• “Recommender Systems and their Ethical Challenges” is an academic review paper by Milano, Taddeo & Floridi
• “Regulating Recommending: Motivations, Considerations, and Principles” is an academic paper by Cobbe and Singh

Quick reads

• Five risks of news personalization - particularly good for the non-technical reader

Tutorial

• “Experimentation with fairness-aware recommendation using librec-auto” is material for a hands-on tutorial from FAT* Conference 2020, by Burke and Mansoury

FAQs

Why are we doing this?

There’s a lot of good writing out there and one of the most important principles (even in our own ethical principles) is to discuss and debate the ethical questions.

We hope this will help people gain the tools they need to think about this in their jobs or in DataKind projects, or in encountering algorithmic tools in their everyday life. But if all you get out of it is some friendly discussion over a coffee or beer, that works too :-)

Do I need to be a data scientist to participate?

Nope. We’ll have a mix of technical and non-technical reading material. The aim is to think about data science in a context of ethical impacts and consequences - and that affects everybody!

Is there an online option?

We will be hosting an online group alongisde the in-person event - if you’d like to join remotely, please select the ‘remote bookclub’ option from the ticket options. We’ll also be live tweeting using the hashtag #DKbookclub and taking comments/questions.

I have a brilliant idea for reading material/a theme! Who do I tell?

We love suggestions! Tell us at [email protected]

We welcome you to the very first community dinner at Newspeak House specifically for female-identifying and non-binary people.

A casual dinner to meet new friends and bring people together in the politics and technology sectors. No matter your job title or your experience in these industries, we welcome all diversities of thought.

Vegan food will be provided. Donations are welcome. For specific dietary requirements, email [email protected]

What if I identify as male but I want to come and support?

You can support by sharing this event link with your female-identifying and non-binary friends, encouraging them to come along. But you are not welcome to attend this event.

What if I don’t identify with any gender identity labels?

If you feel you need a safe space to connect with others and express yourself, and currently feel you can’t do that in other social spaces, then this event is a good place to start. You are welcome to join us.

Data privacy is an important and often an overlooked subject in technology. With the rise of devices such as Amazon Ring, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and facial recognition software being rolled out by the Metropolitan police, it is more relevant than ever.

There will be lightning talks (speakers TBC) and then plenty of time to discuss the topics raised and meet fellow attendees. If you would like to give a lightning talk, please get in touch.

Optional Reading:

• Olu’s thread for Data Privacy Day
• CW: domestic abuse Engadget “For victims of smart home abuse, there’s no easy out”
• The Recompiler “But It Doesn’t Have Gifs! Moving privacy, anonymity, and anti-surveillance tools into the mainstream”

Brought to you by Subversion.

PaperJam Game Jam is like a book club, but instead of a book we play a videogame, and as well as discussing it, we make paper prototypes inspired by it!

This time, we’re looking at Factorio, an extraordinary game about escaping an alien planet by building a rocket from scratch.

All are welcome, but some basic familiarity with boardgames or game design will be helpful. It generally goes like this:

• Arrive at the event having played Factorio. There’s a free demo available, but I encourage you to buy it! If you don’t find time to play, don’t let that stop you from coming.
• We discuss the game: Why is it fun? What are the systems in it and how do they work? etc
• We eat dinner together: there are a dozen places on the street that do takeaway of various cuisines.
• We try and make paper prototypes inspired by the game. A selection of materials are provided, but feel free to bring your own.
• We play and discuss each others’ prototypes.

The Conservative party has won a huge majority. ToryTechs want to use technology to help make the most of this.

How can we…

• help new MPs get their offices setup?
• engage people in what the government is doing?
• help the party and MPs be more effective?

Join other Tory Technologists and designers at the first ever ToryTechs Hackathon!

We’ll be spending Saturday and Sunday the 15 & 16th building, testing, and launching tech to improve democracy, and the effectiveness of government.

A hackathon is a weekend event for technologists, designers, and domain experts to come together and solve problems in an intensive and collaborative way. Read more here: https://hackathon.guide

Anyone can come (even if you’re not a member of the Conservative Party), we welcome your interest and would appreciate different perspectives. Everyone is welcome, as long as they follow our code-of-conduct.

Beginners are welcome too! Attendees have a huge range of skill-sets, so you’ll have no problem finding someone to learn from.

Join Campaign Lab to see how we can help out in the upcoming local elections! The fightback begins now!

Local elections and mayoral elections will be happening this May across the UK. Some of these elections will be taking place in areas where Labour has lost MPs so the fightback locally begins now!

Join Campaign Lab for our event where we’ll be inviting campaign organisers and activists from across the country to share their local campaign challenges and what technical help they may need. We’re just confirming on our three fantastic speakers for our event - more details to follow!

During the panel and breakout session we’ll explore how the speakers are currently running their campaigns, their current practices in an effort to identify where there is space for innovation and improvement - asking our candidates and activists: how can the Campaign Lab community help their campaigns on the ground?

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

From facial recognition to social media monitoring, from remote hacking to the use of mobile surveillance equipment called ‘IMSI catchers’, UK police forces are using an ever-expanding array of surveillance tools to spy on us as we go about our everyday lives. Too often, these new and intrusive spying technologies are rolled out without the say, or even the knowledge, of the public or their locally elected representatives.

The use of police surveillance technologies can threaten our privacy and may cause us to change who we associate with and what we feel we can do and say. These technologies can also be used to target, profile and discriminate against certain communities - including minority, low-income and politically active communities.

Join us in London to hear about Privacy International & Liberty’s campaign for the public to have a greater say as to whether their local police force should be allowed to use such highly intrusive technologies.

Speaker: Privacy International Legal Officer Camilla Graham Wood @milliegw

Further reading: https://privacyinternational.org/campaigns/neighbourhood-watched

We are organizing an event for Wikimedians and researchers to exchange! Come along and learn more about research happening around Wikimedia and what Wikimedians can teach you about the different Wikimedia projects!

A large part of the computer science research community is exploring Wikipedia, Wikidata and their sister projects. In the fields of natural language processing (NLP) as well as semantic web, Wikipedia and Wikidata are often used as a fundamental part of the research world. At the same time, the community of Wikidata and Wikipedia could make use of a variety of tools developed by researchers. However, currently, the gap between things explored in research and actual applications in Wikidata and Wikipedia needs bridging. Therefore, we want to build a community of Wikidata community members and research to exchange needs, existing tools, open challenges and research question to foster an environment, where both communities can benefit from the exchange.

The ideal is to have all the different approaches and commonalities under one umbrella to foster exchange and support of different research communities and their approaches.

OpenSym and the WikiWorkshop are already doing that for the people submitting to and attending computer science research conferences. But without the exchange with the community, there is a lack of communication, creating silos of missing exchange.

The Goal is to connect the researcher and the Wikimedia community to enable an exchange that could ultimately lead to the research projects being implemented as tools for Wikipedia. And vice-versa: More research projects build on community needs.

We invite researchers, Wikimedians, anyone who does or is planning to do research on or around Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and others, anyone in the community, who is interested in improving the research happening around Wikimedia - you don’t need any experience in research. Wikipedia editor, Wikidata data magician, whatever you do in Wikimedia projects, your feedback will be highly valuable.

We would ask all researchers to bring an A2/A3 poster about what they are doing in Wikimedia that we can put up so that we can create an easy way to exchange on different projects. If you don’t have a project yet, don’t worry- just bring a poster with topics you find interesting, and you might be able to meet other researchers already working in your field of interest. (If you struggle with printing the poster beforehand, please reach out to us a few days in advance.)

We will spend a day exchanging on recent challenges around Wikimedia. Besides the posters, we aim to form working groups for the afternoon to work on topics of shared interest and possibly propose a project of common interest.

In our commitment to identifying the gaps in how we think about and work with data in the department, we have agreed to focus on four main problem spaces;

• Silos exist between data analysts, policy teams and digital product teams
• We lack a set of organisation-wide data standards
• Our data is often hard to find and difficult to share
• We give little or no thought to the potential uses of data outside each service

I am holding a cross-functional, (directed) unconference [I realise this is an oxymoron but stick with me] to explore these problem spaces and come up with desirable, feasible and viable actions we can take away and present to our Deputy Directors (Helen, Martyn, Jon and Danielle) particularly around the emergent themes of stakeholders mapping, central knowledge management and education, and access to data.

This session will be very much about actually doing stuff; agreeing positive, tangible actions we can take to improve the use of data, to demystify it for our colleagues and to work across the Policy, Data, Product and Tech Arc communities to drive a collaborative, user centred approach to how we work. We would welcome attendance and input from anyone in the MoJ who has an interest in contributing to this, and who wants to share and learn.

More information about the DCWG here. Please read our draft Terms of Reference and draft Justice Services Data Principles as they will inform the discussion. I’d also welcome people’s opinions on the Digital Ethics Charter.

Every month we meet up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on at www.radicalengineers.com

Intelligence Rising is a role playing game about the future of AI and its consequences for society. You will be playing as heads of states and leaders of big tech companies, and your decisions will determine the future of the world.

The goal of this game is to:

1. Train AI developers and AI policy professionals to reflect on and prepare for future social and ethical challenges related to AI.
2. Explore possible futures involving AI technology development, deployment, social impacts, and governance.

More info: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.08964.pdf

Intelligence Rising is still under development. This event is one of several play test events we expect to perform this year.

As a play tester, you are expected to:

1. Select your character ahead of the game and read up a bit on the person you are playing
2. Participate in a game and debriefing
3. Fill out a feedback form

The game is also lots of fun and you will be given lunch.

If you want to participate in this game, please contact me directly via email: [email protected]

If you want to participate in future games, fill in this interest form https://sites.google.com/view/intelligence-rising/ and/or join our player google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/intelligence-rising-players, to stay informed.

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

This month we are reading Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner.

Last decade will be condemned as a total failure of humanity to work together. Next decade and climate change crisis brings challenges that can only be solved by working together.

Join us on a journey of discovery of games that can skill up our ability to collaborate, from passing weapons, providing covering fire in a firefight, healing or boosting a teammate over obstacles.

Speakers

• Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org) – a peak into history of collaborative video gaming
• Ben Greenway – emotional exploration on how to cooperate with total strangers and without language in Journey and Sky: Children of the Light (by ThatGameCompany).
• Karo Janicka – how to leverage community to improve village life in Stardew Valley (by Concerned Ape)
• Simon Sarginson – surviving galactic wars by teaming up with aliens in Startopia (by Mucky Foot)
• Douglas Rushkoff – author of Cyberia book (1994) and lead of Team Human podcast on collaboration for survival of the species

The Echo Chamber Club brings together various experts and specialists who want to improve information environments. You could be an academic, a journalist, a think-tanker, a technologist or a policy-maker who works on anything related to this field. This could be - disinformation, misinformation, information warfare, truth-making, conspiracy theories, data privacy, data politics, political advertising, microtargeting, transparency, mediatisation, normalisation, echo chambers, filter bubbles, herd thinking and more.

The purpose of this meet up is to meet people who are working in adjacent fields to enable collaboration. However, we also have some exciting provocations lined up to help stimulate conversation.

Every meet up has provocations designed to get the attendees to think about the problems they are facing in different ways. This meet up with have three provocateurs:

Alain de Botton is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a ‘philosophy of everyday life.’ He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries. Alain also started and helps to run a school in London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new vision of education. His latest book, published in September 2019, is a collection of essays written for The School of Life, titled The School of Life: An Emotional Education.

Frederike Kaltheuner is a writer and technology critic and a 2019-2020 Mozilla Tech Policy Fellow. Before joining Mozilla, Frederike was a director at Privacy International in London, where she led the organisation’s strategic work on corporate surveillance and emerging technology. Frederike has given expert evidence in the European Parliament, the Belgium Parliament, and the UK House of Lords. She holds an MSc in Internet Science the University of Oxford and a BA in Philosophy and Politics from Maastricht University.

Areeq Chowdhury is the founder of the think tank WebRoots Democracy which explores the intersection of technology and democratic participation. He’s also Head of Think Tank at Future Advocacy focusing on the social, economic, and political impact of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

The meet up will be hosted by Alice Thwaite, founder of the Echo Chamber Club. We will provide snacks and drinks. Please do give us a donation to help us buy the goods.

• Arrivals from 6.30 pm
• Provocations from 7pm
• The event ends when the last person exits

Join us to talk all things political and civic technology - anything from promise trackers, to new ways of campaigning or government. We’re here for it.

We’re starting off the year with 3 brilliant speakers:

• Dan Barrett, Head of Data Science, Citizens Advice
• Alex Parsons, Research Associate, mySociety
• Tabitha Morton, CEO, MoreUnited [TBC]

• We’ll also be joined by some of the Newspeak House fellows who will share some of the new tools they’re developing for future civic tech endeavours.

• 7.00pm – Doors Open
• 7.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 7.40pm – Speakers
• 8.30pm – Drinks

A all-day event bringing public servants together with experts to teach, connect and inspire action on the climate emergency

OneGreenGov is the next global event in One Team Gov’s calendar, focused on the environment, sustainability and climate change.

The global environmental problems we are facing are becoming ever more apparent, and are higher in the public consciousness than ever before. As public servants, our work will be touched by climate change and environmental sustainability whether it is part of our day jobs or not.

The OneTeamGov community wants to bring people together to talk, learn and be inspired to take action - to live and work in more sustainable ways, to share their knowledge, and to develop policies, systems and practices which contribute to tackling the climate crisis, resource sustainability and environmental degradation.

To help contribute to this agenda, we are organising events in the UK and convening events worldwide to do this on 22nd January 2020. The events will have different flavours depending on where in the world they’re organised.

The event in London will be held at Newspeak House, hosted by the London College of Political Technologists. Our ambition is for this event is for participants to:

• Learn something new to help you contribute to the fight against climate change;
• Meet people interested in taking action for the environment, sustainability, and climate change;
• Be inspired to take action.

The event will be part-unconference, and part-scheduled speakers and pre-arranged sessions. If you would like to run a session, please submit this form.

Our lives are dominated by an economic system that fuels inequality, makes our jobs and homes more insecure, and hastens environmental breakdown. Support for this system is crumbling, which places us at a moment of both great danger and opportunity. Disaffection with political and economic institutions has unleashed the forces of the populist right, but also created a once-in-a-generation chance to define and build a new economy.

Some people are building this new economy right now in the places they live and work. From workers’ cooperatives to community-owned energy they are shifting wealth and power to people and their communities. But while our zombie economic system stumbles on, all that energy will continue to be blocked by an outdated set of economic rules and institutions.

For more than three decades, the New Economics Foundation’s mission has been to transform the economy so it works for people and the planet. We celebrate – and help to enable – the new economy springing up from below, but we also know that it needs support from above, including a state that prioritises people’s wellbeing and a healthy planet over a misplaced faith in free markets and competition. Therefore we work with people igniting change from below and we combine this with rigorous research to fight for change at the top.

Join us to hear from an exciting panel of speakers to discuss what next for the new economy movement:

• Gary Younge - Journalist and professor of sociology, Manchester University
• Maya Goodfellow - Author and journalist
• Miatta Fahnbulleh - CEO New Economics Foundation
• Dave Ward - General Secretary, CWU
• More speakers TBC

December saw the election of a government without a plan to tackle climate breakdown or fix an economy that has failed so many. Exciting and transformative ideas were put forward during this election but failed to cut through. This agenda remains our best chance to tackle the seismic issues we face, yet people have lost the will to believe change is possible. How can we learn from mistakes, and build on the strength of our ideas to continue making the case for a better future?

After discussion there will be drinks and a social.

It may not make the headlines, but Brexit’s impact on UK life online will be a gamechanger. Join us for a night with Open Rights Group to discuss how leaving the European Union will affect how UK residents experience the Internet.

• Open Rights Group Policy Director Javier Ruiz: Javier will explain how post-Brexit international trade deals with the United States and other countries could impact UK rights online. Trade agreements increasingly include clauses to promote digital trade, which unfortunately tend to translate into weakening the protection of the personal data of ordinary people and increasing the protections on the algorithms and trade secrets of businesses. Entering these agreements will put the UK in a difficult position as it strives to maintain the current arrangements for data flows with the EU.
• Open Rights Group Campaigns Manager Mike Morel: Mike will provide an overview of EU laws and institutions that currently influence UK rights to free speech online and digital privacy. Find out which protections will disappear, which will remain, and what could happen in a no-deal scenario.

News is broken.

The current system of monetisation (advertising) dis-incentivises good quality journalism in favour of clickbait and sensationalism.

News organisations have historically existed to solve distribution (printing presses) and monetisation/marketing (town criers) problems, these are problems the internet has solved in a much more scalable way.

It’s time Journalism, and by extension society, got a new model - one that uses technology to make high quality journalism sustainable again.

The first HackThePress Hackathon in September 2019 was a huge success, you can read more about it here: https://hackthepress.org/write-up-hackthepress-hackathon/

For the second HTP Hackathon we’ll be back at Newspeak House on Jan 18-19th. The core themes we’ll be exploring are:

• Monetisation - How can news organisations monetise differently?
• Public Advice - How can news orgs help people make better decisions?
• Follow-through - How can news pieces inspire real change?

We will have a judging panel of 4 people from the tech and news industry who will select a winner in each of the three themes above.

For more information, see https://hackthepress.org/2020-hackathon-jan/

Slack workspace: https://bit.ly/HTPSlack

This event is for charity campaigners to discuss best practice and challenges in campaigning for change. We meet quarterly for discussions and to hear from expert speakers. New members are always welcome.

Speakers:

• Steve Pound, Labour MP for Ealing North from 1997-2019, will be answering a Q&A on what it is really like being an MP and how charities can be better at working with them.
• Mary Milne, Head of Comms and Campaigns from Traidcraft Exchange will be speaking about their Injustice Advent Calendar which brought together actions from a number of organisations throughout December.

This event is designed for everyone in and around London who is interested in building and growing great businesses through platform strategy and platform design.

70% of value created by tech companies in the past 30 years has come through businesses with network effects, based on market cap data. Network effects are the ultimate growth hack! On the other hand, launching or managing a platform business is extremely difficult and it can have dangerous side effects.

• How do we improve our success ratio for launching new platforms in the London tech ecosystem?
• How do we build, manage and create platforms that truly deliver value to all players involved?
• What role do platforms play in today strategy making? How does it differ in start-ups vs enterprises?
• How do pipeline products gain Network Effects?
• How do platform businesses evolve?

These and more are the theme we can discuss together. To start our first session there will be two short (15 min) presentations:

• Manfredi Sassoli introducing the group and providing context for the relevance of the field.
• Simone Cicero, ideator of the PDT (Platform Design Toolkit) and worldwide renowned thought leader on platform design and strategy.

Food will be provided.

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

We really hoped we’d be holding this under happier circumstances but right now a genuinely neutral evidence-based analysis of the election results is urgently needed. In many ways this speaks to the heart of why Campaign Lab was set up.

So join us for our election campaign retrospective to look at what innovations worked, what maybe didn’t and try to understand some of the factors that contributed to the result.

This event will also be an chance for us to take stock, evaluate what we’ve achieved and think about where we should be heading next.

Finally it will also be a chance to thank our community for all their hard work over the past few months and year.

All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners, are welcome!

Including new people who are interested in evidence based campaign innovation and want to work out what happened and why.

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.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome!

Wikimedia UK is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia movement which supports Wikipedia and its sister projects. In January 2020, we are hosting a training workshop for Turkish speakers in basic Wikipedia editing. Currently, all language versions of Wikipedia are blocked in Turkey, and although it is still possible to access the website, it is much harder to edit Wikipedia from Turkey. That is why we are encouraging Turkish speakers in the UK to learn to edit Wikipedia so that we can help to improve content on Wikipedia in Turkish.

The workshop will give a general introduction to the basic skills needed to edit Wikipedia, and we will help you to start creating and updating content on the Turkish Wikipedia in the areas of culture, history and the arts. Whatever your interests, Wikipedia has articles about them and we need your help in improving those articles.

Please bring a laptop to the event which you can use to edit Wikipedia. A laptop with a keyboard is much easier to work on than a tablet. If you do not have one of your own, please let us know and we will provide one for you. Snacks and refreshments will also be provided.

For any other questions, please contact Communications Coordinator John at [email protected] or ask us on Twitter @wikimediauk

Görüşürüz!

Julio Alejandro asks “If politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats are perennially stupid and illiterate in technology, economics, and globalisation, why should they concentrate the monopoly on creation of human-civilization services?”

He will explain his map of the systems, technologies, and startups fighting to provide competition, markets, and choice in centralised, monopolised government industries to build better, cheaper, more affordable, transparent, inclusive, and market regulated services in social welfare; immigration; money creation; legality, criminality, enforcement; nation building; environmentalism; gender-racial-religious equality; and private property protection; Bitnation, Social Evolution, Seasteading, (3D Printed) Distributed Defense, Alcor Cryonics, Aragon DAO, Special Governance Zones, AI Pandora Boxchain, privacy Monero, Ulex OS Legal System, Free Private Cities, Kleros (crowdsourced jury), the Paralelni Polis ecosystem, and more.

Julio Alejandro is a VC investor, former CEO of three Blockchain and Disruptive Technologies consultancies, and has lectured in +70 universities and think tanks worldwide, including Oxford, Cambridge, United Nations, Google, EU Parliament, MIT, LSE, WeWork Headquarters, Amnesty International, and the Bahrain EDB.

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

We’ll be unveiling the full list of speakers over the next few weeks.

How many tickets are there?

About 125. We always sell out, so please grab a ticket early to avoid disappointment, and if you can’t make it let us know so someone else can grab your spot.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. Rebels sometimes bring onion rings or monster munch.

You have a great evening, make friends with strangers and learn a bunch.

Livingmaps Network was established in 2013 to develop a network of researchers, community activists, artists and others with a common interest in the use of mapping for social change, public engagement, critical debate, and creative forms of community campaigning. It now has nearly 2000 names on its subscription list, people who have attended one or more of our events over the past few years, and/or who follow our online journal. We are keen to involve more people in our activities, and to facilitate new projects and events proposed by members of our network.

For this purpose we are organising an event in the New Year which will give you an opportunity to meet the directors and advisory group, and to find out more about our plans for the future. Readers of the journal will be able to meet the editors and some of the contributors, and discuss the possibility of writing something for us. It will also be an opportunity to share your own plans with us, to exchange experiences and ideas with other people in the network, all over pizza and drinks.

Programme

• Welcome and Introduction
• Screening of The Citizens Atlas of London
• Living Maps Review Panel Discussion
• Putting ourselves on the Map: social networking

Tickets are £5.00 to cover the cost of refreshments and room hire: Register

Yes it’s cold and dark and January. But remember when it was cold and dark and there was a general election?

Let’s not forget everything we learned: good or bad. What worked? What absolutely bombed?

Let’s celebrate efforts to register voters, get out the vote and all the other good stuff.

If you liked the ElectionTechHandbook, you’ll love the Election Tech Debrief!

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

This month we are reading Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Just like in 2017, we will be at Newspeak House to experience the election excitement of adding new MPs to Wikipedia and updating pages related to UK politics subjects.

This is not a training event, so we would expect those who come to be reasonably proficient Wikipedia editors already. There will be lots of updates to do, so come and join us and help improve Wikipedia’s coverage of UK politics.

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Building technology for the Liberal Democrats. You’ll need a laptop to participate.

Join your fellow HackThePress members at Newspeak House to hang out and continue hacking on news-tech 👩‍💻.

We’ll provide power, WiFi, and somewhere warm, you bring the code! (and beer)

There are a few projects for you to join, or you can come with your own idea to work on.

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Building technology for the Liberal Democrats. You’ll need a laptop to participate.

On the 14th of November, local councils will release details of who is standing for the upcoming election. At this event, we’ll be collecting all that data together into one database.

Stay for the whole session or just drop in whenever you can — every little helps! We’ll provide drinks and snacks! You’ll need a laptop, but no technical knowledge.

You might like to sign up for an account at candidates.democracyclub.org.uk before the event.

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

No text this month - volunteers will give lightning talks, and then we will have a discussion.

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Building technology for the Liberal Democrats. You’ll need a laptop to participate.

Join your fellow HackThePress members at Newspeak House to hang out and continue hacking on news-tech 👩‍💻.

We’ll provide power, WiFi, and somewhere warm, you bring the code! (and beer)

There are a few projects for you to join, or you can come with your own idea to work on.

Dinner, wifi, sofas, desks, drinks & chats: if you’re a fan of electiontechhandbook.uk then this is the place for you!

Every Wednesday night from now until the election, 7:30 till late, show up any time and ring the bell!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Digital technology has transformed the way that humans are able to relate to each other. In spite of being able to connect over vast differences, we are more atomised, alienated and culturally estranged than ever. What does this mean for building working-class power? How can we create the cultural infrastructure that we need to be able to organise together and change the World for the better.

Douglas Lain of Zero Books hosts a conversation with some of the most important voices on the British left.

• Sasha Josette, The World Transformed festival and Momentum organiser.
• Chris Nineham, Counterfire and Stop the War founder, Zero Books author
• Tom O’ Brien, Alpha to Omega podcast host
• Angie Speaks, Youtuber and Left wing commentator
• Cian Prendiville, Socialist organiser, Bottom Dog podcast host
• David Swift, Historian and Zero Books Author

It’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday at the end of October. Come and celebrate with drinks at this informal meetup organised by Wikimedia UK.

Meet other Wikidata users and talk about your projects, get help with questions and hang out with other people who share your love of data science!

Come and get the conversation started ahead of the main event. Hosted by Mozilla Fellow Anouk Ruhaak.

Join your fellow HackThePress members at Newspeak House to hang out and continue hacking on news-tech 👩‍💻.

We’ll provide power, WiFi, and somewhere warm, you bring the code! (and beer)

There are a few projects for you to join, or you can come with your own idea to work on.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

This month we are reading two papers:

Useful Theory of Change Models: Although frequently discussed in the evaluation literature and general agreement on what a theory of change is conceptually, there is actually little agreement beyond the big picture of just what a theory of change comprises, what does it show, how it can be represented and how it can be used. This article outlines models for theories of change and their development that have proven quite useful for both straightforward and more complex interventions. The models are intuitive, flexible, well-defined in terms of their components and link directly to rigorous models of causality. The models provide a structured framework for developing a theory of change and analysing the intervention it represents.

The COM-B Theory of Change Model (V3): Discussion of the COM-B (‘capability’, ‘opportunity’, ‘motivation’ and ‘behaviour’) model for making interventions to cause behaviour change.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

Join your fellow HackThePress members at Newspeak House to hang out and continue hacking on news-tech 👩‍💻.

We’ll provide power, WiFi, and somewhere warm, you bring the code! (and beer)

There are a few projects for you to join, or you can come with your own idea to work on.

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

Top notch speakers. Wot else?

• Tamsin Omond on Extinction Rebellion and how they are shaking up campaigning
• Pete Moorey on what campaigners can learn from the Marvel Comic Universe
• Joe Mitchell on Democracy Club’s fantastic election tools

.. more to come

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Wot you waiting for? (as Gwen Stefani would say) #wineandwotsits

The Echo Chamber Club invites you to a meet up and discussion on: “what makes a healthy information environment?”

There are many subjects being examined by academics, journalists, think-tanks, technologists and policy makers when it comes to digital’s impact on democracy. Disinformation, misinformation, information warfare, truth-making, conspiracy theories, data privacy, data politics, political advertising, microtargeting, transparency, mediatisation, normalisation, echo chambers, filter bubbles, herd thinking and more.

Democracy is a contested term. We agree that it means: “rule by the people”. But we also acknowledge that in a modern nation state the people need to elect representatives to govern them. Information then must circulate between citizens and the government in order to ensure that ‘the people have the power’. But what are the best mechanisms for this? What are the institutions that we absolutely need? Are there any red lines?

We often talk about various digital structures ‘undermining democracy’. But if we cannot agree what democracy is, then how do we agree that it is being undermined? How can we then look to how to use digital to promote democratic ideals?

The purpose of this meetup is to meet people who are working in adjacent fields to enable collaboration. However, we also have some exciting provocations lined up to help stimulate conversation:

• Matthew d’Ancona - partner at Tortoise Media and columnist for GQ, the Evening Standard and the Guardian. Matt has decades of experience commentating on politics and has written many books including: “Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back”.
• Nafisa Bakkar - founder and CEO of Amaliah and CEO of Halal Gems. Amaliah is dedicated to representing Muslim women. It has a reach of 3.2 million across all editorial channels and publishes on topics from lifestyle to relationships to fashion and politics.
• Gemma Milne - tech and science journalist and co-founder of Science: Disrupt. Gemma has written for many publications including Forbes, the Guardian and the BBC. Her latest book focusses on hype and is called: “Smoke and Mirrors”. It is out next year and helps form a realistic understanding of what is going on in tech and science today.

Please register to ensure your place.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

For those who can’t choose sides between Greta Thunberg and the Suffragettes… or between ecology and feminism…

We are a bit lost… somewhere between the #metoo movement and the rise of Extinction Rebellion. Feeling stretched between fighting for women’s rights and the earth… so we want to create a space to connect with, explore the tensions between and raise questions about ecology and feminism. Are they compatible? How can feminist action be mindful of climate change activism and the other way around? How can we join forces to make a difference?

Using dialogue, drama and dance, we will explore your own lived experiences and questions around the climate crisis and the feminist cause. Through this creative process, we will together define the themes that are most alive in us as Londoners, and be the key points in coming meetings.

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

It’s General Election Time! Join Campaign Lab for a Hack Day working on political data science challenges and designing, developing and testing election tech and campaigning innovations.

From data analysis to improve targeting and working out the factors that could swing an election to developing new election tools for activists on the ground, we’ll be working out how together we can make the biggest impact on this election.

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.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome!

We are a group of philosophy researchers and students from the University of Bristol. We acknowledge that in our increasingly busy lives, the time people spend to inform themselves is extremely narrow. On top of that, behind all media – newspapers, advertising, even entertainment – lies incentives that are no longer driven by truth but by financial or political interests. This means that information is designed to exploit our ignorance and our vulnerability to sentimental persuasion. Information is no longer primarily truth-guiding.

In this talk, we will describe how our Validity Code, a 13-step system that incorporates both logical analysis and fact-checking, will help people to check the validity of the information that every media delivers.

Our mission is to create a citizen who is not only better informed but has a broader outlook on the world, and, ultimately, is better placed to reconcile.

For the third round in our Trajectory Talks series of free debates we consider this: how important is the presentation of a human body to our experience of virtual realities?

Direct evidence suggests that embodiment is a key factor in immersion and presence within XR. It is important to recognise however that existing design principles around this embodiment betray implicit ableist and heteronormative bias. In cases where creators attempt to move past this, their efforts are often made in the questionable pursuit of empathy and the inhabiting of another’s experience. So whether extended, cross or augmented the virtual space is as problematic as the traditional performance space when it comes to perspective and representation.

Starting with the lived expertise of makers with different or changing experiences of their own bodies or identities, this Trajectory Talk will examine and debate current and future uses of embodiment in XR. We will ask what insights can be inferred when decontextualizing narrative and design elements from LGBTQ+ makers and makers with disabilities, and to what extent these forms of embodiment effect meaningful representation.

SPEAKERS

• Rob Eagle (Chair), PhD researcher at UWE Bristol, uses methods from audio documentary storytelling, immersive theatre and interactive digital art to present nonbinary and genderqueer narratives in mixed reality.
• Jane Gauntlett, whose work explores the impact of storytelling, shared experience and human connection. She works as a writer, director, producer and lecturer (interactive audio, interactive theatre, game, 360 film, VR, MR). In 2009 she founded the In My Shoes project, each piece combines multi-sensory theatre, technology and first-person documentary to recreate extraordinary real-life events.
• Michelle Baharier, whose artistic practice is influenced by her heritage and life experience, brings new context to a space and gives a voice to people whose stories are hidden and unheard. Since 2006 she has worked collaboratively developing The Largactyl Shuffle. This project is named after Chlorpromazine, one of the first anti-psychotic drugs, whose side effects included a deterioration of motor functions that often manifest in a slow shuffling walk. In 2011, she was commissioned by Southwark Council’s Public Realm Department to create a sculpture on Camberwell Green – representing CoolTan Arts. Using a two part process, we created a live sculpture - a Ginkgo tree to mark the Largactyl Shuffle and to symbolise positive mental health, resilience and memory. She then worked with artist Rossen Daskalov to produce a bench that celebrated all that Largactyl Shuffle represents for the local community – a place of safety, contemplation, friendship and destigmatisation.

RUNNING ORDER

• 6.30-7pm: Arrivals, drinks, nibbles and networking.
• 7-8pm: Debate and ‘fishbowl’ discussion.
• 8-9pm: Drinks and networking.

Steering session for London Tech Workers Coalition, a coalition of workers in and around the tech industry. London chapter of @TechWorkersCo

Open to all tech workers, students and those seeking work in the industry. Bring a friend.

if you’ve any questions or requirements email us at techworkersldn {at} protonmail {dot} com

Join us at our first ever HackThePress social!

We’ll spend some time talking about what we all want to get out of the group - learning, networking, or something else entirely. Then there will be plenty of time to get to know your fellow tech and news nerds over booze and food.

We’re looking forward to meeting you there!

Help us to beta test two workshops in applied mathematics:

Workshop 1: Intro to Bayesian Statistics (50 mins)

The first half of this session will focus on the base rate fallacy, building intuitions of how it affects probabilities. In the second half we’ll compare Bayesian and frequentist methods of inference and consider the advantages/disadvantages of each.

Workshop 2: Can Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) stop the AIDs epidemic? (50 mins)

We’ll read a paper that makes some exciting claims about the possibility of ending the global AIDs epidemic. With a small amount of contextual knowledge, we’ll look at the paper with a critical reviewer’s eye to see what we make of its methods and claims.

Hear a digital marketing expert blow the whistle on deceitful tactics used by digital advertisers and show us how we can “opt out” of the corporate surveillance economy.

We’ll also receive an update about Open Rights Group’s AdTech complaint against Google and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

This event is a great way to learn easy and practical ways to protect yourself online from companies that aggressively target and track you across the Internet.

Bring your laptops and mobile phones so you can use what you learn immediately.

Our planet is in ecological crisis and everyday we are seeing the effects of increasing climate breakdown. Yet from Heathrow expansion to debates over land use, time and again the environmental movement comes up against barriers to achieving the significant systemic change that is needed.

To secure democratic consent for the significant actions we will need to take, we need to understand how to bring more people into the conversation and reach out beyond the activist base. This means exploring how we can create a positive vision of a greener future for everyone in society.

How can we get people to understand the scale and urgency of the challenge without them feeling hopeless? How can we understand and more effectively counter right wing populism and conspiracy theories which deny climate change? At this meet up we’ll be looking at how we can start working together more concretely to solve some of these pressing challenges.

If you know someone who you think needs to be in the room, please do invite them too! We’re really keen to hear from a range of perspectives across the movement and working at different levels.

Drinks and refreshments will be provided.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

The solar power industry is growing remarkably fast worldwide, with over 100GW installed for the first time in 2018 and over 120GW expected in 2019. This is largely driven by rapidly dropping costs and increasing competitiveness of solar electricity with gas and coal in many countries, almost regardless of action on climate change. Over the past decade, the price of solar modules has fallen over 90% and the big challenges for solar power have moved beyond the cost of electricity, to much bigger questions about the future of electricity.

A new book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, introduces key concepts in finance and renewable energy and provides a readable introduction to the world of business as it applies to solving the energy portion of climate change. It covers startup culture from a personal angle, some less successful examples of solar companies with candid interviews of the founders, and explanations of concepts like levelised cost of energy, the power markets and the experience curve.

Author Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at financial information provider BloombergNEF, has been tracking solar price, demand, technology and investment since 2006 and aims to write the book she should have read as a student wanting to work in clean energy. This evening will be a chance to meet the author and talk about renewable energy with like-minded people.

The book is available from publisher World Scientific Publishing here and on Amazon here.

New social media communities have bred a renewed interest in radical politics, particularly among the youth generation. Will this culture persist only online, or can we bring our digital communities into the real world to bolster left-wing struggle here?

Join Left Culture Club’s panel event, where we talk about the benefits and pitfalls of using social media to organise online in the digital age.

• Angie Speaks is an anarchist video essayist and Youtuber.
• BadmanMassive is a video producer for Zero Books and Means TV UK, and host of the YouTube-based Spicy Takes series.
• Xexizy (aka. Muke) is a Marxist vlogger and streamer, and founder of the Marxist society at the University of Sussex.

Doors are at 7:00 for a 7:10 start. All are welcome!

The current system of monetisation disincentivises investigative journalism in favour of clickbait and sensationalism. We must find a new model - perhaps technology can help make high quality journalism sustainable again?

A two day hackathon. See the schedule and register your place at hackthepress.org/2019-hackathon/.

Wandsworth Young Labour + London Young Labour trial a new format for a workshop, focused on developing policy solutions to Youth Violence.

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

The book for this month is Seeing like a State by James Scott.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

With the prospect of a general election becoming ever more likely, now more than ever we need to build bridges between technologists and activists on the ground.

Join Campaign Lab for our event Campaign Confessions where we invite candidates, organisers and activists from across the country to share their campaign challenges and where they think Campaign Lab volunteers can help.

For our event, we’ll be joined by Patrick Alcantara & Joe Morrison who are leading the local campaign to unseat Boris in Uxbridge, and Jessie Joe Jacobs one of the Labour Candidates for Tees Valley Mayor, where Labour lost a lot of ground to the Tories in the last election. Our third speaker is to be confirmed.

During the panel and breakout session we’ll explore how the speakers are currently running their campaigns, their current practices in an effort to identify where there is space for innovation and improvement - asking our candidates and activists: how can the Campaign Lab community help their campaigns to innovate?

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

A networking event for those applying technology to the upcoming UK election to talk about ideas, resources, strategy and collaborations.

If you have something you want to share with everyone attending, please add it to electiontechhandbook.uk

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

• 6:30pm: Doors open
• 7:00pm: Coworking time and/or networking

This month there will be time for co-working if you wish, bring a laptop and feel free to work on EA-related projects with likeminded folks! Otherwise, you’re welcome to use the time for networking as normal.

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism/

The first meeting of the Equality Discussion Group, where there shall be a discussion on Angela Y. Davis’ book “Women, Race, and Class”.

Future books, podcasts, things to watch will be discussed and chosen by the group each time for the next event.

NB. Don’t worry if you won’t have read the whole book - it doesn’t matter.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

An informal meetup for people interested in effective altruism and want to work on their own projects or self study.

This may be as individuals or in groups, but we plan to work for 50+ minutes then break at least once and maybe up to three times depending on how much you want to do, with the rest of the evening set aside for socialising and discussing what you’re working on with others.

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism

A day of coding to help the Liberal Democrats HQ, The Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors, and local parties around the country get more done and win more votes.

This event is hosted by The Liberal Democrat Software Group - join to hear about future events.

There will be free pizza for lunch.

Meet people working with Wikidata, learn to use SPARQL to query the database and visualise data in interesting ways! Please bring a laptop to work on.

This is the fourth Wikidata meetup organised by Wikimedia UK at Newspeak House. We hope to support the community of people working with Wikidata and encourage new people to get involved in the project.

This event will be aimed at training people to query Wikidata using SPARQL, a coding language similar to SQL which is commonly used to query databases. SPARQL is not a complicated coding language, and the basics of it can be learned easily, especially if you have previous experience of working with data. This event is aimed at people who want to learn the basics of data science, or people already working in that field.

Wikidata is becoming increasingly important, and data science skills are increasingly sought after by employers in the tech sector. This training will help you get acquainted with some basic concepts in data science, or improve your skills at working with and visualising data.We think this could especially appeal to people studying data science, data journalism or any other data-related field, as well as established data scientists and journalists who want to improve their skills.

Non-alcoholic refreshments will be provided.

If you have a Wikidata project you’re working on and would like to do a 5-10 minute presentation on, please contact me about it - [email protected]

Raise money for the next round of outsourced worker strikes at the University of London

This special TechforGood side-event follows on from our last meetup, which we had to cut short because of the heat: https://www.meetup.com/techforgood/events/263194160/

You don’t have to have attended the first event to come along to this one, and you can see the outputs of that event here: http://bit.ly/TFGJulAllAssets

For this August meetup, the Cyberdelic Society (whose co-founder Carl M Smith spoke at last month’s event) will host a Collective Intelligence summit in order to explore how immersive technologies can be radically recontextualised to help tackle some of the grand challenges humanity is currently facing.

The Cyberdelic Society will set the scene by sharing the outputs from our recent XR for XR event which explored how immersive technologies can be utilised to help combat the climate and extinction crisis. The full video of the XR for XR event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzwfzwaI81Q

Help us build the collective intelligence around Tech for Good solutions by sharing your opinions, ideas and skills. What are the most relevant areas of concern for you? We look forward to this process of collectively co-creating.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• How do we ensure technologies are part of the solution rather than the source of the problem?
• How are we going to use the power of technology to radically change lives and the environment for the better?
• How can we use technology to help us imagine and realise the level of transformation needed to meet the challenges we face?

KEY CONCERNS:

• How can we avoid replacing imagination with computer animation?
• What do our current imaging and sensing technologies already do to our perception of reality?
• If our senses are enhanced or augmented will we become distracted – or more mindful and connected?
• What are the biological and psychological risks of altering your perception with technology?
• Is transformative technology just a shortcut for people who lack the willpower for consistent work with their bodies, breath, meditation and sitting in silence?
• Do AR/VR/MR/AI (XR) experiences endanger people from getting lost further inside the simulation?
• Do Cyberdelics promise a ‘shortcut’ to a false experience of ‘awakening’/‘enlightenment’?
• Why rely on something external when we have all the answers, power and ability to be conscious co-creators of this ‘world’/’reality’ within ourselves?

POTENTIAL APPLICATION AREAS:

• How can we use immersive tech to both measure the impact we are having on our environment and also explore some appropriate systems change solutions?
• How can we use immersive tech to expand our experience of ourselves and the reality we live in?
• How can we create truly transformative experiences within these immersive technologies?
• How can these technologies help us to reprogram our associations and see ourselves from other perspectives (including the non-human)?
• How can we design and use these technologies to contribute to individual and collective awakening?
• What is the healing potential of these technologies?
• How can hybrid technological devices, of often-prosthetic alienation, help us to reconnect to ourselves and to the surrounding environment?
• To what extent can we influence our internal processes and bodily sensations using external sources? How adaptable is our perception?
• How much can we understand the rules that govern our minds and bodies through these technologies?
• How can artificial senses be used to access a greater dynamic range of reality?

If there is appetite, this may form the first in a series of follow-ups along this theme, led by the Cyberdelic Society.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

How did Facebook allow an obscure data company named Cambridge Analytica hack the 2016 US presidential election? Why did they do it? What have been the consequences for democracy?

In this enlightening documentary join film makers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim as we explore the motivations of some of the key players in the story and the journey of those that tried to hold them to account.

Featuring some familiar Newspeak House community faces, this is a must see for anyone interested in increasingly murky intersection between politics, data and ethics in elections.

Popcorn will be provided.

“You leave with a very clear sense of how one company aided and abetted the selling of democracy down the river, not to mention having your fingernails chewed down to the quick.” - David Fear, Rolling Stone

“An intelligent but infuriating piece of liberal hand-wringing.” - Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Climate disaster and far-right politics continue to pose an increasing threat in Britain, the rest of our continent and the world. It is time to act. Time to get organised.

DiEM members and supporters from London and the surrounding area will gather on the 8th of August for a third time - this time in the Newspeak House in Bethnal Green, where we will continue to discuss DiEM policy, how to get organised and the future of Europe.

The overarching goal will be to set up AT LEAST ONE new London local group!

There will be a loose agenda for the evening, including a “creative space” at the end of our meet-up.

Considering the great interested in the “Green New Deal for Europe”, our plan to tackle the threat of climate disaster and the burning injustices in Europe and beyond, you can find out more about it here: https://www.gndforeurope.com/

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

The book for this month is The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, by Sidney Dekker.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting.

Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

Prototype games to explore complex systems. Today we explore the game loop in Baba Is You.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

• 6.30 pm: Doors open
• 7 pm: Talks
  • Vicky Clayton (Senior Researcher, Nesta): the desirability of automating impact measurement
  • Ozzie Gooen (Research Scholar, FHI Oxford): Forecasting infrastructure and Foretold, a new forecasting app

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism/

Are you digitally able? A videographer? A copy writer? A social media mastermind? London Green Party has put together a Green Party Hackathon on the 3rd August to help put together a digital campaign from scratch.

Work with Sian Berry to put together a housing campaign designed to push the Mayor and local Councils to take radical Green backed action!

Spaces are limited so please fill out this form to let us know how you want to contribute. We’ll be in touch to confirm places.

Join us for a day of making, playing, failing, and doing as we take a Hackathon and a Scratch Night and smash them together.

About this event

We invite those from the arts and technology worlds, as well as anyone interested in different ideas and new approaches, to come along to this open and relaxed forum for the creation and testing of work that combines digital and immersive technology with artistic practice.

The Hack strand will be a chance for tech people and art people to get together to test an idea, iterate on a concept or demonstrates a method none of which existed at the beginning of the day. They’ll be working away all day and will show off what they’ve created at the open sharing session.

We will give you the chance to try out work in development from those participating in the Scratch strand. Similar to traditional theatre scratch nights we invite direct and collaborative feedback from audiences, but with the pieces growing and changing throughout the day. The Scratch space will be open to the public for free from 12 – 5pm, no sign up required.

The day will culminate in an open sharing session at 5:30pm before we head to Newspeak’s terrace to reflect on the work of the day over a BBQ and drinks.

Further details and participant details to follow. Sign up so you don’t miss out.

Though our open call has now closed there may still be possibilities to participate - get in touch via [email protected]

About your hosts

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, or email us at [email protected]

Why fight for a just digital future if there might be no future at all?

Technology crisis and climate crisis have many aspects in common: they are both often invisible, yet pervasive in their impact. Whether it is privacy, bias in AI or open data, the digital human rights community often fights for more equal and just futures while vastly ignoring the environmental crisis we are currently facing.

In this meet up series we want to initiate, map and advance the intersection between digital human rights and climate crisis. That means that we want to figure out how to create a sustainable social, environmental and technological future. By that we aim to go beyond current debates in the community that include arguments such as 1) we need to fly less 2) we need to repair devices 3) bitcoin consumes too much energy. We want to figure out how topics such as bias in AI or open source can be combined with the very idea of sustainability. We want to deepen the intersection between technology and nature.

At this first Sustainable Tech Meetup in London Katrin will give a short introduction with some initial thoughts on the topic. Then we will discuss how the intersection of digital human rights and climate crisis can advance. We will collect national and international initiatives that already work at the tech for good/sustainability intersection to make a first overview. Also, we are going to create a roadmap for more research and activism to advocate for a sustainable social, environmental and technological future.

The Sustainable Tech Meet Up and Newspeak are very happy to receive donations. Please bring pen and paper. If you want to contribute with an input or if you have any questions contact Katrin on Twitter at @KatrinFritsch, private messages are open.

“We have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before. How are we going to use it? This whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will succeed only in destroying the world. Technology and its powers must be handled by… people who cherish… above all, the Earth, and treat it with the reverence that is due to one’s own body.” - Alan Watts

How are we going to use the power of technology to radically change lives for the better? That’s a question we will explore in this meetup to really find out if we’re thinking and acting radical enough in applying technology to solve the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Tech for Good is certainly gaining mainstream recognition and popularity, but so is our collective appreciation and recognition of the scale of existential threats facing humanity.

How can we use technology to help us imagine and realise the level of transformation needed to meet the challenges we face? Who is involved? Who needs to be? This event will look at some more ambitious and consciousness-shifting applications and explorations within tech.

The event will start with speakers, then open out into a facilitated ‘citizens assembly’ style discussion where we invite you to bring your ears and ideas.

As always, we’ll have our community announcements at the end, which is a chance for attendees to share an update, funding opportunities, jobs and more with the community. If you’d like to share yours in advance with the organisers, email us at mail@techforgood.tv.

We charge £3 (+VAT) to help manage the number of people who show up on the night, which goes towards the cost of running the event. We don’t want this to become a barrier to attendance, so please get in touch via Meetup messages or directly via mail@techforgood.tv if this causes a problem for you. Furthermore, if you need a VAT receipt please email mail@techforgood.tv.

Our speakers are:

Cassie Robinson, National Lottery Community Fund / The Point People / Tech for Good Global / CAST / Nesta New Radicals Awards: Cassie wears multiple hats in the tech for good space, which gives her a rare perspective on the field and the changes within it. She’ll discuss some of the key burning questions she feels we should all be asking, and who’s working to answer them currently. She’ll set the scene for the citizens assembly discussion around different possible futures, and the challenges we must overcome to get there.

Carl H Smith, Ravensbourne University London / The Cyberdelics Society / The London Experimental Psychonautics Club / Contextology: Carl is a regular writer and speaker on Humanism, Transhumanism and Hyper-Humanism, and how a new mental model can help us better shape our relationship with technology and the world around us. He will share examples of where mixed reality and other XR technologies are enabling positive context engineering, as well as new modes of thinking and embodiment. He will also share the outputs from a recent XR for XR event, hosted by the Cyberdelics Society which explored how immersive technologies can be utilised to help combat the climate and extinction crisis.

We hope to see you there!

Dama & Ellie (Bethnal Green Ventures + CAST)

Register Here

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In her new book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea argue that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, the book constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources, that might hold relevance for similar concepts today, like the Internet? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?

Future Histories has been described by Claire L. Evans as “a potent, timely, and unrepentantly radical reminder of history’s creative potential.” O’Shea will be talking about some of the questions raised by her book and how we can use history to fight for a democratic digital tomorrow.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2960-future-histories

Often referred to as one of the fathers of systems thinking, Dr John Gall was the first to articulate the counterintuitive nature of systems, in particular how they succeed and how they fail. He is best known for his seminal work The Systems Bible. A Renaissance man, as well as writing on systems, John worked as a paediatrician writing books on parenting, child development, historical novels and memoirs.

Join Newspeak House in warmly welcoming his wife Carol Gall for a special guest lecture celebrating John’s work and their life together.

Carol Gall married Dr Gall in 1994 and for many years worked in his medical office. Together they taught parenting classes and jointly authoring Hit by a Low-Flying Goose a book about their experiences. She has worked as a piano teacher, a special education teacher and tutor, a family counsellor, specialising in young offenders and as a lecturer in child development and music.

In this lecture Carol will explore some of John’s later thinking laid out in his unpublished work and share stories that illustrate some of the many concepts raised in The Systems Bible. Alongside this she will share some of the many personal biographical anecdotes and memories of her life with John that inspired his thinking around systems. The listener does not need a background in systems theory to enjoy and learn from this lecture about John’s life and work.

Labour for a Public Vote is setting up an independent, activist-led grassroots organisation to fight Brexit and promote a left wing remain and reform agenda, called Remain and Reform: Grassroots. They’re proposing a predominantly non-hierarchical structure which they hope will encourage autonomy and engagement - in short, you’re encourage you to get involved, and take a lead on the issues that you’re passionate about.

They are eliciting ideas from across the UK, and from across Europe, in order to develop a transformative agenda that can win widespread public support for our EU membership, and which can win support for the changes needed to make our economy fairer, our societies safer and more secure, and to help us stop climate chaos.

They’re looking for activists who want to be there at the start of this journey, and want to help shape this project from the outset. If this sounds like you, come to their first organising meeting when they’ll discuss all this and more in an open and friendly setting.

Presenting the community powered tourism platform Fairbnb.coop, and kicking off the search for someone to develop the London node!

Fairbnb.coop platform cooperative is a community-centred alternative to current vacation rental platforms that prioritises people over profit and offers the potential for authentic, sustainable, and intimate travel experiences.

As a community of engaged citizens, researchers, and people coming from a variety of professional backgrounds and different cities we have been working together for several years to create the platform, and the beta version is finally nearly ready to be released.

We are now looking for like minded people to foster the creation of Local Nodes in towns and cities in the UK.

If you’re interested in finding more about what this involves you can find more info here.

While in London for LONDON UNBOUND 2019 we are organising a meet up and our co-founders will be delighted to meet whoever is interested to participate in this co-creation process.

This will be the first of a series of events part of a European roadshow that will span over the next 15 months with the goal to involve as many communities as possible in our project.

Programme of the meet up::

• 6:00 pm: Doors open
• 6:30 pm: Presentation of Fairbnb.coop project
• 7:00 pm: Co-creation Workshop in small groups
• 7:45 pm: Food and drink, chill

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Brave Conversations was created to bring thinking around Web Science and the Social Machine to mainstream conversations that occur in everyday life. Its objective is to demystify the world of emerging technologies and enable an exploration of the impact that these technologies will have on our selves, our communities, our societies and our planet.

We deliberately create a space where everyone can be brave, can say the things that they know need to be said, and be prepared to apply intellectual rigour to challenging ideas that might take us to uncomfortable places.

Background

In 2008 a group of people from industry, government, academia, and the community sectors came together to create the first Brave Conversations (then called the Meta conference) to create a forum for people to discuss and debate the emerging issues related to humans and their use of digital technologies.

At about the same time a group of luminaries from the Web world were creating Web Science in order to focus interdisciplinary research on precisely the same thing.

Since that time the world has changed.

The Web has evolved from being read-only to read-write and now dominates how the majority of society interacts with digital platforms, giving rise to the largest companies of the modern era. These companies are now pushing the boundaries for how data and information are used and are becoming a key driver for the next step in human evolution.

We can all feel that the world ahead is very different from the world behind, but:

• How often do we find the time to step back, to engage in robust and challenging dialogue and debate with others from diverse backgrounds about what sort of future we want to create?
• How often do we feel that our opinions are respected, that we have the space to imagine real possibilities, and that we can take some proactive control of the world that is emerging?

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge everyone who participates - regardless of what background they come from, or what their skillset and expertise are - to more fully explore and understand the interplay between humans, the societies we live in, and the technologies we have created.

We want to empower people to proactively make decisions about how we live our everyday lives, how we participate as commercial actors within the economy, and how we operate as digital citizens and exercise our political rights. That empowerment comes from demystifying data and information and understanding how it informs the everyday decisions which gradually create the future.

Each of those decisions begin on an individual human level - our bodies and our minds - and then emanates out to our families, communities, societies and from there to nation states. We are all responsible for the world we are creating and never has there been a time when we have more potential to influence the changes around us. But we need to be given the space for robust debate and respectful curiosity, learning from each other, playing with ideas, and asking the questions that are both confronting and potentially will take us to uncomfortable places.

How it works

The best way to learn is through experience and the act of playing with ideas.

We have deliberately chosen to partner with Newspeak House to co-host Brave Conversations London 2019 to build on the work we have been doing around the world over the past two years. Our aim is to enable that teams of diverse participants to critically examine our current societies through the lens of systems, communications, governance and technology.

This is important as the Geopolitics of Political Governance is now playing itself out as the Internet and the Web become more enmeshed in how regimes govern.

Brave Conversations complements the work being done at Newspeak House to address the challenges and opportunities which face contemporary society.

A new public service - and how we plan to make it

How do we better create a culture of mutual aid, reciprocity, co-operation, and collaboration in our cities?

How can more public social eating spaces be made and how can they be more inclusively designed?

At a time when public services are increasingly under threat, can we create an entirely new one?

The National Food Service is a new idea. A public system emerging from a network of social eating spaces across the UK. The goal is to enable social eating spaces to better interrelate, tackle common issues as a unified body, and provide a collaborative, inclusive welfare system for all.

Join members of the NFS Campaign as they explain their vision for the organisation, detail the progress so far, and invite the audience to contribute their ideas to the project.

This event is free to attend. Donations for the evening meal are optional, and not expected. Please email ‘‘[email protected]’’ about dietary requirements.

Running order:

• 18.00: Doors open
• 18.30: Campaign update - What is the NFS, and what have we been doing?
• 19.00: Group discussions
• 20.00: Dinner is served

Follow the campaign on:

• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/National-Food-Service-472002436672526/
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/national_food
• Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/31CVoO6KLoXq1wyjmM7zhR

more onion is an award winning digital agency behind the Campaignion platform, which delivers high-impact digital campaigns and fundraising for progressive non-profits. Come and meet the more more onion team as well as fundraisers and campaigners from across the UK charity sector.

ON THE AGENDA

• New Campaignion features - thank you page overlays, custom redirects and more
• Campaign showcase - how Compassion in World Farming have gathered over a million signatures for their #EndTheCageAge European Citizen’s Initiative
• Consultation report launch - be the first to see tips, best practice and case studies from Young Minds, Stonewall, Open Rights Group and more on helping your supporters take part in public consultations

Please Register: https://www.more-onion.com/en/campaignion-london-july19

For those who are new to Campaignion (or fancy a refresh!), please feel free to join us a little earlier at 2.00pm for a demo.

A year since launching, the London Renters Union is establishing itself as a powerful union where renters can get organised and win the big changes to the housing system we all need.

We’re now looking to grow and expand the union so we can organise in new places, get more people involved and build the power of renters.

To do that, we need YOU!

Join us for an evening of training and planning.

We’ll be talking about how we can communicate in ways that encourage people to get involved in organising, and how we can do street stalls and other outreach effectively.

We’ll also be planning some exciting stalls and outreach for over the summer. Bring your diaries so you can leave with some dates for exciting outreach in it!

No experience of activism or the LRU is required to join this session!

Childcare is available if needed, please let us know in advance by emailing [email protected]

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

Come to chat with other EAs about doing the most good with tech. After our first successful run of having talks last time, we’ll return with another exciting talk this time.

• 6.30 pm: Doors open
• 7 pm: Talks
  • Michal Trziesimich (Rethink Charity, Local Effective Altruism Network): How LEAN rebooted the EAHub, a social platform for effective altruists
  • Mark Somerset (Freelance software engineer): How to find freelance work as a software engineer

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism/

Millions and millions of people across the UK say they are sometimes, or always, lonely. Many older people say they go more than a month at a time without speaking to friends or family.

It’s thought to be as bad for you as being obese and even smoking.

At The Reader we have spent more than 20 years getting people of all ages reading great literature aloud together because it gives us the opportunity to read more and read differently.

Storytelling is an ancient human practice and, done in this way, it allows us to imagine a future beyond screens.

The Reader has launched a unique collaboration with Hackney Libraries to get people of all ages reading great literature aloud together.

If you’ve been wanting ‘something more’ in your life, you can train to use this powerful practice to change your local community.

Come to Newspeak House on Monday 8 July from 7pm to 8.30pm for a conversation about why getting together in real life matters more than ever, followed by a Shared Reading taster.

Stop scrolling.

Email: [email protected] to book.

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks, a big homemade soupy lunch and pizza dinner will be provided!

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, reasearchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

We think that discussing the ethics and impacts of data science is important, but also, kind of fun? There’s a lot of good writing out there and one of the most important principles is to discuss and debate the ethical questions. We hope this will help people gain the tools they need to think about this in their jobs or in DataKind projects, or in encountering algorithmic tools in their everyday life. But if all you get out of it is some friendly discussion over a coffee or beer, that’s also good.

Reading List:

• How do we define fairness? 21 Fairness definitions and their politics - Arvind Narayanan, 2018 [video; 1hr]
• Machine Bias - the Propublica COMPAS story that is the key reference point in talks about algorithmic bias and unfair outcomes [article]
• Where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse - Anna Lauren Hoffman, 2019 [academic article]
• IBM AI Fairness 360 tool [blog + links to interactive tutorials]

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Wikipedia is one of the first places that people go to find out information about any subject. Google’s search results privilege Wikipedia links highly, and many Wikipedia pages receive millions of views a year. It’s hugely important for fans and music companies to ensure that their artists are well-represented on the site.

Join the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and Wikimedia UK for the latest AIM Academy workshop, with expert guidance on how music companies and artists can fully optimise and understand Wikipedia.

Why Wikipedia is important for you and your artists

• Having a Wikipedia page is a sign that an artist is established and successful. Because the text is Open Licensed, it can be reused elsewhere - Spotify and the BBC use biographies from Wikipedia for artists listed on their sites.
• Images used on Wikipedia also end up appearing elsewhere, so uploading a good image of your artist is a way to influence how other sites present your them.
• Wikipedia pages will be added to and curated by fans, so it’s also a way that fans can engage with the artists they care about.
• Wikipedia pageviews are open – find out about how to access your data (page views, edits, editors etc) and how to analyse it. Did you know these pageviews count towards some charts.

Who should attend?

• Anyone with an interest in understanding Wikipedia and open licences.
• Anyone working in artist marketing, press, promo or label management.
• Self-releasing artists, or anyone who manages their own online presence.

Thanks to breakthroughs in science and technology, the future could be profoundly better than the present – provided we recognise this opportunity, and take appropriate actions.

In this vision, there will be an abundance of all-round human flourishing. Everyone will have the means to live better than well - healthier and fitter than ever before; nourished emotionally and spiritually as well as physically; and living at peace with ourselves, the environment, and our neighbours both near and far.

That’s the vision of the Transhumanist Party UK. The Party is developing a set of bold top level targets for the UK to seek to achieve by 2035. These goals are intended to be memorable, clear, and inspiring.

A number of these goals have already been publicised (text/video) and are generating a rich set of feedback (feedback survey!)

This meeting is a chance to join members, supporters, friends, and critics of the Transhumanist Party UK to take this discussion further forward:

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Party’s current set of goals for 2035?
• What are the most important steps to take to significantly enhance all-round human flourishing by 2035?
• And bearing in mind both the potential and constraints of both technology and politics, what transformations would need to be well advanced by 2025?

The event will involve a short presentation followed by an extended discussion of roadmap options and priorities. It’s free to attend, but numbers will be restricted, so please RSVP in advance.

Join Wikimedia UK and Open Street Map UK for a joint event, following on from Open Street Map’s AGM earlier in the day. The plan is to get people interested in Wikidata to meet people from the OSM community and talk about possible areas of collaboration.

If you would like to present a short talk of 5-10 minutes about a Wikidata or OSM project you are working on, please email [email protected] to let us know that you would like to speak.

There will be room for people to meet and discuss their projects, and hopefully the weather might be nice and we can also use the outside terrace. So whether you want to come and talk about a specific project or just to meet other Wikidata and OSM users to find out more about the projects, come and join us for a casual discussion of all things OpenData and OpenMaps!

This year the OSMUK AGM will be held in London at Newspeak House, Bethnal Green, 1-5pm. There will be an official AGM bit followed by short talks and possibly some planning activities.

Schedule talks or discussions at https://www.loomio.org/d/rnWSF7uZ/osmuk-agm-schedule

At 3pm we have invited Wikimedia UK to join us for a “Wikidata Meets OSM” crossover. There should be attendees from the South East and further afield.

The future of governance is distributed. Exchange ideas and get a glimpse into our governance track at Web3 Summit. Also: Open afterparty!

Are you involved or interested in distributed governance, future of governance, DAOs, blockchain governance? Join us on Friday, June 28 at Newspeak House and discuss related topics in an open conference format.

This will be the official after-party drinks to the OPEN 2019 Event (www.open.coop). So, prepare to welcome the participants from the conference too, discussing P2P, co-ops and distributed governance.

We will run a similar format to the DGOV Council, with open discussion format and some lightning talks. If you’re working on an interesting project related to Decentralized Governance, DAOs or Blockchain and want to share it: please drop an email to [email protected]

Phoebe Tickell will share ideas and thoughts from the dgov retreat in May with us. Also, there might be a glimpse into our preparation for the dedicated track on governance during Web3 Summit on August 19-21 in Berlin.

We look forward to seeing you!

Timing:

• Welcome / Intro / Topic Selection – 10 mins
• Lightning talks, 3x 10 mins
  • Phoebe - dgov foundation retreat recap
  • [propose yours]
• Facilitated Discussion (Lean Coffee Format) – 60 mins

Join charity campaigners from across the sector to learn how to communicate effectively with stakeholders in government.

Hattie FitzGerald, former campaigner and now a civil servant at the Home Office, will talk about how charity campaigns and communications are viewed from within a Government department, and how to land your messages most effectively.

Simon Morrison is Deputy Chief Executive at Nesta, the innovation foundation working to bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good. He has extensive experience of communications, and whilst at the Home Office led one of the most comprehensive media engagement and public affairs programmes in the UK. We’ll be talking to Simon about what he learned and how it shaped the way he now approaches influencing stakeholders in Government.

This event is for charity campaigners to discuss best practice and challenges in campaigning for change. We meet quarterly to hear from expert speakers, share ideas and build relationships across the sector. New members are always welcome.

Registration will open at 13:30 with the event starting promptly at 14:00. The session will finish at 16:00.

Please Register

Trajectory Theatre brings together the brightest minds in the XR community for an evening of debate and discussion.

Like most technologies XR has seen a lot of its research and early exploration performed under the banner of the armed services. Without long term investment from governments attempting to use it as a tool of military strength, we would not have consumer VR and AR today. Does this then have moral implications for the artists and makers using XR? And what should be our stance on further funding from the military?

SPEAKERS

• Bill Thompson is a technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Click on the BBC World Service. He is also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London’s Journalism Department and writes for BBC Webwise.
• Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer at Trajectory Theatre.
• Chair: Jo Kerr, digital consultant, Fellow of the Intersticia Foundation and a Resident Fellow of Newspeak House.

Read the re-cap of our last event: Content vs Technology in XR.

RUNNING ORDER

• 6.30-7pm: Arrivals, drinks, nibbles and networking.
• 7-8pm: Debate and discussion.
• 8-9pm: Drinks and networking.

ABOUT YOUR HOSTS

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, Instagram or email us at [email protected]

Welcome to our Co-BBQ, made up of three communities centred around Coworking, Coop and Coliving.

Hosted by Open Coop, The European Coworking Assembly, and co-liv.

Founders and Coders CIC is a UK-based nonprofit that develops and runs tuition-free, peer-led training programmes in web development, guided by our core values of cooperation, inclusion and social impact. We operate in London and work with Mercy Corps and the UK government to deliver programmes in the Middle East and Africa.

Today we’ll discuss upcoming changes to the programme and Tech For Better, as well as have demonstrations of the summer cohort’s prototypes.

Virtual Futures presents Aaron Bastani in conversation on his new book, ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto’ (Verso, 2019).

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.

The first decades of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of a series of disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream has been to stick with the status quo. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.

In his first book, leading political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we might move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

In conversation with Richard Barbrook, Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster. Moderated by Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures.

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and senior editor at Novara Media. He holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action. His research interests include new media, social movements, asymmetric strategies and post-scarcity political economy. He has written for Vice, London Review of Books, Guardian and Open Democracy.

Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.

• 18:30 – 19:00: Registration & Drinks
• 19:00 – 20:00: In Conversation with Aaron Bastani
• 20:00 – 20:30: Audience Q&A
• 20:30 – Late: Book Signing & Networking

Please register. 
Discounts are available for students and early career researchers. Contact [email protected] for Promo Codes. Tickets are FREE for journalists and members of the press. 
Virtual Futures (Est.1994) is a Community Interest Company (CIC). Ticket sales help to cover the cost of filming and documentation.

‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto’ is published by Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2757-fully-automated-luxury-communism

Follow the debate on Twitter #VFSalon / @VirtualFutures

This 2 day workshops will cover elements of the ‘Transition Training’ used by the Transition Towns movement to resources its members. This will include covering the following elements:

• Exploring the context issues; such as climate change and peak oil, and wider ecological questions, and social justice and equality.
• Introduction to the Transition model and the principles behind it. We will examine the issue of the right scale to create a Transition Initiative. Small groups will experiment with a world cafe style discussion around what experience we bring.
• We will explore different types of visioning, including an exploration of the ‘Deep Adaptation’ agenda.
• We will look at awareness raising, why we need to do it and how. We will explain how people engage with change and play the awareness raising game. We will also take a look at practical projects.
• We will look at groups and group process, in particular the role of the initiating group. We will look more generally at how and why functioning in groups can either be heaven or hell.
• We will examine the role of networking and partnerships. A strategic model for building good relationships in your community will be explained.
• We will introduce the role and practices of inner transition. What is inner transition, and why is it important. We will offer some psychological models which make it easier for us to incorporate this often neglected and tricky side of Transition.
• We will look at what makes a healthy human culture and how to avoid burnout.
• We will see us look at the global spread of transition, how to connect with and make best use of the world wide learning network.

Workshop host background:

Naresh Giangrande

Co-founder of Transition Town Totnes, the first Transition Town, and of Transition Training, Naresh has been involved in designing, running and evolving many of the events, groups, and trainings that have been at the heart of the enormously successful Transition project. He has delivered the hundreds of Transition Trainings to thousands of participants in twenty countries worldwide.

As one of the Transition Town founders he has given dozens of lectures and interviews, and spoken at many conferences and other public events. He set up and coordinated the Energy Group of Transition Town Totnes and was a director of Transition Town Totnes Ltd. Before the Transition movement took over his life he lived and worked in an eco community, was Managing Director of a landscape company, and a gaffer in the film industry, as well as teaching meditation.

His work for Transition Network has lead to a passion for working with self-organising systems, and how participatory learning can be fostered and strengthened across the movement. This has lead to coordinating Transition Network’s work with academic researchers. He is fascinated by data analysis and the block chain, while being painfully aware of the preciousness of life, his capacity for love, and acceptance of his own mortality.

He is father to two lovely daughters.

Sophy Banks

Sophy jointly set up the first “Heart and Soul”, or Inner Transition group in Totnes in 2006. She co-founded Transition Training and, during her time at Transition Network, delivered Launch and other workshops to transition projects around the world.

A trainer for over 20 years she has worked as an engineer, information systems consultant and psychotherapist and has considerable experience of voluntary sector and community projects.

In 2016 Sophy stepped back from the Transition movement to give time to her own work and teaching.

Join Medact, Medact Refugee Solidarity Group, MSF Take Action Group, and Docs Not Cops for an evening of short films, and discussion to celebrate #WorldRefugeeDay.

We will be showing a selection of shorts exploring the themes of identity, inclusion and how we can contribute.

SCREENING

• HAMSA - Caroline Spearpoint (trailer)
• Only My Voice - Myriam Rey (trailer)
• Flight - Laura Wadha (trailer)
• Entitled - Adeyemi Michael (trailer)

We are delighted to be joined by Caroline, Laura and Adeyemi who will introduce their films and join us in a discussion exploring people’s experience of migration and the impact of the Hostile Environment on migrant communities. There will also be an opportunity to hear about what Migrant Solidarity Group, Medact, Docs not cops, and the local MSF group are doing in refugee and migrant health and meet other folk from the group. The event is free to all, no one will be turned away.

From Heathrow expansion to debates over land use, time and again the environmental movement comes up against barriers to achieving the significant systemic change that is needed to tackle climate chaos.

With Extinction Rebellion and the School Climate Strikes bringing unprecedented attention to the threat of inaction and Labour voting to declare a climate emergency, how can we make sure this focus is best utilised? What are the competing priorities within the left that stop more from being achieved? How can we find a way through them? What compromises can we reach? Could a Green New Deal offer the solution?

Join us for a workshop in which we explore how we can build bridges across the left to unlock new and lasting support for a greener future.

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

Top notch speakers. Wot else?

• Faty Kane - Girls Not Brides
• Ella Goldner - Zinc VC
• Alex Chesterfield - behavioural scientist
• Deborah Coughlin - Studio X
• Ros Urwin - The Sunday Times

.. more to come

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Wot you waiting for? (as Gwen Stefani would say) #wineandwotsits

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

See some projects Radical Engineers are working on.

With deepening funding cuts and an increasing need for support, the services that charities and non-profits provide are more crucial than ever. In short, we need to help more people, but with less funding.

In addition, consumer behaviour and expectations are rapidly changing – as are those of our beneficiaries. People do not change how they want to access and experience services when they switch between sectors – charities and non-profits need to meet these expectations. Frankly, social care needs to catch up.

This event will showcase the journey that Action for Children and the charity sector is embarking on. Exhibitions and speakers will talk about:

• developing user-led services that start small
• real life examples and (often hard) lessons learned
• our vision for the future of digital services – which is scalable and data rich
• how to work collaboratively with agencies and funders to achieve real impact for beneficiaries

Speakers include:

• Kate Stulberg – UX Lead, Action for Children
• Rachael Gilthorpe – Digital Services Manager, Action for Children
• Lynn Roberts – Head of Digital and Innovation, Action for Children
• Darshan Sanghrajka – Founder, SuperBeingLabs

This event is free to attend, however registration is mandatory to secure your space.

It’s been a busy few months! We’ve won section 21 but with Theresa May resigning as Prime Minister we are going to have to work hard to push this new legislation over the line.

On Monday 17th June we are coming together to plan out our next steps on Section 21 and more. We’ll work out which campaigns to work on, who we need to join us and what each of us can do to win for renters.

Expect a big conversation about section 21, next steps and building a big network of campaigners.Feel free to bring a friend and some food or drink (if we each bring something , we’ll share a big picnic together).

The civic tech meetup for curious passionate people.

Tonight we’ll be hearing from:

• Helen Milner, CEO of Good Things Foundation
• Laurie Parma, Neuropsychologist - The fastest way to culture change
• Irina Bolychevsky, Redecentralize - We can’t just break up Big Tech, we must break them open
• Alex Blandford, Person of Interest - ‘I’ve got the power’ and 3 other inaccurate songs about politics and the internet

Join us for a screening of Knock Down The House - the story of four women taking on American politics. Hosted by BBC journalist Catrin Nye at Newspeak House in Shoreditch, this event has been put together by WebRoots Democracy and Unicef’s Next Gen London.

Entry is free of charge and we are planning to hold a Q&A session with one of makers of the film (details tbc). Spaces, however, are limited and you will need to be on the guestlist in order to attend.

When tragedy struck her family in the midst of the financial crisis, Bronx-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to work double shifts in a restaurant to save her home from foreclosure. After losing a loved one to a preventable medical condition, Amy Vilela didn’t know what to do with the anger she felt about America’s broken health care system. Cori Bush was drawn into the streets when the police shooting of an unarmed black man brought protests and tanks into her neighborhood. Paula Jean Swearengin was fed up with watching her friends and family suffer and die from the environmental effects of the coal industry.

At a moment of historic volatility in American politics, these four women decide to fight back, setting themselves on a journey that will change their lives and their country forever. Without political experience or corporate money, they build a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. Their efforts result in a legendary upset.

The Echo Chamber Club invites you to a meet up and discussion on: “what makes a healthy information environment?”

There are many subjects being examined by academics, journalists, think-tanks, technologists and policy makers when it comes to digital’s impact on democracy. Disinformation, misinformation, information warfare, truth-making, conspiracy theories, data privacy, data politics, political advertising, microtargeting, transparency, mediatisation, normalisation, echo chambers, filter bubbles, herd thinking and more.

Democracy is a contested term. We agree that it means: “rule by the people”. But we also acknowledge that in a modern nation state the people need to elect representatives to govern them. Information then must circulate between citizens and the government in order to ensure that ‘the people have the power’. But what are the best mechanisms for this? What are the institutions that we absolutely need? Are there any red lines?

We often talk about various digital structures ‘undermining democracy’. But if we cannot agree what democracy is, then how do we agree that it is being undermined? How can we then look to how to use digital to promote democratic ideals?

The purpose of this meeting is to bring experts in this field together to discuss these difficult issues. There will be provocations, conversation, drinks & snacks.

SCHEDULE TBC

Please register to ensure your place.

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

Come to chat with other EAs about doing the most good with tech. After our first successful run of having talks last time, we’ll return with another exciting talk this time.

• 6 pm: Doors open
• 6.30pm: Talk by Alex Zari (Senior Software Engineer, Imperial College London): “Why research science needs software engineers”

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism/

Psephology is a division of political science that deals with the examination as well as the statistical analysis of elections and political polling. Psephologists and the polls they create and interpret are a powerful force in contemporary politics. They shape our political narratives around elections, govern the news cycle and act as powerful social proof of a campaign’s success or failure.

As trust in polling declines and as technology begins to unlock new sources of political information, we ask what is the future of this discipline and how will it affect campaigning?

So how do psephologists calculate results and turnout? What kind of models, approaches and data do psephologists currently use? Can new approaches be developed using data science techniques which are emerging from different sectors?

For our event, we’ll be joined by Marcus Roberts, Director of International Projects for YouGov and John Sandall, Founder of SixFifty, a community of voluntary data scientists, and software engineers who worked on a model to predict the 2017 election results. (Further speakers to be announced).

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

This event will feature two top data protection experts working “hands on” to devise mechanisms of accountability for personal data processing, with particular focus on artificial intelligence applications. Reuben Binns will present some of the work that he is leading at the Information Commissioner’s Office on AI auditing, while Sophie Stalla Bourdillon will discuss promises and challenges that she has encountered at Immuta in promoting the adoption of responsible data management practices. We’ll thus have the opportunity to hear about cutting-edge issues in this domain from the perspective of both the regulator and the private sector.

Schedule:

• 6:30 - 7:00 pm Networking time
• 7:00 - 8:30 pm 2 talks (30 mins + 15 mins Q&A for each speaker)
• 8:30 - 9:30 pm Networking time and refreshment

Speakers:

Reuben Binns recently joined the ICO on a two-year Research Fellowship. He will research and investigate a framework for auditing algorithms and conduct further in-depth research activities in AI and machine learning. Dr Binns is also a researcher in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research interests include technical, legal and ethical aspects of privacy, machine learning, and decentralised systems. He has a BA and MSc in Philosophy from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Computer Science and Law from the University of Southampton.

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon is Senior Privacy Counsel and Legal Engineer at Immuta, the leading data management platform for data science. She is responsible for examining current data protection and model risk frameworks, helping customers to embed aspects of these frameworks within the Immuta platform, and framing these practices into digestible, easy-to-scale methods so they can better control risk across their data science programs. Sophie is also a professor at the University of Southampton Law School of law, where she co-directs the Web Science Institute. She is the author and co-author of several legal articles, chapters and books on data protection and privacy, including Privacy vs. Security (Springer, 2014). Sophie is Editor-in-chief of the Computer Law and Security Review, a leading international journal of technology law, and has also served as a legal and data privacy expert for the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for the Cooperation and Security in Europe, and for the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation.

The talks and QA will be filmed for people who can’t make the event. For past presentations check out London Mydata on Youtube.

Most people agree that the quality of information and discourse during election and referendum campaigns is too low – both in the UK and in other democracies around the world. But what can be done about it?

Drawing on their recent report for the UCL Constitution Unit, Alan Renwick and Michela Palese will lead a discussion of what our vision for a better democracy should be and what practical steps can be taken to get there. They will explore the lessons that can be learnt from a range of democracies in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific and propose an ambitious new model for transforming how we conceive of democratic campaigning.

Dr Alan Renwick is Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit. He is an expert on elections, referendums, and deliberative democracy, and recently served as Research Director for the Independent Commission on Referendums.

Michela Palese was Research Assistant and McDougall Fellow at the Constitution Unit. She is now Research and Policy Officer at the Electoral Reform Society.

Their report, Doing Democracy Better: How Can Information in Election and Referendum Campaigns Be Improved?, can be read here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/news/2019/mar/new-report-doing-democracy-better

Join Lyrical Science for Minds on Tap, our event series where public audiences listen to scientists discuss their research in the format of 10 minute-long inspiring talks.

Six scientists from King’s College London and University College London will speak about their cutting edge research on Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Motor Neuron Disease. We’ll also share our vision to bring public support and philanthropy to early career researchers in the medical sciences.

You’ll be able to learn more about the state of critical research in this field, network with the scientists over drinks, and discover a new way to get involved in scientific discovery.

For an example of what these talks look like, check out Dr Lizzie Glennon’s talk from our inaugural Minds on Tap event last November: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5SrS6JOUH0

The event is open to all members of the public – carers, friends or family members of those who have suffered from neurodegenerative diseases; scientists, science lovers, philanthropists, members of foundations or corporations and anyone interested in helping the scientific community gain the support it needs to conduct critical research on neurodegenerative diseases. Whatever your background, simply come on by, hear the scientists and enjoy the informative and inspiring evening.

At Lyrical Science, we help scientists share their inspiring stories with the public in an effort to connect them with private funders and philanthropists. Scientists are often prevented from doing life saving research by funding shortages outside of their control. This event is about helping brilliant young scientists communicate their research to the public in an inspiring and compelling format. It’s also a call for philanthropists to fund their labs. We’re a team of early career researchers and public speaking creatives across the US and UK and can’t wait to share our vision with you in person.

Visit lyricalscience.com and find out how we got started

UnFound is for tech founders and start-ups looking for a different way to set-up and run platform businesses. It brings together platforms that would like to go about their business in a more collaborative and inclusive way.

• Hear about the potential for platform co‑ops
• Hear how your platform or product could benefit from the co‑op model
• Learn about next steps and support available
• Meet others exploring this space for their next platform idea

The events are being delivered by Cat Ainsworth and Annie Legge of Dot Project in collaboration with Co-operatives UK and Stir to Action. Find out more: http://unfound.coop

UnFound is funded by The Hive - a support programme for co-ops delivered by Co-operatives UK in partnership with The Co-operative Bank: http://thehive.coop

Come and share your most prescient analyses, cutting insights, and hottest takes on the European Elections, a day after the dust has settled.

The European Parliament Election 2019 is a pivotal moment in the history of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, and even more so for the European Union as a whole. How well will DiEM25, the European Green New Deal and the European Spring perform in the 6 countries they are running in? What will the future of the continent look like? How much will the far-right gain?

The fate of Europe is on the line! This is why we teamed up with Another Europe Is Possible and DiEM25 United Kingdom in watching the announcement of the Exit Polls.

The Race Beat is a network for people of colour, open to anyone working in, or interested in, journalism.

We are independent of any media organisation and open to all people of colour – experienced news reporters, citizen journalists, students, writers, freelancers, staff writers, broadcasters, media academics, aspiring columnists and critics. You don’t need to be a professional journalist to join us. Come down and get involved!

The May meet up will be a great a chance to get to know people of colour who are interested in the media. We will also be discussing further our big events coming up later in the year, including a panel at Byline Festival on the coverage of climate change the environment. Where are the people of colour?

We are also planning a one day conference in Glasgow on Friday 27 September with Gary Younge as keynote speaker and another day long event in London in November. Both will include workshops, panel discussions, networking.

Bring ideas for who you would you like to see speak at our events this year, or maybe you are a journalist who could offer some training?

This is a space for people of colour only. We welcome queer and trans people of colour and all other identities.

The venue is wheelchair accessible.

About us

We want to create space for writers of colour to come together and begin to:

• collaborate on race related stories and reporting projects on a wide range of subjects,
• provide accessible spaces for regular discussion; on craft, on racism, on class, skills sharing, solutions,
• build partnerships with small organisations fighting for better representation and supporting writers of colour,
• strategise on ways to properly fund more quality journalism (comment, criticism, investigations) and race reporting by writers of colour.

Sign up to our mailing list

Join us for a special EU Election week event focused on technology’s worrying impacts on UK democracy.

Nearly a year after the General Data Protection Regulation was implemented, questionable data practices on social media advertising are threatening UK elections. We’ll hear from Who Targets Me about their innovative browser extension that improves transparency in online advertising by showing users who is targeting political ads at them and why.

We’ll also hear from our new Data & Democracy Project Officer Pascal Crowe about why we should be concerned about electronic voting trials in the UK. We’ll also hear about ORG’s upcoming event ORGCon.

No technical expertise are necessary, all are welcome to this free event. Attendees will be offered discounted access to our July event ORGCon 2019!

Extinction Rebellion Democratic Socialists is an independent collective of activists within the XR movement who are interested in progressive socialist ideas for concrete political, economic and social change. We view the climate crisis primarily in terms of climate justice: this means that in order to fight climate change, we also need to fight the social systems which drive its destructive march. We sponsor events and workshops dedicated to sparking conversations around movement-building practice, outreach and consciousness-raising, and the practical policy questions that come with any serious committment to de-carbonising the economy within our lifetimes.

This is our launch event! XRDS is a freshly-minted collective, so this will be a relatively informal occasion for people to meet, greet, and share their ideas about what kind of good a group like XRDS could do for Extinction Rebellion and the broader movement to de-carbonise the economy.

Asad Rehman, Executive Director of War on Want, will join us to talk about the need for an intersectional approach to the climate crisis and the need to place the people most affected by climate change at the heart of the movement to defeat it. Asad was Head of International Climate at Friends of the Earth from 2009 to 2017, and has over 25 years’ experience in the non-governmental and charity sector. Asad has served on the boards of Amnesty International UK, Friends of the Earth International, Global Justice Now and Newham Monitoring Project. Find out more at www.waronwant.org

Doors open from 7:00 PM for a start around 7:30. Asad’s presentation will be followed by a period for questions and discussion, which will be followed by time for general networking. Snacks and drinks will be provided.

To stay up to date, follow XRDS on Facebook and Twitter!

• www.facebook.com/Extinction-Rebellion-Democratic-Socialists-2296611777242659
• www.twitter.com/XRDemSocs

In this training we will take people through the methodology and practice of an NVDA (non-violent direct action) training. We will discuss what makes an effective training and trainer, as well as the necessary facilitation skills to hold a training session.

Those attending will practice leading the exercises used in our training, and better understand why they are used.

Those attending will NEED to have attended one of our NVDA trainings previously and be prepared to lead the group through various exercises.

As the movement grows, we need to build our base of organisers. This is a great opportunity to develop the tools needed to effectively carry out NVDA training, prepare people for actions, and understand why Civil Disobedience works.

By the end of the session you will be ready to carry out XR NVDA Trainings.

900 million people are currently participating in a massive festival of electoral democracy in India. Over 6 weeks, Indian citizens are going to the ballot to elect 545 MP’s to govern them for five years. 2014 saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi ride a massive wave of anti-incumbency to enter the highest office with a thumping majority. Five years hence, the man and his mania may have waned a little but he remains the favourite to win the elections.

The five years of Modi rule has raised profound questions on the idea of India. His government has witnessed the rise of whatsapp lynchings, Hindutva terror, environmental destruction, devastating fiscal and monetary policies and a near absolute control of popular media.

So how does Modi continue to remain popular? How do we, here in the UK, view these elections? What do the outcomes mean for democratic space and dissent? How social media is shaping the Indian elections?

To discuss these complex questions and engage in a lively debate, we have Salil Tripathi joining us. Salil Tripathi is a senior adviser at the Institute for Human Rights and Business. Based in London, he is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan in India, two respected media outlets. He is currently Chair, PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and an outspoken individual on twitter @saliltripathi

Event format:

• A quick primer on Indian elections for 7-10 minutes
• Salil Tripathi offering his views for 25 minutes
• QnA from the chair for 10 minutes
• QnA from the audience for 45 minutes

Come join us for this free event. Please arrive from 6 PM for a 6:30 start. We will wrap up by 8:30 pm.

This event is not being put together by any organisation. We are just individuals interested in Indian politics, culture and society.

Gen:impact aims to connect young (22-35 y/o) professionals in London who work in the social impact space. Our goal is to provide a casual setting to exchange ideas, build relationships, and collaborate towards social change. Whether you work in social entrepreneurship, education, the charity sector, impact investment, or something different, we look forward to meeting you.

• 7:00 - 7:30 PM - Arrivals - Arrive and meet.
• 7:30 - 8:30 PM - Fireside Chats - Learn about exciting projects in the impact space from your peers.
  • Angus Innes, Jangala
  • Tanveer Sian, Social Finance
  • Ellie Ereira & Aly Blenkin, Pivotal Act
• 8:30 - 10 PM - Networking - Mingle with your peers in the impact community

Org/speaker bios:

Jangala is a London-based charitable organisation that design and make Wi-Fi systems to provide connectivity to those displaced by natural and man-made disasters. In 2015, Jangala made the first and only wifi network in the Jungle, the refugee camp in Calais, providing internet to over 5000 people a week. In 2018, they equipped 16 grassroots groups across 3 continents with their first product Big Box. In 2019, their aim is to distribute 100 more systems. Angus joined Jangala back in November to lead strategy and business development. His talk will discuss what brought Jangala together back in Calais, how he came to join and what they have planned for the future.

Social Finance is a London-based social enterprise that aims to deliver social change through innovative mechanisms such as its social investment model, the Social Impact Bond, now scaled across 24 countries, and its Impact Incubator which has incubated unique responses to difficult issues such as domestic violence and refugee integration. Tanveer is an analyst at Social Finance who will speak about the Impact Incubator’s Black Thrive initiative which aims to reduce inequalities in mental health outcomes in the black community in London.

Pivotal Act is a program that partners with humanitarian organizations and nonprofits to identify, design, and develop practical technology solutions to pressing challenges around the world, born out of San Francisco-based software and design org Pivotal. Aly and Ellie are associate directors at Pivotal Act and will talk about the projects they’ve run. These include finding ways for NGOs to share data during emergency responses for distributing cash aid, improving the design of toilets in refugee camps, creating a tool to support young people in foster care, and designing for climate change resilience in coastal cities. With a background in Industrial Design, Systems Thinking and Service Design, Aly is passionate about designing products and services that addresses social and environmental issues. Ellie comes from a product management background and has has worked on developing technology to make social impact from an international development angle at the World Bank and with private sector startups.

Note: This will be the first event held by Gen:impact. There will be some light snacks and drinks available, but please BYOB!

The third meetup for government digital folk to share their work and ideas around designing case-working systems in government.

For this event, the theme is around around developing standards and patterns. We’re going to experiment with more collaborative sessions.

The agenda will be:

• 10:00 - 10:30: Arrival
• 10:30 - 12:30: Morning session: A series of workshops to look at defining standards for caseworking systems
• 12:30 - 13:30: Lunch break (sorry, no lunch provided)
• 13:30 - 16:00: Afternoon session: Unconference style sessions open to anyone to suggest topics

If you have any questions at all, please email: [email protected]

You can read write-ups of the previous events here:

• Designing caseworking systems #1
• Designing caseworking systems #2

Pease note this event is limited to people working in government only.

Please sign up with a government email address.

The financially driven, capitalist economy works as it does by design. Money is created by banks as interest bearing debt and serves the interests of the few over the many. Money, as it has been designed, is the core driver of environmental destruction, global warming, inequality and poverty.

If we are going to escape the multitude of systemic issues which plague our planet the monetary system has to change.

Since revolution is unsafe, and reform has been proved ineffective, we need to implement new systems of exchange which out-evolve capitalism. A money system that serves our needs better is not only possible, but is already in operation - it’s known as mutual credit.

The challenge is to refine, scale and integrate the various mutual credit systems so they can support a saner global economic system for people and planet.

The event is for anyone with an interest in the evolution of money and will focus on how mutual credit networks are beginning to build a new, alternative financial system known as the Global Credit Commons.

In an exclusive round table discussion we will hear from:

• Thomas Greco, author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, who, for more than 35 years, has been working at the leading edge of moneyless exchange systems, community currencies, financial innovation, and community economic development - and is on a rare visit to the UK from Arizona.
• Representatives of the Open Credit Network, a new UK co-operative mutual credit network made up of businesses who have come together, under a simple shared agreement, in order to trade with each other without the need for hard cash.
• Matthew Slater, complementary currency engineer and author of The Credit commons - A money system for the solidarity economy, a proposed accounting system to allow mutual credit schemes anywhere to trade with each other in a new, global, moneyless system.

Please register. This is a free event but as places are limited we ask for five (conventional) pounds as a deposit to encourage attendance. Attendees deposits will be refunded on request.

Paul (Rally) & Jo Kerr Consults are excited to present a screening of Knock Down The House.

The film will take us behind the scenes as four determined women, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, challenge big money politics in the 2018 race for Congress.

We’re expecting a great crowd of general troublemakers from all sorts of amazing organisations. We will provide popcorn and time for chat. You should bring something to drink.

Newspeak House starts a partnership with GREENHAUS, the co-retail concept store for sustainable products.

Come try some cocktails all PERMACULTURE focused using SUSTAINABLE liquors and SEASONAL fruit!

Join the Center for Innovative Governance Research for a discussion about charter cities, effective altruism, and their plan to lift ten million people out of poverty.

Charter cities are cities with special jurisdictions which give them a blank slate, or close to it, in commercial law. The new jurisdiction allows them to adopt the best practices in business registration procedure, labor law, tax administration, commercial dispute resolution, and more. By adopting governance systems which encourage trade, investment, and entrepreneurship charter cities create the conditions for decades of economic growth. Examples proto-charter cities include Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, whose successes demonstrate that it is possible for cities to achieve prosperity in 2-3 generations.

Executive Director Mark Lutter and Communications Lead Tamara Winter will be on hand throughout the night to say hi and answer your questions. Whether you’re interested in discovering just what exactly charter cities are or are a skeptic, they’d love to meet you.

Light appetisers will be provided.

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism/

Are you an experienced coder, tester or designer that wants to contribute your skills to a socially and ecologically transformative project? Are you new to software and want to join a project that will help you develop your skills? Do you hate a series of vague questions attempting to lure you into something before you know enough to be excited?

Then read on!

The Open Food Network are thrilled to announce our first ever UK Hackathon. Over the weekend of the 4th and 5th of May we’ll be nestling into Newspeak House to spend two days working on real issues for the global open source project. Together we hope to expand our exciting community, bring in new people that believe in what we do and share our experience in building a successful remote open source community. And of course we will share great food, laughs and fun!

What is the Open Food Network?

The Open Food Network (OFN) is a global, open source collaboration building software for short and local supply chains. We want to make it easy for people to build vibrant and viable communities around the production and distribution of healthy, sustainable food. Our open source platform is used in a dozen countries by hundreds of food enterprises, selling millions of pounds of good food every year. Our global team is built of about 25 people around the world, working on product, dev, testing, UX and support. OFN is growing fast and are hoping to expand our community of passionate food tech enthusiasts.

What to Expect

Over the weekend you will:

• Work in teams to tackle issues that are affecting sustainable farmers and community food projects all over the world
• Build and share your skills. Our stack is built on Ruby, Rails, Postgres, AngularJS deployed with Ansible (Unicorn, NGINX).
• Learn from OFN developers, contributors and professionals
• Contribute to issues in different stages of our pipe process – from development to testing to release
• Work on problems that suit your skills and interests – design, UX, coding, APIs, testing
• Learn about our processes and systems, including how to become a paid contributor in the longer term.
• Meet an amazing group of like minded people working to use tech to make the world we want to live in
• Stickers and other (much more) exciting rewards for being involved and making contributions!

We’ll provide lunch, snacks and drinks throughout the two days.

If you would like to attend but travel or accommodation costs are prohibitive please get in touch as we might be able to help.

Wikimedia UK is organising the second London Wikidata meetup. If you’re working on Wikidata projects, or interested in Wikidata and want to find out how to get involved, come along and talk to us about it.

As this will take place in the downstairs part of Newspeak, there will be an opportunity for brief presentations. If you have a Wikidata project you’re working on and would like to do a 5-10 minute presentation on, please contact me about it - [email protected]

This event will not be catered, but you are welcome to bring your own food or drink into the venue.

Come along to this free introduction with Autopia creator Stephen Reid to learn how to use the platform, and how you can contribute to its development.

Autopia (https://autopia.co/) is a platform that makes organising co-created gatherings and sticking to good habits easy and fun.

Most of the gatherings organised via Autopia are smaller than 150 people and last less than a week. We’ve found this to be a sweet spot offering great depth of connection for reasonable time and cost.

People use Autopia to organise gatherings across the globe: both standalone gatherings, and camps at larger events like Nowhere and the Borderland.

The process of co-creating a gathering on Autopia can act as a kind of initiation into collective intelligence and emergent order.

Come along to this free event to learn more.

The Race Beat is a network for people of colour, open to anyone working in, or interested in, journalism.

At the April meet up we will talk about our plans for 2019, including day long training events in London and Glasgow, as well as panels at summer festivals. Bring ideas for who you would you like to see speak at our events this year - writers, editors, broadcasters. Are you a journalist who could offer some training? Do you want to get involved with organising or have access to event space?

It will also be a chance to chat and get to know people of colour who are interested in the media. Some of us might also have a drink afterwards.

This is a space for people of colour only. We welcome queer and trans people of colour and all other identities. You don’t need to be a professional journalist.

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available structured data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and helping with a new approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science and innovation.

Over the course of our hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

You do not need to be a data scientist or developer to take part in this event!

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks, breakfast pastries, a big homemade lunch and dinner will be provided!

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

Collectives are everything, from the cells of our bodies and brains to the groups, nations, and ecosystems we are part of. Are there principles that characterise collective intelligence across scales? Have the factors that lead to human group performance been accurately measured? How do flocks of birds or swarms of bees make collective decisions, and are there lessons in them for human groups? When are crowds wise and when are they stupid? Can technology improve collective decisions? If so how, and by how much?

Drawing on research from academia, corporate performance optimisation, and group decision technology, we’ll dive into the knowns and unknowns of collective intelligence and see where they lead.

We’ll start with an interactive presentation on some of the key findings on collective intelligence from psychology, biology, ecology, and elsewhere.

Then, we’ll take the research out of the journals and experiment with it, using conversational games, human swarming, voting by convergence, and other experiments to test our real-world sensitivity to collective intelligence principles and how they appear (or don’t!) in the groups we’re part of.

Throughout, we’ll tap the collective’s intelligence about collective intelligence with reverse Q&A, discussion, and experimental group decisions about the flow of the event.

A meetup discussing the state of data privacy and data ethics. If you’re working in privacy, grab a free ticket.

Speakers:

“Fuck your banners, fuck your pop-ups and fuck your feature walls!” - Shad Jahangir @systemantix, fellow of Newspeak House, design director of Metomic. He’ll talk about designing data transparency and trust into the fabric of the web.

“Data everywhere, how we got to this point.” - Ben van Enckevort @benvan87, CTO of Metomic, will be talking briefly about the state of data on the web and how we got here. He promises he will only mention Facebook three times.

Since becoming Lord Mayor of Sheffield in 2018, Magid ‘Magic’ Magid has taken the political scene by storm, making headlines in the UK and across the world. A former child refugee, Magid is Sheffield City Council’s first Green Party mayor and its youngest at 29. His monthly campaigns have reached millions of people online and have touched upon a wide range of issues including knife crime, climate change, Brexit, and the NHS.

Areeq Chowdhury (Chief Executive, WebRoots Democracy) will be in conversation with Magid and will be delving into his journey from Somali refugee to one of the most engaging young politicians the UK has ever seen. In particular, we will be exploring his methods for “doing politics differently”.

How urgent is the need to take serious action over the threat of what some are calling “climate catastrophe”? What are the factors that prevent sufficient attention being given to this topic? And what are the best methods to overcome this state of learned ignorance, and to advance practical solutions?

Andrew Medhurst, former investment banker, now climate change activist with Extinction Rebellion, a global movement focussed on creating mass nonviolent civil disobedience.

Paul Powlesland, founder of Lawyers for Nature and Newspeak House Fellow.

Gavin Starks, founder of Open Environmental Risk Standard, aiming to radically increase the accessibility of data required to address a wide range environmental risks.

In this half-day training, we will focus on the foundation of every collaborative team: how to communicate effectively and deal with conflict in a productive way.

We’ll look at the appropriate use of digital communication tools, understanding how different tools suit different jobs. We’ll examine typical reactions to conflict, and how to choose the right response when conflict arises. We’ll explore how to give good feedback and improve your listening skills.​

You’ll leave with processes your team can use to address conflict, and practice the skills that will make you a more effective communicator.

This workshop is ideal for groups working with less hierarchy and more collaboration: cooperatives, self-managing teams, startups, Teal organisations, Agile squads, innovation units, flat NGOs… if you’re growing a participatory culture of shared leadership and mutual accountability, this training is for you. ​ Our knowledge is rooted in our lived experience in our own organisations at the forefront of collaborative work practice. We bring examples from different groups around the world, as well as research from academic studies. We host participatory learning exercises for participants to reflect on how these lessons apply in their group context.

The Hum is Nati Lombardo and Richard Bartlett. We have been immersed in decentralised organisations since 2011, playing co-leadership roles in the Loomio tech co-op and the Enspiral network of social enterprises. For the past 3 years, we’ve been travelling the world sharing our experiences, and learning with others about non-hierarchical management. We’ve worked in 17 countries, with a huge diversity of organisations across all sectors.

We’re offering a 20% discount for “early bird” tickets, purchased before March 20th. This training is even more effective when multiple people from the same team can join. If you have 3 or more people coming together, contact us for a group discount.

On the 5th of April, each council will release a document called a Statements of Persons Nominated, which details the candidates for the upcoming local elections. We need to manually enter this information into a database so that more useful things can be done with it. Come and help!

Trajectory Theatre brings together the brightest minds in the XR community for an evening of debate and discussion.

The first in the ‘Trajectory Talks’ series will explore the nuances of a topic that has long fallen into platitudes and empty conjecture.

Does the answer to broadening audiences for XR lie with content, or technology? It’s a challenging binary choice, but it’s also potentially limiting.

We’ll unpack the arguments through lively discussion to reach a collective understanding of what a successful content-driven ecosystem looks like.

Four people from across the arts and tech space will frame the discourse, before we open up to a ‘fishbowl’ discussion where everyone has the opportunity to share their views and experiences. You are all experts, so we’ll hear from as many of you as we can.

SPEAKERS

• Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer at Trajectory Theatre.
• Chair: Jo Kerr, digital consultant, Fellow of the Intersticia Foundation and Resident Fellow of Newspeak House.

Further speakers to be announced soon.

RUNNING ORDER

• 6.30-7pm: Arrivals, drinks, nibbles and networking.
• 7-8pm: Debate and ‘fishbowl’ discussion.
• 8-9pm: Drinks and networking.

ABOUT YOUR HOSTS

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, Instagram or email us at [email protected]

This training explores how we make group decisions when there’s no top-down command-and-control structure.

You’ll learn different decision-making protocols, like consensus, consent, and the advice process. We’ll unpack the neuroscience of cognitive biases, and how to de-bias your decisions. And we’ll investigate how digital tools can help you make collective decision more efficiently.

This workshop is ideal for groups working with less hierarchy and more collaboration: cooperatives, self-managing teams, startups, Teal organisations, Agile squads, innovation units, flat NGOs… if you’re growing a participatory culture of shared leadership and mutual accountability, this training is for you. ​ Our knowledge is rooted in our lived experience in our own organisations at the forefront of collaborative work practice. We bring examples from different groups around the world, as well as research from academic studies. We host participatory learning exercises for participants to reflect on how these lessons apply in their group context.

The Hum is Nati Lombardo and Richard Bartlett. We have been immersed in decentralised organisations since 2011, playing co-leadership roles in the Loomio tech co-op and the Enspiral network of social enterprises. For the past 3 years, we’ve been travelling the world sharing our experiences, and learning with others about non-hierarchical management. We’ve worked in 17 countries, with a huge diversity of organisations across all sectors.

We’re offering a 20% discount for “early bird” tickets, purchased before March 20th. This training is even more effective when multiple people from the same team can join. If you have 3 or more people coming together, contact us for a group discount.

A meetup for software/web developers, tech and data science people in London who are also interested in effective altruism.

Innovation is a term we hear a lot in government and the private sector. Innovation is a lot of things. Innovation is emerging technology, new ideas, experimentation, and partnering across sectors. It’s self-driving cars and conversational interfaces and it’s also applying for your first passport online.

We’ll have talks from the GovTech Catalyst team, the head of front-end development at GDS on Progressive Web Apps and more. We’ll hear about what innovation means for designers in government.

We Hack London is a hackathon where you will have the opportunity to work together with people, NGO leaders and entrepreneurs to develop solutions to challenges in London.

Confirmed mentors include:

• Alex Stephany: Founder & CEO, Beam
• Marilise de Villiers: Director of Security Skills And Culture, Centrica
• Sherry Peck: Chief Executive, Safer London
• Ben Hudson: Project Director, London Sustainability Exchange

Schedule:

• 09:30am Registration
• 10:00am Welcome and speaker
• 10:20am Split into Challenge groups
• 10:30am People pitch project ideas
• 11:20am Project teams form
• 11:30am Break
• 12:00pm Hacking begins with Mentors
• 02:00pm Lunch
• 02:45pm Hacking continues
• 05:30pm Break
• 05:40pm Keynote speaker
• 06:00pm Presentations to judges
• 07:30pm Judging and awards
• 08:00pm Close

All attendees must register.

Find out more at the We Hack London website.

The UK government’s Prevent policy places a legal obligation on professionals working with children and families to identify and report children and vulnerable adults at risk of radicalisation. This process can have serious implications for families’ freedom of movement and right to privacy, including restrictions on children travelling abroad under guidance issued by former President of the Family Division Sir James Munby, or removal of children in the family courts according to documentation collated by CAGE in 2018. This is contentious and raises many questions. As practitioners what do we perceive as ‘radicalisation’? Are terms like ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ adequately defined in law? At what point does ideology place children at risk of serious harm? And in cases related to radicalisation, does secrecy in the interests of national security interfere with the human rights of children and families?

This event is open to social work and mental health practitioners, academics and students. Beginning with a panel discussion, we will explore the impact of the Prevent policy on children and families in social work and mental health practise from multiple perspectives. We will invite practitioners to together for a workshop led by the charity Medact, and share experiences of working within the Prevent policy, the ethical challenges it raises for practitioners, and ways of practising or advocating to uphold the human rights of the people we work with.

• 19:00 - Welcome/Refreshments
• 19:30 - Panel Discussion
• 20.15 - Break/Refreshments
• 20.30 - Workshop
• 21.30 - End

Note: The perspectives offered by panellists are their own. They do not represent BASW London, Psychologists for Social Change or MedAct.q

Speakers

Chair: Sumayyah Hart is a BASW London committee member and has held a number of senior roles in children’s services across London, including Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) in Lambeth and Independent Reviewing Officer in Hammersmith and Fulham. Her current positions are Child Protection Advisor and Child Protection Conference Chair for Brent.

Dr. Asim Qureshi is Research Director for CAGE, a London-based advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the ‘War on Terror’. Asim collected evidence from families and published the report ‘Separating Families - How PREVENT Seeks the Removal of Children’ in 2018. The full report can be found here.

Dr. Tony Stanley was Chief Social Worker for Birmingham Children’s Trust and Principal Social Worker for Tower Hamlets. He has published three papers on social work practise and the Prevent duty with colleagues Dr. Surinder Guru, Dr. Anna Gupta and Vicki Coppock, and recently led the BASW Webinar ‘A Risky Time for Muslim Families: Professionalised Counter-radicalisation Networks’.

Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly is Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick University. Her research focuses on Counterterrorism in the UK and USA and Counter-Radicalisation Policies The Guardian’s coverage of her research into Prevent Duty Safeguarding in the NHS is here and here (also see Ted-X Warwick talk on ‘The Motivations for Terrorism’).

Dr. Tarek Younis is Newton International Fellow at UCL (University College London). His current project is a a community ethnography study of the impact of anti­-radicalisation discourse within healthcare institutions on the recipients and providers of PREVENT policy.

Anna Sekular is a caseworker with PreventWatch, which supports people impact by the Prevent policy to access legal advice and representation.

Workshop Coordinator: Reem Abu-Hayyeh works for the charity Medact, and is set to launch a consultation into healthcare professionals experiences of working within the Prevent policy in 2019. Reem has worked in advocacy and campaigns particularly on social justice issues relating to the marginalisation of BAME and migrant communities in the UK and Europe. In her last role at Maslaha, Reem managed projects focusing on Islamophobia, gender and stereotypes, working primarily with young people.

The sell out corn-based snack event of the quarter is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

ou’re getting a sneak peak at this and we will be unveiling the full line up in the next week or so. We’re thrilled to announce our first speakers though..

• Sarah Corbett - Craftivist Collective
• Polly Billington - UK100
• Bayo Adelaja - Do it Now Now
• Kat Sladden - We Huddle

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Register

Hate has gone viral and is destroying our communities. Our world has has become tribal, ‘betrayal’ and ‘treason’ appear daily in social media about even the smallest differences of opinions.

How can we fight this footballisation of politics ?

How can we change Them and Us into our shared community again?

“Learning another language is like having a chance to live another life” this quote is true but learning another language takes a lot of time and are all busy people. Lucky for us, playing a game can be like peeking into someone else’s life. In the space of a few hours we can explore in-depth how native Alaskans live (Never Alone), with a glimpse into how incredibly collaborative culture manages to survive in the harshest of climates, how lack of privacy is turned into strength.

In Where the Water taste like Wine we are faced with unemployment and survival dilemmas from the Great Depression times in US. It has amazing soundtrack and shows live in rural US during the tough period in American history. It also explores the Other, non-urban values.

On The Surface – How to be friends with people who are different? Exploring empathy and feelings for others. A game by Digital Liberties for The Challenge and ISD.

Flash Demo VR from Casto – showing a VR game recreating old environments, alternative worlds that can be explored as a story background- Huddersfield Uni) will be show in the break.

The Problem: Our online filter bubbles (Twitter, Facebook) have a propensity to create rapid polarisation (Paolo Gerbaudo and Jamie J Bartlett), where quickly some Them and some Us emerge, praying on people’s innermost fears, emphasising tribalism and exploiting their insecurities. From polarisation to extremism is only a short hop and as a society we need to search for ways to ‘vaccine’ ourselves against the siren call of hate.

The Challenge: How do game designers create worlds where experience of other world, other lives and unfamiliar cultural context can be experienced by thousands of people in a space of few hours and without the need to learn their language? Can games become our hate-vaccines? How can intense emotional gaming experience convey the subtle and often nuance differences in opinion love, sense of community, sense of belonging and shared history or lack of it. Can we create as powerful games as 12 Angry Men movie was for Human Rights movement in 1960 ?

Join us on 18th March to find how hit games step up are the Force for Good in the world obsessed with hate.

Speakers

• Ben Greenaway – Cybersalon’s Game Reviewer-in-Chief
• Simon Sarginson – ex game developer (RockSteady Studios and SplashDamage)
• Casto Vocal – VR /3D developer (Huddersfield University /Teeside University)
• Chaired by Eva Pascoe – Cybersalon

What is holding us back from creating a powerful and inspiring vision for our future? Why do we seem stuck in making minor upgrades to managerial capitalism?

One of the youngest law professors in Harvard’s history at 29, Professor Roberto Unger played a significant role in bringing democracy back to Brazil, served in Lula’s government as a minister and has been called “a prophet” by the famed philosopher Richard Rorty. A key influence and inspiration to Obama he was also one of Obama’s toughest critics, memorably arguing against Obama’s second term.

Unger is the author of several important and groundbreaking works, most recently “The Future of American Progressivism” and “The Knowledge Economy”. For decades, he has been a pragmatic utopian, working to envision a practical path to a radically better future at a time when such political dreams were unfashionable. An outspoken critic of neoliberalism and a prophet before his time, he early identified the ideological bankruptcy of managerial capitalism. Now, at a time when history seems to be proving him right, we should learn all what we can from this pioneering voice.

The conference will be facilitated by Dr Rufus Pollock, economists, technologist and author of the Open Revolution and Dr Liam Kavanagh cognitive scientist and Director of the Art / Earth / Tech institute.

Common Knowledge is a newly founded non profit tech workers cooperative with a mission to support and build infrastructure for grassroots political and community organising.

Join us for an evening debrief and workshop. We’ll be presenting the work done in the last two weeks, the third sprint of work. Then we’ll be putting this in the context of the last six months of the project and deciding next steps.

Since October, we’ve been designing and testing our first product, a political organising and community capacity building platform. This work is aimed squarely at boosting the levels of autonomous organising in the progressive space and grassroots movements, activating a largely passive activist population and decentralising and devolving key community resources currently held by large institutional actors.

March 15th will mark the end of our third sprint. We’d like to invite you down, have a few drinks with us and share in our work and learnings. We’ve interviewed over 70 activists and organisers across London as part of this project so far and are currently testing a range of assumptions we’ve developed from those conversations - that’s a lot of juicy learnings.

Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and snacks will be provided.

The event will be split between a presentation and discussion of our work and a short breakout and group feedback session.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of party activists across the world pound the streets and knock on doors in an effort to mobilise large numbers of citizens to vote for their party of choice.

Get Out The Vote (GOTV) voter mobilisation has become a staple of electoral campaigning, but as new technologies develop and new political forces take root, is there room for improvement?

Join Campaign Lab for the first event in our new series exploring the potential for innovation in electoral campaigning in the UK and beyond.

For our debut event, we’ll be joined by Rudi Shenk, former National Outreach Director of Obama for America, and Matt Goddin, Labour Party organiser for Ilford North, one of the few Labour wins in 2015. Our third speaker is to be confirmed.

During the panel and breakout session we’ll explore current methods and GOTV strategies used by political parties and campaigns in an effort to identify where there is space for innovation and improvement - asking our speakers: in an ideal world, how would you improve the GOTV operation?

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

Purpose is central to resilience in organisations, but it’s more than a mission statement. Drawing on academic theory and practical examples, this talk will show how to figure out what an organisation is really working towards and build resilience. It will touch on the relationship between people and technology in organisations, how to understand different people’s perspectives and how to design for changeability.

Dr Eloise Elliott-Taysom is a Product Manager specialising in emerging technology, data and AI. She did her PhD in Engineering at Cambridge University looking at resilience in complex socio-technical systems. Her most recent publication, ‘On the Resilience of Sociotechnical Systems’, can be found in a new book on Systemic Design.

Burglary affects 2 in every 100 households, and it sucks! In 2018 there were 664,000 burglaries. It’s a miserable and frightening experience for the victim, and a huge drain on police resources.

We’re building a bot to help the victims of burglary. If you’re interested in being a part of the project, join us on Tuesday 12th!

You can find out more at our site: https://www.policecoders.org/home/2019-01-projects/002-burglary-victims-support-bot

If you meet any of these criteria, then you’re perfect for this project:

• Creative problem solvers who’d like to give a little back.
• Former victims of burglary who’d like to reach out and help others.
• C# developers with a passion for doing some civic good.
• Professional testers who can push our bot to its limits.
• Security professionals with knowledge around GDPR compliance and secure design.
• HTML/CSS/Javascript coders and designers who’d like to help make our work open and accessible to the public.
• Copywriters who can help us with conversational text and blog posts.
• Technical writers to help us preserve the legacy of our framework.

Police officers, we’ll be reaching out once we’ve completed a working prototype that we can structure around the work you do.

The market for personal data is broken. All of our information is traded behind our backs every day by 3rd parties with whome we have no direct relationship. Misaligned incentive structures ensure our privacy is violated again and again.

How did this happen and what we can do about it? The GDPR gives you powerful new rights, but real world constraints continue to prohibit large numbers of people from exercising those rights.

While the problem may seem unprecedented, it is actually something we have solved many times before. Personal data is just an information good, best thought of as a newspaper we publish about ourselves to be read by AIs. What this means is that, in effect, every person is now an author whose copyright is being infringed. As such, we draw draw important insights into this problem by studying information economics and information law.

In this lecture, we identify the key failures afflicting the market for personal data by examining the history of other types of information goods, including books and music. We examine how societies in the past helped fix these broken markets, how new technologies require regular updates to the rules and regulations governing these markets, and outline our solution to the problem modelled on the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

What does a 15th century publishing guild have to do with this 21st century problem? Join the discussion to find out!

Open to those interested in conflict intervention and reconstruction, the mapathon will try to bring people together through a collective activity of mapping one of the Syrian cities (Daraya) affected by the conflict.

Bring along your laptop and mouse to the mapathon where you will be guided through the process of mapping, and given a summary about our project as a whole. Also, the role of open maps platforms in humanitarian intervention and human rights protection in conflict areas.

Other than being a tool for intervention and protecting property rights for Syrians, this mapathon will be a safe and friendly space where we can get to know each other and explore together what can maps reveal about different areas in Syria and how can they be put on the map for all Syrians.

Part of a multi-stage project that seeks to draw maps for urban cities and areas across Syria based on satellite images available through open mapping platforms. The priority is given to areas which fall under laws and decrees that legalise the confiscation of properties owned by Syrian citizens who fail to claim it, giving the priority to the destroyed properties a result of the conflict. The project will be carried out through multiple mapathons adopting a bottom-up approach which depends on the the participation of volunteers (Syrians and non-Syrians) in the mapping process.

One of a series of bi-monthly socials for those interested in community-led housing.

This month we’re joined by Zarinah Agnew (zarinahagnew.com), a US based neuroscientist and social scientist, and a member of the Embassy Network (www.embassynetwork.com) of ten intentional communities spread over six countries.

Zarinah will give a short talk about their exploring and iterating living methods, and in particular their eight month experiment with forms of governance (embassygovernance.space).

Also present will be members of existing cohousing and coliving communities in London, who will be happy to share their experiences and knowledge. You can meet others who are forming projects, looking for members for existing projects and you can find out about other events, advisers, consultants, funders and other organisations.

The event is free to attend and children are welcome.

Feeling daunted about coming alone? We feel that too sometimes. Send us a message with the words ‘buddy me up’ and we’ll make sure you are welcomed in by one of the group and helped to feel at ease.

Cohousing London is a community-led organisation working to create a network of diverse, inclusive, sustainable and affordable cohousing developments across London: facebook.com/groups/cohousinglondon

KIN helps to deliver world-class sustainable and community-led housing projects, providing site finding, facilitation, design and funding: cohousing.co / kinarchitects.co

An afternoon diving into an open dataset of repair data on electronics to discover what is impeding repairs.

Take part in person at Newspeak House, or participate remotely.

The Restart Project collects data on every repair attempted at their community repair events. That data is used to present insights into the devices and problems found to those who design, manufacture and regulate products in the first place. The aim is to identify the barriers to repair that people come up against, whether it’s lack of spare parts, poor documentation, or simply bad design.

This Open Data Day focuses on computers, the product most frequently brought to Restart Parties. New regulations on the repairability of computers will soon be discussed at EU level. The data may reveal common problems, common (and less common!) solutions, and what are the barriers to repair that should be highlighted to policymakers.

There is data on over 10,000 devices from repair events around the world, and a group of volunteers has fixed over 50% of them, offsetting tonnes of e-waste and hundreds of tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process.

There will be a range of data and research tasks suitable for newcomers and experienced analysts, and tools will be provided for the analysis if required. All you’ll need to do is bring a laptop.

The planet is in ecological crisis: we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event this planet has experienced. Scientists believe we may have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown. This is an emergency.

In this public talk, climate speakers from Extinction Rebellion will share the latest climate science on where our planet is heading, discuss some of the current psychology around climate change, and offer solutions through the study of social movements.

Everyone is welcome and there will be time to ask questions and discuss afterwards. Entry is free.

Paolo Gerbaudo (author), Anastasia Kavada (University of Westminster), Adam Klug (Momentum co-founder), Matteo Canestrari (digital politics expert).

From the Five Star Movement to Podemos, from the Pirate Parties to La France Insoumise, from the movements behind Bernie Sanders to those backing Jeremy Corbyn, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a new blueprint for political organisation: the digital party.

Paolo Gerbaudo will discuss the transformation of political parties in the digital era, drawing on the argument of his new book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, with scholars and practitioners of digital politics.

In the book Gerbaudo addresses the organisational revolution that is transforming political parties in the time of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Cambridge Analytica. Drawing on interviews with political leaders and organisers, he demonstrates that besides rapidly growing in votes, these formations have also revitalised party democracy, involving hundreds of thousands in discussions carried out on online decision-making platforms.

Participatory, yet plebiscitarian, open and democratic, yet dominated by charismatic ‘hyperleaders’, digital parties display both great potentials and risks for the development of new forms of mass participation in an era of growing inequality. All political parties will have to reckon with the lessons of the digital party.

Paolo Gerbaudo is a political sociologist and the Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London. He is the author of The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (2018), The Mask and the Flag: Populism and Global Protest (2017) and Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (2012).

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks, a big homemade soupy lunch and pizza dinner will be provided!

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

Aaron Swartz was a young hacktivist, and co-founder of Reddit, early developer of RSS, Markdown and Creative Commons. He led the campaigns against SOPA and was both an excellent technologist and activist.

He was convicted for mass downloading academic journals from JSTOR from MIT. His final charges included a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison. He hanged himself two days after prosecution.

Let’s come together and remember what happened by watching the documentary about him, The Internet’s Own Boy (available here), and be inspired together by his courage. Afterwards we will have time for chatting.

• 19:00 Arrivals
• 19:30 Screening starts
• 21:30 Discussion/networking

This month’s theme is health. Whether you lead a healthy life still largely depends on where you are born, your socio-economic class, race, gender and sexual orientation. Given this reality, how do we ensure we all have access to health services? How do we ensure issues that affect the health of marginalised populations (e.g. drug addictions, or tropical diseases) get researched and treated? And, how do we promote healthy habits when our digital lives, increased social isolation and sedentary lifestyles are putting our (mental) well-being at risk? Many radical initiatives are working to tackle these problems. They need our help!

We are inviting organisations working in this area to meet engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to these projects. During the meetup we will run a speed dating session, for organisations to introduce themselves to our engineers.

Please confirm your presence.

See other projects Radical Engineers are working on.

This meetup is the final one in our three-part series, ‘Interdisciplinary alchemy’, exploring what data scientists can learn from delving into other disciplines.

This time, we’re turning the spotlight on civil liberties activists. As technology continues to permeate more and more aspects of our lives, data is increasingly becoming a civil rights issue.

We’re asking how data scientists and activists can work together to design innovative tech solutions that don’t compromise our civil liberties.

Bringing years of experience along with some fresh ideas to help us consider this question, we have a panel of speakers from the world of civil liberties activism, including:

• Hannah Couchman - Policy and Campaigns Officer at Liberty
• Frederike Kaltheuner - Data Programme Lead at Privacy International

More speakers to be announced soon!

• 6.30pm: Doors open and sign-in
• 7.00pm: Welcome from host
• 7.10pm: ‘What can the worlds of data science and civil liberties activism learn from working together? - panel discussion
• 7.45pm: Questions to the panel
• 8.30pm: Drinks and a chance to chat
• 9.00pm: Finish

Wikimedia UK is organising the first Wikidata meetup in London.

If you’re working on Wikidata projects, or interested in Wikidata and want to find out how to get involved, come along and talk to us about it.

Those of you familiar with the world of finance know it is a complex world built on trust. Banks and financial institutions are hard at work with how they can win our trust again, and offering options for ethical investment is high on the list. It is a positive development, but also something we need to remain critical about: to what extent can we see ethical investing as a way to make the world a little bit better?

The discussion will be hosted by Eline Hesse, who has spent three years creating Petrol Dollars for a Different Engine, a documentary of her experience researching how to reinvest her portfolio in a sustainable manner. She has spoken to many sustainable investment experts and various bankers raising the question if it is possible to match your ideals with your capital. She would like to start a discussion about the value of ethical investing presently and in the future.

Join us at Newspeak House for a rebellious song sharing workshop. Bring your favourite protest, peace and medicine songs and let’s learn them together in a co-created space.

Whether you want to learn songs to take with you to Extinction Rebellion actions, or you just want to come together with a group of people to create beautiful music you are very welcome. We will start by sharing some XR favourites before opening up the space for new sharings. If you have an instrument that you wish to bring, please do. Otherwise just come with yourself and your voice and you’re ready to go!

Following from this event there will be an open discussion on ethical investment, asking to what extent we can see ethical investing as a way to make the world a bit better.

Campaign Lab is a community of political analysts, researchers, developers and data scientists organised around a simple idea, to develop an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

After 5 fun meetups and a fantastic hackday we’re pausing for breath to do some strategy thinking!

We’ll be discussing:

• Our methodology: What have we achieved so far, next steps & getting to grips with statistics
• Our “austerity mapping” platform: How can we get funding for it and who can help us build it?
• Our testing & innovation: How can our community help candidates who approach us for help in future elections?
• Our governance & structures: How can we organise ourselves and make better decisions together?
• Our skills & training: How can we upskill our community? How can we share and exchange our technical and political knowledge?

It’d be great to see campaign labbers old and new come along and help us work out our strategy for the next 6 months… We can promise homemade veggie burgers & wedges!

Want to recap where we’ve got to? Check out our GitHub and join our slack!

Our second meetup is themed around the idea of waste. From fast fashion to endless packaging, we are surrounded by the unnecessary. This meetup is about ways to get rid of it.

This could be dematerialisation, sharing, reuse and transformation.

We are inviting organisations working in this area to meet engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to these projects.

Please confirm your presence.

See other projects Radical Engineers are working on.

Following up from the Human Networks Convergence held in Barcelona in October 2018, a gathering which brought together people from 16 different networks to see how we might experiment and learn together, we are hosting a small gathering in London to continue the conversations on ecosystemic collaboration, systemic change and networks, working on shared challenges.

This will be an open space with a small number of people (10-12) who are working in the areas of ecosystemic collaboration and addressing complex issues that involve a variety of players. The purpose is to exchange insights and learn from each other.

This gathering is organised by Corina Angheloiu (Forum for the Future), Phoebe Tickell (Enspiral) and Manel Heredero (Ouishare). If you can’t attend or think of someone who would be interested in this topic, please feel free to make it your own and invite them.

For more context:

• Weaving networks — when we all need to be spiders by Corina at Medium
• Write Up after the Convergence in Barcelona
• Festival by Emergence by Manel at Medium
• “If we want to address the complex problem situations that the world is facing, being a smart systems thinker and innovator is not enough. We need to engage in new ways of collaborating that promote continuous, productive and collective learning and innovation. These collaborations require us to learn social skills, build social structures, and adopt attitudes of openness to learning, trust and responsibility, however hard it is to let go of the behaviours and structures that hold us back.” Why being smart is not enough — the social skills and structures of tackling complexity by Mieke van der Bijl

Take part in a live round of Work Cycles, a productivity technique:

1. Register for the event. (It’s free, but there’s limited capacity — so we ask you only register if you can actually attend.)

2. Bring work you want to accomplish. This isn’t a lecture or networking event — you’ll actually be getting your work done at the event.

3. There will be 20-30 minutes of setup and overview where you’ll learn how to break your work into a more efficient format.

4. You’ll work in cycles: 30 minutes of focused work followed by 10 minute breaks to analyze, plan the next cycle block, get feedback if desired, and do some brief socializing.

5. At the end of the whole day, you’ll debrief lessons learned for 10-20 minutes, share lessons with other cool people attending, and call it a day.

Ultraworking has run Work Cycles both virtually via videoconferencing, and live and in-person with thousands of people around the world, including at coworking spaces, top universities like the University of Chicago, at the offices of top companies including YCombinator-backed startups, and at government-sponsored innovation spaces like the Seoul Global Startup Center.

For more info on the technique, see ultraworking.com.

Prototype games to explore complex systems. Today we explore the game loop in Return of the Obra Dinn.

On 16th January 1969, young Czech philosophy student Jan Palach burned himself to death. He did so in protest against the growing indifference of citizens towards the gross injustices of the communist regime. The impact of his act was unprecedented. It changed the course of Czechoslovak history and became a symbol that inspired protesters around the world.

There are many different kinds of sacrifice. What is the meaning of sacrifice today? Is it the right way to protest? What can we learn from the legacy of Jan Palach’s most radical act?

The purpose of this event will be to address these questions. We will discuss the philosophical origins of the idea of self-sacrifice, from Christianity to Buddhism to the New Left. We will hear people sharing their own personal experiences with protest by sacrifice. We will engage in a collective ritual to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Jan Palach’s death.

Help us vectorise Mandate-era maps of Palestine, and learn about open mapping tools

We found archival maps of mandate-era Palestine (from 1923 to 1948), including details of 500+ ethnically cleansed villages and towns. We have made them available through PalOpenMaps.org. Now we are working on extracting the data out of the maps, in order to make them useful and accessible to artists and researchers. All the data that we produce will be freely licensed for anyone to use.

In this event, we will introduce the project, show you how to vectorise historic maps using open mapping tools (OpenStreetMap/osm-seed), and we will spend the rest of the session exploring the maps and vectorising sections of it.

No previous mapping experience is necessary. All you need is a computer, curiosity and a desire to help. Please bring a laptop & mouse if you have one. If not, then you can still help by pairing up with another attendee. The more eyes the better!

This will be a relaxed Sunday afternoon, we will provide light snacks and drinks.

Palestine Open Maps is a project supported by Visualizing Palestine and the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fund.

Insights from the South is a new event format by IDEAS Globally, to create the space for knowledge exchange between London and the Global South. Our theme for this event is ‘Designing for Development’: how can external efforts for development be improved through perspectives from the ground?

Come listen to IDEAS Globally authors present their Insights on key issues in Development today, and have your perspectives challenged by our international speakers - community leaders, business people and artists who connect us with the local reality of each topic. Witness conversations that will change your perspective of development and North-South relations.

IDEAS Insights are short academic briefs written by members of the IDEAS Globally international network, providing thought leadership on development and social enterprise. All IDEAS Globally Insights can be read freely at: www.ideasglobally.org/Insights. They have been viewed over 6,000 times (and counting!). This event will use selected insights as the starting point for deeper discussion of issues in the Global South.

Our Selected Insights authors:

• Tamas Katona: “Narratives of Development (Hungary’s Social Enterprise Landscape in Historical Context)”.
• Kristina Funk & Alyette de Royere: “Women in Nepalese Healthcare as a Potential for Development”.
• Joe Forsdick: “Grids & Batteries: Strengthening Energy Reliability against Natural Disasters”.

Our Outsights leaders:

• Dr Estella Carpi, Postdoctoral Research Associate: “Analysing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey”.
• Shamim Azad, writer and poet: “The Significance of British-Bangladeshi Bilingualism and History in my Writing and Social Activism”.

Register now!

We live, socialize and work in communities, with some of our closest friends, families and colleagues. We also live in a world that socializes and reinforces violence. We live in a rape culture where media portrays violence and violation as romance.

Data indicates that most consent violations take place, not in abandoned alley ways by strangers, but by people we know, in places where we are supposed to feel safe. One in four women in north america will be assaulted in their lifetimes, many men also. This affects us all, not just those directly harmed. Families are destroyed, communities are fragmented, workplaces become alienating.

How we do best prepare ourselves for these issues? How do we create a culture that clearly sets the bar for the future society that we wish to live in? How do we create restorative and alternative processes and practices that protect those that are harmed in our communities, and also work to guide, teach and serve those who have done the harm? What do you each want to see, how would you like to be treated should you find yourself on either side of the coin in one of these situations?

Come and join us for a discussion around how we’d like society to deal with these issues and to see if we can take some of these lessons on into our day to day life.

Format // Doors 7pm // Talk 7.30pm // Moderated discussion 8pm - 10pm

Food, drink, pretty lights, live music, and more political technologists in one place than is probably wise.

Please register so we can plan for attendance: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/christmas-at-newspeak-house-tickets-52482297966

Recent predictions about the future of work point in the direction of an incredibly fluid labour market. We face an increasingly precarious employment-market, where the individualisation of labour — seen as a push towards self-employment, short-term contracts, unpaid internships, and disingenuous forms of non-standard employment — becomes the unhappy norm.

At Newspeak House on 13 December 2018, three leading experts will debate the future of work, unions, and the digital economy.

• Dr. Christina Colclough, Director of the Future World of Work, UNI Global Union
• Dr. Barry Cofler, Deacon Fellow, Oxford University; Researcher, Policy Network
• Final Speaker TBA

Audience participation is encouraged. We will assess the technological and political barriers that limit union’s use of data as well as the skills and systems needed to overcome them.

Our goal is to understand how trade unions – the natural and historic advisor and guardians of collective rights – must adapt to this new digital economy to meet the needs and aspirations of workers.

In the question period, we will explore how digital technologies could be used by unions and workers to improve job quality and collective empowerment.

New, expanded and updated edition of How to dismantle the NHS in 10 easy steps: The blueprint that the government does not want you to see, by Dr Youssef El-Gingihy published by Zero books

The much anticipated new, expanded and updated edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps comes with high praise from Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, John Pilger and Ken Loach.

Dr Youssef El-Gingihy is a Tower Hamlets GP at the Bromley by Bow Centre. This book tells the story of how the NHS is being sold off and why you might have to buy private health insurance soon. It contains new chapters on the junior doctors’ strike and the introduction of US style healthcare models of accountable/integrated care. It also has a coda on how we can save the NHS.

Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors’ strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017.

Further, since writing the first edition, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy found himself stricken with a life-threatening illness and the NHS doctor became the NHS patient. The fight to save the NHS transformed into a fight for his own life.

Now, fully recovered, Dr El-Gingihy returns to his 10 Easy Steps in order to strengthen his original argument on the 70th anniversary of the NHS. Dr El-Gingihy’s insights have never been more vital as our National Health Service continues to be hit by the privatisation of public services.

more onion is an award winning digital agency behind the Campaignion platform, which delivers high-impact digital campaigns and fundraising for progressive non-profits. Come and meet the more more onion as well as fundraisers and campaigners from across the UK charity sector.

ON THE AGENDA

• New Campaignion features - upgraded ‘email protest’ actions and more
• Campaign showcase - insights into campaign actions and strategies including Mencap’s Treat Me Well campaign, and Friends of the Earth’s lead generation quiz
• Campaign clinic’ - chance to get input from other campaigners and fundraisers into your campaign plans and challenges
• Christmas drinks, networking and discussion with peers from across the sector

Please Register: https://www.more-onion.com/en/campaignion-dec2018

For those who are new to Campaignion (or fancy a refresh!), please feel free to join us a little earlier at 2.30pm for a demo.

From The Hunger Games to Ready Player One, visions of dystopia dominate contemporary ideas of the future. But is there room for a more hopeful alternative?

At the Utopia Café we explore alternative ideas of the future through the lenses of literature, film, and other media. We also consider how these ideas can be realised.

Drinks and snacks will be provided. Everyone is welcome. :)

Decentralisation is charging ahead, but where to? How do we ensure a decentralised web brings about greater autonomy, privacy, choice? What’s the priority? Which apps work now? What’s in the way for mainstream adoption?

Join us for an evening of decentralized conversation! This month, we’ll host a redecentralized speed dating session: a chance to embark on deep (but short) conversations with those building decentralized apps, or developing decentralized governance models and designs.

In addition we’ll have drinks, pizza and tons of fun!

We encourage you to bring anyone with an interest in decentralization. No prior knowledge required! This movement belongs to all of us!

You can reach us at [email protected], or find us on Twitter: @anoukruhaak, @shevksi

For anyone wanting more context, here’s a blog post on the motivations and values behind redecentralize.org, with suggested characteristics of decentralisation that we should care about (TL;DR distribution of power and how this applies to tech)

A huge amount of edible food is wasted and many efforts are being made by governments, companies, charities and community organisations with mixed results. Nick Sellen is hopeful that de-centralized co-operative community organising using open source software can provide a way forward.

Please note that space is limited in the Drawing Room so seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

This event is open only to Kairos Fellows and specially invited Friends of Kairos.

Kairos UK has partnered with Enspiral to bring you a unique evening, exploring the future of entrepreneurship. Registration is required.

Kairos is a global network of young entrepreneurs seeking to fix broken industries. We are from different continents, verticals and backgrounds but share a desire to leave the world in a better way than how we found it, by sharing our experience, networks and expertise.

Enspiral is a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and freelancers who develop software and practices for global collaboration, and who collaborate together to launch businesses with a social and/or environmental mission. The Enspiral network has been experimenting with new forms of governance, making decisions and collaboratively budgeting together for 8 years.

Life as an entrepreneur can be tough. As Elon Musk says, “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” Long days, constant challenges, learning from failures - and unfortunately a lot of this is often done alone.

But could it be different? Imagine a new kind of entrepreneurship, an Entrepreneurship 2.0, where instead of the focus being on the lone wolf entrepreneur, the focus is on the community, and the ecosystem that supports a start-up into flourishing? This kind of collaborative entrepreneurship throws up some big questions:

• How can we come together as entrepreneurs and be stronger?
• How could we pool our resources, time and know-how to be larger than the sum of our parts?
• What kind of impact could we unlock if we learned to collaborate on a large scale?

Cost: We are asking for a £15 contribution to cover food and drink (beers, wine and soft drinks) for the evening and nothing else. If there is any money leftover after organising, this will be donated to charity.

Dresscode: Casual. The evening will be casual but we may decide to go out in Shoreditch after the event.

Format: There will be drinks, we’ll order in some food, and some light exercises to get to know each other better. There will also be slots for some Lightning Talks - 5 minute talks from the community to share what they are working on, and any problems they need help solving.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Phoebe ([email protected]) or Seth ([email protected]).

The internet has democratised speech — it has given everyone a publishing platform. So how can we make sense of this explosion of material?

In this Citizen Beta we talk to Turi Munthe and Jamie Bartlett about the new projects they’re working on that try to do just that.

We’ll be covering whether argument mining can actually map an atlas of ideas or arguments, how knowledge and information is currently stored and how that needs to change, and who will actually benefit from these kinds of tools?

Doors open at 7.00pm, talks start at 7.30pm

Speakers

• Turi Munthe. Turi is a VC for Northbase Media. He is most recently the founder of Parli. He is also the founder of Demotix and served as its CEO. Turi has worked as Head for CNN, and at the BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi, Reuters, Sky, you name it. He is a Publisher, Editor, Policy Analyst, Lecturer, Journalist. He has written for The Economist, Slate.com, the FT, the Telegraph, the Nation and many others. He has given lectures on Iran to the Central Communist Party of China, and on erotica to the ICA. His one book is the Saddam Hussein Reader. He studied at Oxford University, the Hebrew University and NYU.
• Jamie Bartlett. Jamie is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, where he has become one of the UK’s leading thinkers on politics and technology. He is also author of The People Vs Tech (2018) about the relationship between technology and democracy, Radicals (2017) about political outsiders and best-selling The Dark Net (2014) about internet subcultures, which has been translated into 13 languages. His Ted Talk about how dark net technology is changing the nature of cybercrime has been viewed almost 3 million times.

 Schedule

• 7.00pm – Drinks
• 7.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 7.40pm – Turi Munthe
• 7.50pm – Jamie Bartlett
• 8.00pm – Q&A
• 8.10pm – More drinks and mince pies!

Please note - you will need to bring a laptop to this event

Since June, together we’ve sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, and made a start on setting up scrapers and writing parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our first full HackDay as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Check out the Campaign Lab volunteer teams and project guide

You will need to bring a laptop to this event

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks, lunch and dinner will be provided!

Connecting developers, designers and other technologists to radical organizations in need of technological support. Radical organizations aim to solve society’s gravest problems by addressing the underlying systems, rather than merely fighting symptoms.

During this meetup we’ll host a speed dating session, to connect the two groups and get you working on the world’s most urgent problems. In addition we’ll also have drinks and chats and lots of fun!

Are you a technologist? Great, join our meetup and we’ll connect you to organizations that need your help. ‘Help’ can range from getting e-mail setup to building full-fledged apps.

Are you a radical organization? Send us an email: [email protected] We’ll reach out to you and explain a bit about the evening and how you can get the most out of it!

Find more: http://radicalengineers.com and find us at [email protected], or @anoukruhaak on Twitter.

Four scientists from across the UK will speak about the battle against Alzheimer’s, cancer and the future of regenerative medicine. We’ll also share the story of Lyrical Science, and our vision for the future of science funding.

You’ll be able to learn more about the state of critical life science research, network with the scientists, celebrate our public launch over drinks, and discover a new way to get involved in scientific discovery.

At Lyrical Science, we help scientists share their inspiring stories and earn research incomes from their public backers. Scientists are often prevented from doing life saving research by funding cuts outside of their control. This event is about how we change that.

We’re a team of early career researchers across the UK and can’t wait to share our vision with you in person. We look forward to welcoming guests from all backgrounds– scientists, science lovers, philanthropists, impact investors, and anyone interested in helping the scientific community gain the support it needs to conduct critical life science research.

Let’s come together for a beautiful and inspiring evening!

Visit lyricalscience.com and find out how we got started

Got an idea to make the world a better place but need advice or volunteers? Utopia Forum wants you!

We’re looking to follow the reading groups of Utopia Cafe with a venue for people to plan and work on their projects together. Unlike many planning groups, we’re not focused on one type of politics, or on one sector for transformation. Instead we’re hoping to bring together lots of different projects together to transform society as a whole.

In this first meeting, we’ll be discussing Utopia Cafe and Forum as a project, and then opening up the floor for discussion of various projects. Bring your ideas!

Design Hops are the first step for charities exploring the role of digital in their services. By demystifying technology and design approaches, this free half-day creative workshop builds confidence and motivation to take the next step, as well as focus on what that immediate next step should be for each organisation.

For more details and to apply for a place, https://wearecast.org.uk/for-nonprofits/design-hops

At its heart, data science is a set of tools for turning impenetrable datasets into clear insights & decisions that can help you to achieve your goals. This workshop series will introduce you to several of these tools with the aim of giving you practical skills to take away and immediately apply in your own work.

Part I (Mon 5th): A Crash Course in Coding

The first workshop will focus on learning the Python programming language and related libraries for importing, manipulating and visualising datasets.

Part II (Wed 7th): Dabbling with Data

The first workshop leads straight into Part II, which will cover more advanced data visualisation techniques, creating your own datasets by scraping web pages, and a brief introduction to building your own regression models.

The workshops will be hands-on throughout with code examples and exercises provided to apply what you’ve just learned. We strongly encourage you to attend both workshops if possible as they are designed to run together. There are no pre-requisites other than a laptop and your own curiosity.

Registration and further details

Over the last decade, the police, tasked with ensuring our safety, have been so severely defunded that they are unable to help every person, or respond to every crime report. The numbers don’t lie. Over the last 8 years, police funding dropped by 19%, resulting in 20,000 fewer police officers and significantly reduced resources to tackle, investigate and prevent crime.

We can’t magically restore the policing budget, but we can help the remaining officers leverage their police skills by providing the tools and technologies they need to be effective.

While innovation within the police has historically been slow, technology could help overcome a number of obstacles. That’s where you come in.

On 6th November we’re holding our first meet-up at Newspeak House to start building tools for police officers! We welcome software developers, designers and anyone with ideas, critical thinking and problem-solving skills to come along and help out. If you’re not available on the 6th, but you’d like to get involved, join our community to find out more about the projects.