A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora.

The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, 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 week the articles are:

1. Diversify your identity (https://markmanson.net/diversify-your-identity)
2. Conscious dreaming and controlled hallucinations (http://www.shaman-australis.com/~claude/dreams.html)
3. In defense of flogging (https://harpers.org/blog/2011/07/in-defense-of-flogging-six-questions-for-peter-moskos/)

We’ll start to talk about these around three. People usually 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.

We also have a subreddit, reddit.com/r/londonrationalish, which right now is mostly used for announcing meetups, but if you think it would be useful for other things too I encourage you to use them for it. You can also suggest discussion articles in the thread for that, reddit.com/r/londonrationalish/comments/8oxedb/reading_group_voting_thread/.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software. Sign up online, contribute to five projects and get a sweet t-shirt.

At this event, we’ll be focusing on civic tech projects - those which enable engagement, participation or enhances the relationship between the people and government.

If you want to highlight your open source civic tech projects to attendees - you can do so here: https://goo.gl/XaMJK8

We’ll provide some snacks and refreshments.

See you at the event!

What would happen if we locked 100 people in a complex with access to barely enough food for everyone? What if we made it so only one person had the power to say who could eat what and when? Would such a society always fall into totalitarianism? What simple changes to such a society would make a difference?

We know that power can be structured by simple rules in some societies. Bee colonies have a queen with access to the best food and lays all the eggs. Are there simple rules for human societies? How do people organise themselves politically?

We’ll be investigating questions like these in the workshop using a systems modelling approach. It’s possible to create simulation models on computers where individual ‘agents’ behave and interact according to simple rules. We can then observe and study the artificial societies and political systems that we create.

You can see some examples of simulation models from the excellent explorable explanations.

The workshop will be hosted by Dr John Bryden, a research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London and a fellow of Newspeak House. It will start with a background talk about the topic. Examples of simulation models will be provided to get you started.

You’ll need to bring a laptop and an aptitude for programming. We’re going to be using python, so it would be good if you have python 3, matplotlib and scipy installed.

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

Since June, together we’ve sourced over 130 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 next event 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 has never been any 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.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

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 an evening of data gathering.

You do not need to know how to code to attend and help.

You will need to bring a laptop to this event.

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks and food will be provided!

The rapid rise of the gig economy in recent years reflects a huge shift in the way people work. While greater flexibility has created more jobs and low unemployment, in many cases the low-pay and insecurity of some of these jobs means that workers are worse off.

Over three million people in the UK are now estimated to be in insecure work such as temporary work, low-paid self-employment or working on a zero-hours contract, according to the IPPR Prosperity and Justice report. This is not just a problem of the gig economy. The report argues that this trend has reversed the income gains and employee protections secured over much of the last century.

While policy reform is back in the news (BBC), this event will explore how technology could be used to create better work for flexible and independent workers.

We’re interested in how technology can be used to push back against these trends. We’ll discuss products or services that make flexible work benefit workers, as well as employers. For example by helping independent workers increase their income, access benefits, or have more control over when and how they work.

Speakers include:

• Emma Blackmore, Head of Partnerships and Marketing at Gigstr
• Kayleigh Walsh, Co-op member at Outlandish, CoTech and member of the Worker Co-op Council
• Anna Maybank, Co-founder of Poplar (aka Better Work Lab)
• Alysia Wanczyk, Head of Marketing at Trezeo

If you’d like to put forward a speaker then please message us through the WorkerTech meetup page.

The WorkerTech event series is brought to you by Bethnal Green Ventures and sponsored by Resolution Trust and Accenture. This event is delivered in partnership with Newspeak House, The London College of Political Technologists.

This discussion is aimed at people who have a relatively good understanding of the core concepts of effective altruism and know the basic principles behind global priorities research.

We’ll be discussing what the current gaps may be in global priorities research and if and how we as individuals and a community can do anything to help out, whether that is self directed research or working out which organisations we can support more or even whether individual and volunteer research may be negative.

A casual meetup for those who make games!

Please contact @Jupiter_Hadley if you would like to bring your game to show off, we’d love to see what you’re working on!

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office is publishing a list of all British diplomats from 1782-2015. They’re looking for bold and innovative ideas for navigating, using, and presenting the data.

• Where have we had the most female Ambassadors?
• Did diplomats follow similar career paths, or were they posted at random?
• How old are diplomats when they die?

Everyone is welcome, experienced developers and total beginners alike.

The Prize:

• the chance to see your idea become a live product, with the help of FCO experts
• a private tour with our expert historians of the FCO King Charles Street building in Whitehall
• a chance to win Palmerston memorabilia and potentially meet the infamous feline himself

The Event:

• Hacking and building: Friday 28th September 18:00-23:00 & Saturday 29th September 09:00-16:00
• Pitches and Judging: Saturday 29th September 16:30
• Prizes awarded: Saturday 29th September 18:00

Spaces are limited so please register

Some of our most important laws- public safety codes such as building, fire, or electrical codes - are considered the private property of standards development organizations and may only be read at great cost and under conditions set by them. In this talk, Carl Malamud will discuss his 10-year fight to change that situation in the U.S., Europe, and India, including court fights that are ongoing on all 3 continents.

Carl will then discuss the efforts Public Resource, the nongovernmental organization he heads, has undertaken to make other forms of knowledge more broadly available, including works of government and the ongoing fight to free up scientific knowledge for use by students.

Carl Malamud has spent 30 years making government information more broadly available on the Internet. He helped put U.S. court cases, the patent database, non-profit tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service, and the Securities and Exchange Commission on the net. In 1993, Carl created the first radio station on the Internet. He has been a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and is the recipient of the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Carl’s current work is focused for the most part on India, where he is leading efforts to make several important repositories available. He is the author of 9 books, most recently (co-authored with Sam Pitroda), Code Swaraj: Field Notes from the Standards Satyagraha.

The numbers that govern our lives: The Office of National Statistics, new APIs and the stories we tell

There are some numbers which mean more than others. GDP rising, prices falling, the average cost of a house. Numbers tell us stories about the lives people are leading, whether they have jobs, how much they are earning and how that’s changed year on year.

Access to these numbers governs how we understand and tell those stories, and who we hold accountable for the choices that have lead us there.

The Office for National Statistics has done a spectacular job in recent years of moving us to a position where we can do more.

Come to this Citizen Beta to hear about that journey, and how it’s changing the lives of people everywhere.

Speakers

• Andrew Dudfield, Office for National Statistics
• Mevan Babakar, Full Fact
• More speakers announced soon

 Schedule

• 7.00pm – Drinks
• 7.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 7.40pm – Talks
• 8.30pm – More drinks and chat

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.

In our third meeting, we’ll be discussing Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and exploring what the strengths and weaknesses of different types of utopian societies might be. Don’t worry if this is your first meeting as we’ll be focusing on the broad themes of the book more than specifics!

Drinks and snacks will be provided. Everyone is welcome.

This event is brought together and led by Adam Greenfield in collaboration with Theatrum Mundi

Contemporary society is traversed at every level by the software-encoded rules generically known as “algorithms.” Algorithms determine whether or not we’ll be offered a job, or a loan, or a place at school. They guide the route and mode of transit we take on our way to and from work. They drive the disposition and posture of police on our streets, and if we should happen to run afoul of those police, strongly shape just what it is we’ll experience as we make our way through the criminal justice system. They shape what we wear, what we watch, what we listen to, what kind of answers we’re offered when we ask questions, possibly even who we woke up next to this morning. Together, their field of operation is little short of total.

And yet, for all their tremendous power to condition our life choices and chances, very few of us understand algorithms — neither where they come from, nor how they do their work in the world, nor even necessarily what they are. The aim of this one-day workshop is to trace the material effects of these seemingly immaterial actors from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, and to share what it is we know about their origin, purpose, function and impact on our lives.

For the purposes of this conversation, we have chosen to emphasize three different aspects of our encounter with algorithms: their poetics, kinaesthetics and politics.

By “poetics,” we mean a consideration for an emergent algorithmic aesthetic in art, design, literature and craft, and especially the ways in which algorithmic systems begin to suggest the metaphors through which we explain and contextualize everyday experiences. By “kinaesthetics,” we mean the ways in which algorithms and machine-learning systems capture, understand, represent or condition the human body’s movement through urban space. And by “politics,” we mean the ways in which algorithmic systems condition, constrain or determine collective choice, especially with regard to the allocation of power.

During this day-long working group we will discuss these facets of algorithmic experience. We’re especially interested in the perspective of artists that consciously use the expressive dimension of emergent technologies to communicate experience, as we believe their work plays a critical role in helping a broader public understand the capabilities, implications and limits of the technologies that already do so much to condition our lives.

Agenda

11.15 Session 1 | The Poetics of Algorithmic Culture

Topics to be discussed might include James Bridle’s putative “New Aesthetic”; the legibility (for humans) of spaces and objects designed procedurally/parametrically; the drift into other expressive media of terminology originating in the study of algorithmic systems; and dimensions of the algorithmic sublime and uncanny. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

12.30 Session 2 | The Kineaesthetics of Algorithmic Culture

Here we’ll treat aspects of the algorithmic capture and regulation of bodily experience: techniques of face recognition, gait recognition, etc.; the abandonment of traditional choreographic notation in characterizing the movement of the human body through space, and possible new approaches to doing same; pattern recognition and the characterization of stereotyped human gestures; and crowd detection, crowd-size and footfall analysis, and their use in the design of urban space. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

14.30 Session 3 | The Politics of Algorithmic Culture

By “politics,” we mean the ways in which the systems described and discussed condition, constrain or determine collective choice, especially with regard to the allocation of power. Topics might include decision-support systems; credit-scoring systems and their use as tools of discipline; new modes of association or collective. action based on blockchain technologies; and China’s “social credit” system and its implications for networked authoritarianism elsewhere. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

15.45 Session 4 | General discussion: Algorithms, activism and the arts

16.45 Wrap-up and next steps

Registration: email info@theatrum-mundi.org to express interest in attending.

In this public talk, Roger Hallam will explain why we are entering a climate apocalypse and show how denial mechanisms stop us from seeing what is now obvious. Based upon his award winning PhD research on effective campaign mobilisation, he will outline the political response necessary to maximise the chances that we will avoid the extinction we are presently racing towards. It doesn’t involve NGOs and governments.

A year ago, Roger organised a rapid 8-week direct action campaign at Kings College which resulted in a commitment to fully divest from fossil fuels. It involved the painting of the central hall of the university for which he was suspended. He then went on a 14-day hunger strike which led to the College agreeing to all the campaign’s demands.

This talk in being held by the Rising Up Network in towns and cities all around the country in preparation for large scale civil disobedience activities in London this November which will call for emergency action on the climate crisis.

Prototype games to explore complex systems. Today we examine at the game loop in Dead Cells.

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

Since June, together we’ve sourced over 130 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 next event as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning.

This coming event we’ll be:

• Doubling down on Police cuts in an effort to correlate local crime data, police cuts and local election results.
• Inputting Local Election results into Democracy Club’s beta results platform.

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 has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify 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 campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

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 an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

• What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?
• How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?
• What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

You do not need to know how to code to attend and help.

You will need to bring a laptop to this event.

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks and food will be provided!

Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive makes platforms liable for copyright violations of the content they host. It’s facing yet another major vote on 12 September, with dramatically conflicting narratives coming from rights-holders, industry bodies, artists, musicians, and free speech organisations.

Is Article 13 good for musicians or just music labels? Will it usher in a new era of automated Internet censorship or instead help direct royalties to under-appreciated artists? Where do UK political parties stand and why aren’t MEPs voting on strict partisan lines?

Join us for a lively night as we review the current status of the Directive and consider all sides of this important debate.

Speakers include:

• Jake Beaumont-Nesbitt, Copyright Committee, International Music Managers Forum
• Anna Mazgal, EU Policy Advisor, Wikimedia Foundation
• Mike Morel, Campaigns Manager (& musician), Open Rights Group

Are the robots coming for our reporting jobs? How can we augment reporting workflows? What would the automated utopia look like for journalism?

This month, we’re looking at the whole gamut of automation historically used in journalism, and the future promised by AI.

Panel discussion, with:

Bill Thompson, Principal Engineer, BBC Research & Development

Bill has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984, and was Internet Ambassador for PIPEX, the UK’s first commercial ISP, and Head of New Media at Guardian Newspapers where he built the paper’s first website. He helped develop the Labour Party’s internet policy in 1996.

Bill appears regularly on Click on BBC World Service radio and writes for a range of publications.

Mevan Babakar, Head of Automated Factchecking at Full Fact

Mevan leads a tool-building team that scales the work of factcheckers around the world for the UK’s leading factchecking charity. She co-authored the seminal report “The State of Automated Factchecking” in 2016.

« more speakers announced soon»

Chaired by Manisha Ganguly, Director of the Future of Journalism network.

Drinks and discussions to follow.

Places are very limited so please Register.

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora.

The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, 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 week the articles are:

1. When Your Left Arm Becomes A Chicken
2. The New Politics of Meaning
3. Can Economists and Humanists Ever be Friends?
4. Yuppie Fishtanks: YIMBYism explained without “supply and demand”
5. The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics

We’ll start to talk about these around three. People usually 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.

We also have a subreddit, reddit.com/r/londonrationalish, which right now is mostly used for announcing meetups, but if you think it would be useful for other things too I encourage you to use them for it. You can also suggest discussion articles in the thread for that, reddit.com/r/londonrationalish/comments/8oxedb/reading_group_voting_thread/.

“Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear”

HACK Fear is an interdisciplinary hackathon bringing together technologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, academics, hardware tinkerers, UX, gamers, activists with parkour and mindfulness practitioners to team up and experiment on designing and building out ideas and solutions to hack our own fear and develop our self awareness through technology.

There will be:

• Interactive workshops, both physical and non
• Intensive hacking sessions where teams work on the design and implementation of a prototype that makes progress in hacking fear
• Input and feedback from subject matter experts
• Deeper work uncovering and moving past your own fears and shared ones

We welcome coming both solo and as a team. Cross disciplinary teams will be created with the intent to maximise the potential towards successful fear hacking.

Please note: Bring a laptop. The event will be livestreamed and remote listeners will have opportunities to input comments/requests. Inform the organisers if you do not want to be recorded.

The ideas that come out of Fear Hack could contribute towards R&D for the award winning work of Karen Palmer, who is currently in development for RIOT*, an emotionally responsive film which uses facial recognition and A.I. technology to navigate through a dangerous riot.

*RIOT: You are confronted by a riot cop. Respond with fear and the film goes in one direction respond with anger and it goes in another. RIOT makes the player aware of their subconscious behaviour and enables them to consciously build new neurological pathways in their brain, to override automatic behaviour responses and create new ones.

Fashion consumers can make better buying decisions if they can find out whether an item is ethically produced or not. Likewise, transparency along the fashion supply chain allows investors to better understand where their money is going. Ultimately, clear investor information can help manufacturing workers in the global garment industry know who they are working for and how to leverage for better working conditions.

Yet, supply chain and investor information are scarce, scattered and hard to access.

On August 23, 2018, Clean Clothes Campaign, in collaboration with OpenCorporates and WikiRate, invite you to an Open Data Sprint to find out what kind of investor data is publicly available and how we can all start connecting the dots in supply chains.

We will bring together researchers, data analysts, and activists to map investor to company relations in the fashion industry. The focus of the sprint will be on some of the largest companies within the apparel industry, such as HANES, ASOS, GAP, and H&M.

After the research and review session, we invite you to stay with us for a get together.

Follow updates about the event on twitter with the hashtag #InvestorDataSprint

Program:

• 13:30 - 13:40 Welcoming remarks and introduction
• 13:40 - 13:50 Learn how to research (Goals, Methods, Process)
• 13:50 - 14:00 Group settings
• 14:00 - 15:50 Researching in groups
• 15:50 - 16:20 Share findings and wrap-up
• 16:20 - 17:00 Networking and refreshments

Refreshments will be served. Please let us know if you have any dietary requirements.

As this is an interactive event please bring a laptop so you can participate in the research. The event is open to the public but the venue has limited space, so please confirm your attendance by registering.

A new network for people of colour in the UK - open to anyone working in, or interested in, journalism.

Catch up with exciting plans to develop the Race Beat network, meet other journalists of colour, and feed in your own ideas on what the collective should look like and focus on in the future.

We will dedicate around 30 minutes to workshopping a piece of work/pitch/project proposal by one of our members.

For decades people wishing to organize in more cooperative ways have been encouraged to make decisions by consensus, and for good reason: when it works well, it’s awesome. However—when it doesn’t work—it can lead to personal guilt, frustration; organizational paralysis or disintegration.

What should we do when consensus can’t be reached? What if cooperative decision-making is better achieved in such cases with practices other than “reaching consensus”? In this talk I will explore how score voting with tweaks can provide a simple, scalable and systematically cooperative alternative to the often utopian ideal of consensus.

Please note, due to space this event is limited to only 15 people. If you aren’t able to come, please cancel your ticket so someone else is able to attend.

Launch of the debut book by Carl Miller, Newspeak Fellow & Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos: “The Death of Gods – the new global power grab”, a ground-breaking journey to reveal the new centres of power and control in the twenty-first century.

The old gods are dying. Giant corporations collapse overnight. Newspapers are being swallowed. Stock prices plummet with a tweet. Governments are losing control. The old familiarities are tumbling down and a strange new social order is rising in their place. More crime now happens online than offline. Facebook has grown bigger than any state, bots battle elections, technologists have re-invented democracy and information wars are breaking out around us. New mines produce crypto-currencies, coders write policy, and algorithms shape our lives in more ways than we can imagine. What is going on?

For centuries, writers and thinkers have used power as a prism through which to view and understand the world at moments of seismic change. This talk will be about Carl’s journey to find the reality of power today. From a cyber-crime raid in suburbia to the engine rooms of Silicon Valley, and from the digital soldiers of Berkshire to the hackers of Las Vegas, he will explain how power – the most important currency of all – is being transformed, fought over, won and lost. As power escapes from its old bonds, he shows us where it has gone, the shape it now takes and how it touches each of our lives.

Meet and mix with Londoners working in or passionate about social impact and enterprise.

No agenda - This is purely social and with the goal to make connections, learn and collaborate within the industry.

Pop in at anytime between 6-8:30pm for drinks, nibbles and mingling.

BYOB and BYOGrub! Please contribute whatever you would like to share with the group.

Get ready to mix and mingle with people working or interested in the tech for good space over a drink or two. You’ll have the opportunity to hear from some tech for good funders and field-builders, and find out who is actively involved in this space.

We’ll kick off at 6.30pm with a short round of introductions of tech for good funders and field-builders, dive straight into community announcements and use the rest of the time to socialise with some quality people in this community.

Registration: 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 get in touch via Meetup messages or directly with dama@bethnalgreenventures.com if this causes a problem for you.

The #metoo movement spread virally in October 2017 prompting a global dialogue about countering sexual violence and assault. A stream of more localised movements brought more contextual alternatives around the world. Almost a year on, it’s time to reflect. What has been achieved in challenging norms? How do we build on the momentum? What is the role of digital technology in reporting, solidarity and opening dialogue?

Introducing Hollaback! a global, people-powered movement to end harassment. We work together to understand the problem, ignite public conversations, and develop innovative strategies that ensure equal access to public spaces on and offline. Hollaback! are delighted to invite you to an event to unravel strategies and methodologies which are open for civil society to challenge harassment.

Please join us to hear from these incredible speakers in a panel discussion:

• Laura Somoggi - Women’s Empowerment Expert at Womanity - Womanity fights for girls’ and women’s empowerment and Laura manages The Womanity Award for the Prevention of Violence Against Women, an international award that supports collaborations to combat gender-based violence.
• Manisha Ganguly - Newspeak House Fellow Manisha specialises in investigative journalism and ran a feminist news website and collective in India for five years, including anti-harassment and bystander intervention campaigns
• Molly - Hollaback! London Site Leader
• Miranda Dobson - Hollaback! Oxford Site Leader Miranda is also Communication Manager at the Orchid Project who have a vision of a world free from female genital cutting
• Courtney Young - Board Member, Hollaback and Founder of Think Young Media - a professional storytelling and digital media firm that practices strategic storytelling.

Moderated by Amy O’Donnell - Board Member, Hollaback! and Digital in Programme Lead at Oxfam

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

Impact Founders is a community-run support system for impact-driven entrepreneurs and their companies, which are trying to contribute to solving the world biggest problems.

We love the London summer & are celebrating it with our first Impact Founders Summer BBQ, and we’d love to have you join us!

While attending is free, we ask for a contribution on the day of the event to cover costs of the food.

Find out more about Impact Founders here: www.impactfounders.io

Impact Founders is powered by www.realchangers.com, the recruitment matching platform for impact-driven companies.

Ben Falk will be leading a session getting volunteers to log as many subject access requests as possible, from as many organisations as possible, as a first step towards building a ‘data democracy.’

You will be given instructions on how to request your data from organisations that include the Home Office, the NHS and Facebook, hopefully highlighting how much of your data is available to you, and prompting you to ask the question ‘what do I do with all this?’

Please bring a laptop or tablet if you wish to take part.

We’ve recently seen a flurry of new startup programmes aimed at supporting innovation in public services - from accelerators and incubators to catalysts and challenge prizes.

In this joint CitizenBeta + Tech for Good Meetup we’re bringing together some of these programmes to discuss how they’re supporting startups and public service innovation.

• What are the opportunities and challenges for startups in govtech and civic tech?
• How do these programmes help startups tackle the challenges of developing and selling tech for public services?
• What do they look for when they select startups?

Talks and Speakers

We’ll be joined by speakers from:

• GovTech Catalyst
• Mayor of London’s Civic Innovation Challenge
• Bethnal Green Ventures
• more to be announced

Schedule

• 6.00pm – Drinks
• 6.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 6.40pm – Talks
• 9.00pm – More drinks and chat

See you there!

PS: Don’t miss out! Applications for the GovTech Catalyst and the Mayor of London Civic Innovation Challenge are already open and will close soon.

Apply by July 8th for the Mayor of London’s Civic Innovation Challenge. Offering £15,000 plus partnerships for solutions in 7 challenge areas: dementia, housing and data, active travel, physical activity, isolation and loneliness, electric vehicles and financial inclusion.

Apply by July 18th for the 1st GovTech Catalyst. Offering up to £80,000 to develop a new digital solution to help track waste from source through treatment to end destination.

Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into Commons. Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome ingrained training and ‘rational’, self-interest maximizing behaviours and instead learn how to cooperate to create a commons-oriented locality. It’s also great fun to play and a good challenge.

We’ll be playing with several boards simultaneously, which will make for a lively game. Apart from enjoying a fun and thought-provoking board game, we’ll also be chatting about commoning, radical politics, collaboration and much more in the context of the game.

An action-oriented workshop hosted by Stacco Troncoso, Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo.

The workshop is free but places are limited! Please sign up by emailing contact AT p2pfoundation.net

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.

Join us for our second meeting as we discuss Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and sketch out what we think Utopia could look like. Don’t worry if you haven’t attended before: we try to just use the book as a starting point for much broader debates!

Drinks and snacks will be provided. Everyone is welcome :)

If you are trying to organise in a decentralised, collaborative, less-hierarchical team, you are probably asking yourself: How do we include people in decisions without spending so much time in meetings? How do we develop an open, collaborative culture? How do we encourage participation, engagement, and shared responsibility? And if nobody is in charge, where does accountability come from?

You are not the only one. For the last decade, we have been immersed in these challenges, as we co-founded and built Loomio and Enspiral, two pioneering decentralised organisations. (Read more about us here.)

Everyone seems to face the same challenges when we try to work without a traditional command-and-control structure. The good news is: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel! Many of us have found solutions, and we are here to guide you along the way.

In this Masterclass we will share with you 14 Patterns for Decentralised Organising. These patterns are like lenses for understanding the challenges of working with less hierarchy, and the practical responses that have proven to solve them.

Through this full day of participatory learning, you’ll not only gain new understandings, connections and fresh perspectives. You’ll leave the workshop with practical actions that you can start applying right away, to grow a purpose-driven team environment that feels nourishing, engaging, hugely productive and resilient.

Read More & Register

Last year, 46 journalists were killed. 262 currently remain incarcerated. In the wake of the Capital Gazette shooting and attacks on journalists by governments and the far right around the world, how are we to safeguard journalists in the field physically and digitally from harm?

For this chapter of Future of Journalism, we’re threat-modelling the future of journalists.

It’ll kick off with lightning talks by:

• Rebecca Vincent, the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders/Reporters sans frontières (RSF), which works to promote and defend press freedom around the world. Rebecca is a former US diplomat, with more than 13 years of experience working on human rights and freedom of expression.
• Colin Pereira, Risk and Safety strategist for the Committee to Protect Journalists, supporting journalists and orgnaisations in the field through both physical & digital safety. Colin will be discussing far right threats, which start off as a digital threat and can have physical security issues.
• Joseph Cox, journalist for VICE’s Motherboard, covering cybersecurity, the digital underground, and the surveillance industry.
• Dr Ala’a Shehabi, activist and co-founder Bahrain Watch, a research and investigation collective. Ala’a is former policy analyst at Rand Europe. She has faced arrest while working with journalists in the field.

Talks followed by world cafe style discussion, and drinks.

This is a workshop for people already exposed to the general idea of Ethics in Mathematics, have some intuition for the need for it, and who are keen to figure out how progress can be made in this area.

The workshop will be small, 10 - 15 people, and is by invitation only. It is mostly for people who have done or are doing mathematics or something adjacent, whether in industry or not. Maurice Chiodo, behind CUEiMS will be joining us.

The workshop will focus on imagining and defining what good looks like, after which we will come up with instrumental goals to get there. We will be identifying who in the room can help with what: from just offering ideas, to taking actions.

Agenda

• 6.30 - 7.00pm - Arrivals, food and drinks
• 7.00 - 7.30pm - Introductions and expectations circle
• 7.30 - 8.00pm - Visioning and goal storming
• 8.00 - 8.30pm - Prioritisation: Evaluating goals by tractability, importance and neglect (prioritisation)
• 8.30 - 8.40pm - Break
• 8.40 - 9.00pm - Action item generation and failure mode spotting
• 9.00 - 9.30pm - Voting, action claiming/owning and collaboration going forwards
• 9.30 onwards - Informal discussion

If there is someone you know who you think should be here, please contact the organiser with a brief description of them and an invite can be sent.

Drinks and snacks will be provided, donations in cash on the day appreciated. If you have any dietary requirements, please contact the organiser.

Hear examples of charities using AI, machine learning, web forms and chat bots to great effect.

Measuring good: Defining product metrics to maximise social impact

Whether you’re working in a for-profit or not-for-profit, as a socially motivated product person you care about making the world a better place.

This meetup is about the challenge of defining product metrics that allow you to optimise the social impact of your product. We will be discussing questions like:

• What in-product metrics do product managers use as a proxy for longer term social impact measures (that might be measured outside the product)?
• How do you make sure that social impact measures can stand up to revenue and growth metrics in prioritisation discussions?
• What do funders look for to give them confidence that an early stage product is generating positive outcomes?

Speakers

• Matt Kepple, Founder at Makerble
• Rachel Kettlewell, Digital Manager at Esmee Fairbairn Foundation

Suggested Reading

• 10 Reasons not to measure impact and what to do instead
• CAST “Mist” Growth (Measuring Integrated Social Tech)

P.S. thanks to everyone in the community who did the quick feedback poll last week - We’re doing this event because it was your top voted topic! If you’ve not done the poll yet, have your say here: Survey

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 Where?

We are lucky to be back at our regular venue, Newspeak House (big thanks to them for hosting)

Wot Wot Who?

• Esther Foreman, Social Change Agency
• Mike Harris, 89up
• Beth Knight-Yamamoto, Citizens Advice
• Helen Gravestock, Clic Sargent

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

We’re celebrating the launch of Land Explorer!

Land Explorer is our interactive online mapping platform that provides access to information on land; such as use, ownership and planning. We’ve been improving and updating our initial prototype and are ready to launch our latest BETA version!

Come and join us: test drive new mapping and drawing tools, enrol in future BETA launches, give us feedback.

We’d love the pleasure of your company, so come and celebrate with land professionals, policy folk, public servants, data geeks, and common good land users.

Our aim is to provide community groups, charities and not for profit businesses who manage land for public benefit, with access to the information they need, so everyone has easy access to information about the land around them.

Even in an age of increasingly open data, finding information about land can be time consuming, complicated and costly.

Developers and corporate landowners who purchase and develop land for private profit have the resources to do this but communities, and those seeking to own and manage land for the common good, often can’t access the same information.

Land Explorer has been created in response to this, utilising recently opened up MasterMap data from Ordnance Survey, and a range of other open data, to empower communities and enable more land to be managed for the common good.

Land Explorer helps to level the playing field for community-led development: housing, workspaces, green spaces, energy generation and rural or farming enterprises.

Land Explorer: spaces to live, work, play, generate & grow.

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

On June 13th we ran our first Campaign Lab, together we sourced over 90 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 next event as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning.

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 has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify 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 campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

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 an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

• What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?
• How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?
• What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

You do not need to know how to code to attend and help.

You will need to bring a laptop to this event.

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks and food will be provided!

In 2008 mySociety’s Freedom of Information platform WhatDoTheyKnow.com was born.

10 years on, the site is the biggest online archive of Freedom of Information requests in the UK, and has over 6 million visits a year.

With 130,144 users making over 480,000 requests, the site has helped millions of people to get the information they need to understand the workings of public authorities, and to hold them to account.

WhatDoTheyKnowPro, a new powerful toolkit which provides extra functionality for journalists and other people who use FOI in their jobs, has also just been launched.

Now all of that is a reason to celebrate!

mySociety will host an evening of drinks, nibbles and presentations to reflect on the last 10 years, and to look forward to what the future holds for WhatDoTheyKnow.

As spaces are limited, this event is by invitation only and you must present your invitation on arrival. To request an invitation, please email gemma@mysociety.org and she’ll let you know if spaces are available.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Turkey goes to the polls for a snap election, both presidential and parliamentary, on 24 June. In a rare move, Turkish opposition have largely united against President Erdoğan who could be at risk of losing parliamentary majority. And if no presidential candidate wins 50%+ of votes on June 24, the election will go to a second round in July.

Head over to Newspeak to watch the Turkish election results come in (English broadcast) as we eat, potluck style. Bring a Turkish dish to share if you can, and of course, BYOB.

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

In the fourth session we will discuss platform companies. The data that platform companies collect gives them unique advantages but can also make their operations traceable. What opportunities for intervention does this open, and what does “scraping” reveal about platform capitalism? For inspiration for the discussion, we suggest a number of readings and data sources, focused on creative ways people have studied AirBnb.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi for more information if you’d like to take part.

• 7:00pm: Doors open and welcome
• 7:30pm: Talks
• 8:15pm: Discussion & drinks

Newspeak House invites you to thoughtful talks and discussions on what Blockchain is and is not, and on real impactful applications of the technology that are already deployed today.

We are very happy to have Ben Laurie, Head of Security and Transparency, at DeepMind, and Sarah Meiklejohn, Reader in Cryptography and Security at UCL, with us to talk about:

• real world non-financial applications of blockchain technology, and
• the trade-offs of blockchain architectures.

Afterwards, there will be group discussions and plenty of opportunity to network.

Some drinks and snacks will be provided by Newspeak House.

If you’d be interested in speaking at or sponsoring this or future meetups, get in touch with @nwspk.

This event is hosted by Andreas Kirsch (@blackhc) at Newspeak House, a community space focusing on the intersection of politics and technology.

About the speakers Sarah Meiklejohn (smeiklej.com)

Sarah Meiklejohn is a Reader in Cryptography and Security at University College London. She has broad research interests in computer security and cryptography, and has worked on topics such as anonymity and criminal abuses in cryptocurrencies, privacy-enhancing technologies, and bringing transparency to shared systems.

Ben Laurie (@BenLaurie)

Ben Laurie is the head of security and transparency at DeepMind in London. He was a founding director of The Apache Software Foundation, a founder of OpenSSL, a member of the Shmoo Group, a director of the Open Rights Group, Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting and spent 10 years in Google’s security team. He is a software engineer, protocol designer and cryptographer.

Ben has worked on Certificate Transparency at Google, and on Verifiable Data Audits at DeepMind Health using blockchain technology.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A Roundtable on Political Psychology at Newspeak House with Lee de-Wit (University College London).

Registration by invitation only.

Agenda

• 18:30 - 19:00 Networking and arrivals
• 19:00 - 19:15 Dr de-Wit opening with a short talk
• 19:15 - 20:30 Roundtable facilitated discussion
• 20:30 - 21:00 Open discussion

Lee’s talk

This discussion will review key findings in the psychology of politics from the last 10 years. This research has discovered a range of individual differences between voters with different political leanings (including different moral values, different personality profiles, and different patterns of neural activity), and more recently individual differences in cognitive flexibility between Leave and Remain voters in the UK’s Brexit referendum.

These differences will be explored in relation to claims that this ‘psychological profiling’ can be used to effectively target different voters (in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal). Following that Lee will explore some recent findings from my own research that seeks to test for underlying differences in psychological beliefs and cognitive styles that might help to explain divergent opinions on political polarised topics like immigration and inequality.

Lee is a Teaching Fellow at UCL in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences. He has recently published a book on the psychology of voting with Elliot and Thompson exploring the biases we bring to the political process.

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora.

The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement.

All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Reading for this discussion:

1. Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That’s OK. (For Now.)
2. Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
3. Institutional Memory and Reverse Smuggling
4. Understand - Ted Chiang

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

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 has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify 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 campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

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 an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

• What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?
• How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?
• What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

You do not need to know how to code to attend and help.

Everyone welcome – beer, soft drinks and pizza will be provided!

Register

Join us for the launch of Rufus Pollock’s new book Open Revolution – New Rules for a New Age

Forget everything you think you know about the digital age. The simple truth is that it’s not about privacy, AI or blockchain—it’s about the rules. And hope lies in the fact that we can change them in a radically better way.

Will the digital revolution give us information democracies or information empires? The answer lies not in technology but in a political choice: a choice between making information Open, freely accessible to all, or, making it Closed, exclusively owned and controlled.

In his provocative book Dr Rufus Pollock, founder and president of Open Knowledge, challenges our preconceptions about how the digital age work and its impact on our world.

Open Revolution shows us the source of the increasing inequality and stunted innovation that comes with building our digital age on outdated rules. It offers a solution for how to reboot those rules on a more equal and innovative basis.

North Korea has been directly involved in a wide array of global cyber attacks, including an attempt to steal $1bn from the New York Federal Reserve, the WannaCry ransomware attack, and the Sony hack. Trump is now under pressure to confront North Korea about its aggressive hacking strategy alongside nuclear security issues.

On the night before the historic Trump-Kim summit*, Newspeak House hosts a drinks & discussion evening with Evans J.R. Revere, retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2007 as the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Currently Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the The Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, Revere has also served as the president of the Korea Society and has extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea

The event is hosted by Ekin Can Genç, a Resident Fellow at Newspeak House and an incoming postgrad student at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Ekin is a policy consultant and has a background in international politics through work in Brussels, London, Istanbul and Washington, D.C.

Agenda (11 June)

• 19:00 Door open
• 19:30 Talk by Evans J.R. Revere
• 20:00 Q&A
• 20:30 Drinks & Networking
• 21:00 End

No ticket required.

*The Trump-Kim summit has now been called off – see the letter [but our event will still take place!]: whitehouse letter to kim jong un

Come and discuss the threats and futures of the fourth estate.

We’re looking at collaborative journalism models for our first chapter. It’ll kick off with lightning talks by:

Jules Giraudat, deputy editor of Forbidden Stories, that allows journalists under threat to securely back up their work, so the network can continue the work if something happens to them. Jules is coordinating the Daphne Project, continuing the work of murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on corruption and money laundering, through a global collaborative investigation of 18 news organizations and 45 reporters from 15 countries. (@JulesGiraudat), (@FbdnStories), (@DaphneProject)

Nick Waters, investigative journalist for BellingCat, that uses collaborative techniques with open source information to conduct investigations such as the downing of MH17, Russian airstrikes in Syria, and the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Nick has investigated the bombing of Damascus’ water supply and specialises in tracking the Islamic State’s drone program using open source information. (@N_Waters89), (@Bellingcat)

Jack Barton, journalist for WikiTribune, a publication founded last year by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, to pair the crowd-sourced strengths of Wikipedia with the skills of professional journalists. Jack focuses on international law and corruption. (@jackbarton91), (@WikiTribune)

Maeve McClenaghan, investigative journalist for Bureau Local, that works with local reporters to dig into datasets and publish over 220 exclusive investigative stories in partnership with over 50 local national and international media outlets. Maeve is part of the Bureau Local team, and founder of the award-winning podcast The Tip Off which aims to demystify the inner-workings of investigative journalism. (@MaeveMCC), (@BureauLocal)

In a live podcast Novara tackles some of the big concepts in left-wing politics – from imperialism to revolution, from political ecology to political economy, from electoralism to insurrection.

After the recording, unwind with a few drinks, lively conversation and, doubtless, a disagreement or two.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Technology is completely changing the way we live, work, and play.

What does it mean to be a citizen in the digital age? What common things do we care about and want to tackle as a group? Those are the questions we’re asking people all over the world through our global inquiry into citizens in the digital age.

We kick things off in London where The Fourth Group will host a public conversation. It’s really simple: Join us, engage in debate, meet new people, be part of a movement.

This year The Fourth Group (in partnership with UCL and the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network) is running an inquiry to learn what people want, problems they want to sort out and what actions they want to take in regards to the fourth industrial revolution. To this, we are hosting conversations in every region of the world, and giving everyone the opportunity to engage through our online survey. After listening, we will develop an agenda of issues and solutions which will be launched at Politics Summit 2018 in London. This agenda will form the basis of The Fourth Group’s actions in 2019 and beyond.

Join us at our 2nd WorkerTech meetup - an event for anyone interested in the future of work, and using technology to improve the prospects and power of workers.

“The opportunity for tech-led, pro-worker innovation are many, but there are just too few people pursuing this agenda. That’s what we want to change.” - Gavin Kelly, CEO Resolution Trust

We want to bring together a community of people who can help spread, use, develop, fund and support new WorkerTech solutions. For example, these could be tools that help workers organise and increase bargaining power, boost skills and pay and curb insecurity.

Join us for drinks, talks and networking from 6.30pm at Newspeak House.

If you’d like to speak about an initiative or demo a product on the night then get in touch: jessica@bethnalgreenventures.com

Co-working on radical post-capitalist projects.

We look for a wide range of initiatives: from thought-provoking artworks, to alternative financial models and from cooperatively run factories, to tools for collective decision-making. We welcome projects that aim to instigate change and last until they achieve their goal, as well as those designed to survive the long haul. Our program is especially suitable for projects that hope to grow out of the idea phase.

Register

Come on down to the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain’s #DeliverJustice party - raising money for our campaign to end Deliveroo exploitation.

Imagine putting your health at risk to deliver something as banal as a pizza. As absurd as it sounds, this is the reality faced by many Deliveroo couriers, who force themselves to make deliveries in snow, sleet and rain, just to earn enough to get by. By taking advantage of legal loopholes the company is able to deny these workers basic rights such as the right to a guaranteed minimum wage, holiday pay and trade union rights.

Abandoned by their employer and abandoned by the government, a courageous group of Deliveroo couriers decided to come together and fight back. First unionising with the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and then launching a ground-breaking legal challenge against this food delviery behemoth, these young couriers proved that nobody is too small to take on the powerful.

But now, they need your help. While their legal challenge established the overwhelming desire of the couriers to collectively bargain for their rights, Deliveroo was able to win by inserting an eleventh-hour legal loophole into its contracts. Now, these couriers, backed by the IWGB and armed with a crack legal team including legendary trade union barrister John Hendy QC, are taking Deliveroo on in the High Court.

On 12 June our lawyers will be going to the High Court to overturn a decision preventing the couriers from appealing the case. This case could have massive consequences not only for Deliveroo couriers, but for all workers in the so-called “gig economy”. Winning will create a major precedent that could stop future companies from exploiting workers the same way Deliveroo does, but defeat, could push back a number of earlier victories and put us back years in terms of employment rights.

The potential cost liability is in the tens of thousands and the IWGB, a grassroots union for low-paid and precarious workers, has already been saddled with a £10,000 legal bill by Deliveroo’s lawyers.

Despite the company’s attempts to scare us out of taking action by landing us with legal costs, we are determined to fight back. That’s why we are asking for £50,000 to cover these and any future costs. Any money that isn’t spent will go into the IWGB’s fighting fund, to take on other exploitative companies. With your help we will make sure the courts #deliverjustice.

There’s no reason why we have to allow this multi-billion pound company to bring Victorian work practices into the 21st century. We need your help to push back against the financial might of this company that can spend millions fighting our legal challenge, so please share and donate.

Register

If you are interested in scholarship or activism on the topic of digital labour and the future of work, then consider joining our regular meet-up series that will be held in London.

We aim to meet from 7pm have a few drinks and talk about topics related to digital labour, the platform economy, digital gig work, and online freelancing.

Hosted by

• Mark Graham (@geoplace), Professor of Internet Geography at @oiioxford, researching digital labour, gig economy, economic geography, critical data studies, development, and digital divides.
• Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock), Fellow at LSE researching digital labour, sociology of work, resistance, videogames, and streaming. Publications: https://t.co/udwCHIzjhh + https://t.co/F66wMq9SSy

Digital and design principles are a well established concept across the tech and startup worlds, and there are already some great sets being used by some of the most digitally mature charities. The Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology (CAST) has conducted research over the last four months into how charities use principles to design and deliver better digital services.

Together with dozens of nonprofits and grant-makers, they’ve developed a new set of principles specifically designed to align with the needs, language and practice of the UK social sector. These provide clarity on what ‘good’ looks like when developing digital services, to help nonprofits and funders ‘build the right thing in the right way’, whatever stage they’re at.

You can read more about the process, rationale and learnings in this blog: Digital Design Principles for and by The UK Charity Sector

This event will see the launch of the first version of the principles. Over breakfast, we’ll hear from charities about how they’ve used these principles and the impact they’ve had within their organisations, as well as from funders on why the principles are important to them. We’ll also discuss the future of these principles and how we can engage the sector in their evolution.

For more info and to register, visit the Eventbrite Page

Please note - these digital design principles are designed specifically for nonprofits and their funders, so while they will also be relevant to other types of organisation, this event is primarily intended for those two groups and individuals/organisations that support them.

If you’re unable to attend in person, we’ll be livestreaming it on the Tech for Good Facebook page - simply tune in here at the start of the event: https://www.facebook.com/techforgood/

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

The digital land data team are a new team at the ministry for housing communities and local government. We’ve been set up to help make it easier for people to access the data they need about land and housing. We’re holding an open meeting at Newspeak House so that anyone can drop in and ask us questions about data, tell us the data they need and the problems they have.

We will:

• show what we’ve done so far
• discuss what data people need
• support people to navigate the existing datasets

One way we think the digital land data team can help is to make it easy for different people to find the information they need when they make the decision to move house, build houses or plan local policies. We know that information about land and housing is hard to find, hard to use and hard to reuse. We’d like to make this better.

We’ve found roughly 300 existing datasets, published by around 400 different public sector organisations and done some work to tidy them up. Now we’re leaving the office and asking you to help us work out:

• what data is most needed
• what data is missing
• what are the problems with the data

Github: https://github.com/communitiesuk/digital-land-data

When you hear words like civic tech and open data, we tend to think about shiny websites and csv downloads. But there is nothing necessarily modern or digital about civic tech.

Citizen Beta, History & Policy and mySociety have worked together to bring you historians with perspectives from different points over the last few millenia where technology has changed the relationship between the citizen and the state.

Talks and Speakers

• Short introduction on forgotten histories of civic tech – Alex Parsons (mySociety) & Alix Mortimer (History & Policy)
• Pebbles, potsherds and the polis: legal and political decision-making ‘technology’ in classical Athens’ – Dr Christine Plastow (OU)
• Power to the People? How printing changed politics in early modern Europe. – Dr Sara Barker (University of Leeds)
• The 264-year plan to improve a nation, in every way imaginable: lessons from the history of the Royal Society of Arts. – Dr Anton Howes (King’s College London)

Schedule

• 7.00pm – Drinks
• 7.30pm – Welcome and intro
• 7.40pm – Talks
• 9.00pm – More drinks and chat

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

• Doors open: 7:00pm
• Talks: 7:30pm
• Drinks & discussions: 8:15-10:00pm

OpenAI’s Jack Clark (@jackclarkSF) is visiting from San Francisco and will give a talk on “Policy puzzles: Openness, Measurement, and Malicious Actors”.

Jack will talk about how the open, rapid development norms of the AI community mean that the technology poses unique opportunities and threats to policymakers.

Some of the opportunities include figuring out ways for governments and other organizations to measure and forecast progress of AI-related technologies to better prepare society for its changes, and learning how to use the open development nature of the AI ecosystem to maximize the number of people that can participate in its development.

Some of the threats include the rapid proliferation of powerful AI capabilities via the open ecosystem leading to the arrival of new threats and the enhancement of existing ones, as discussed in the recent multi-stakeholder Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report (PDF).

He will also discuss ways that the AI community in London can become more involved in these and other policy debates and would love to do a Q&A and discuss ways to develop grassroots policy movements in London for AI issues of interest to the attendees.

About Jack Clark

Jack is the strategy and communications director for OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company whose goal is to ensure that powerful artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity - both through direct technical work and through analysis of its impacts.

Jack recently testified in congress on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy. You can watch the testimony and read the comments here.

He writes a weekly newsletter about cutting-edge AI research and applications called Import AI, which is read by more than ten thousand experts around the world. He has given numerous talks about artificial intelligence and its impact on policy, ethics, and security.

He also helps run the AI Index, an initiative from the Stanford One Hundred Year Study on AI to track and analyze AI progress.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Transition Towns are about people in communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world. There are 30+ Transition Towns inside the M25 and 250+ across the UK, not to mention the thousands around the world.

Over the last 2 years, the London Hub has been connecting Transition Towns to share, support and celebrate actions on environmental, social and economic sustainability by local folks for their communities. We also look across and out to build a larger narrative and connect with other organisations as well as develop the infrastructure and communications to make the hub super useful to Transitioners and others.

You’re welcome to come along to the meeting in which we will:

• share what’s going on in our respective groups in an opening go-round
• respond to the needs and interest of those attending, leaving space for that which emerges
• work on a project to connect with other Hubs around the world, share learning and best practice
• open a discussion about a London wide event to build a movement for sustainability suggested for Autumn ‘18/Winter ‘19
• share an invitation to connect with a Community of Practice about work with refugees and asylum seekers from Transition Town Tooting

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a monumental piece of legislation, the ramifications of which we are only beginning to understand.

Join us to learn about your new and strengthened rights as a consumer over the data that organisations store about you including:

• Your Right of Subject Access - get a digital copy of all your data from any organisation in the EU, including retailers, websites, hardware and device makers, government agencies, educational institutions, and many more!
• Your Right to Withdraw Consent to Processing - tell organisatins you no longer consent to them analysing or selling your personal data
• Your Right to Erasure - also known as the “right to be forgotten” exercise your right to delete sensitive personal information from 3rd party servers
• Your Right to be Informed - ask for an explicit elucidation for what your data is being used and to whom it is being sold
• Your Right to Rectification - correct any inaccurate or misleading data no matter where it sits

Following the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, these rights are more important than ever because in a world where AI is ubiquitous, data is power. Understand your data rights, protect your privacy, and take back full legal control of all your personal data.

We are organising a Wikipedia training workshop in London to mark the 1 year anniversary of the block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are disappointed that no progress has been made to find a solution to resolve the issue, and would like to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of Turkish culture and history to show that the Wikimedia community is trying to improve both the Turkish Wikipedia as well as the coverage of Turkish culture in English.

All welcome – English and Turkish speakers, including those with no prior experience editing Wikipedia!

Bring a laptop, if you can.

A casual meetup for those who make games!

Please contact @Jupiter_Hadley if you would like to bring your game to show off, we’d love to see what you’re working on!

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

In this session, we’ll discuss the ideas and practice behind corporate governance. We’ll follow that up with a discussion of a critical theoretical perspective, asking whether the corporate form allows for moral action on the part of the corporation or the people within it, and considering what changes are necessary to allow this.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A discussion group for London-based members of the rationalist diaspora.

The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement.

All are welcome, whether or not you identify as rationalist.

Reading for this discussion:

1. Inadequacy and Modesty (https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/)
2. For Signaling Part I (https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/for-signaling-part-i/)
3. What’s College Good For (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/?utm_source=atltw)
4. College Isn’t a Waste of Time (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-11/college-isn-t-a-waste-of-time)
5. Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/)

Ntropy and DCC Global invite you for Decentralised A.I. Brunch on Saturday, 5th May at 10am. On the menu - round table open discussion where we will be joined by our special guest Ben Livshits, Chief Scientist at Brave Software.

Software is eating the world and internet has become the most important connecting tissue between crowds, organisations and platforms. Lacking a web native model of value exchange, the internet resulted in copying business models of conglomerates of the past creating extremely centralised and powerful entities capable of establishing complete control over choice, opinion and access.

Artificial Intelligence is giving superpowers to the software that is already consuming the world, thus this control tightens. Responsibility frameworks are poorly established and not web native either.

Agenda:

• 10:00 Meet & Greet with tea/coffee
• 10:30 Inspiration video & discussion “Showcase how centralised computer and algorithms are inefficient and biased”, recommended by Guillaume Chaslot
• 10:45 Introduction to Ntropy and DCC Global
• 11:05 Special Guest’s Talk about “Machine learning on the edge”. We are accustomed to the big data approach to machine learning, where user data is aggregated, leading to privacy challenges. I’ll talk about the challenges of machine learning on the edge, i.e. client devices, and the trade-offs between the accuracy and privacy.
• 11:30 Closing, more tea & coffee networking

Guests:

• Ben Livshits - Chief Scientist for Brave Software, reader at Imperial College London and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington
• Guillaume Chaslot - Founder at Algotransparency (virtual intro)
• Nare Vardanyan - Co-founder at Ntropy Network
• Alina Bezuglova - Leader at Decentralised Computer Consortium

About special guest:

Ben Livshits is Chief Scientist for Brave Software (https://brave.com/), the company behind the Brave browser, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks intrusive ads and trackers. He is also a Reader at Imperial College London and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Previously, he was a research scientist at Microsoft Research. He received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006. Ben’s research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis techniques to finding errors in programs. Ben has published papers at PLDI, POPL, Oakland Security, Usenix Security, CCS, SOSP, ICSE, FSE, and many other venues. He is the author of over 100 academic papers, dozens of patents, and multiple tech transfer awards for bringing research into practice.

About organisers:

• DCC Global - research & innovation playground for decentralised computing community
• Ntropy - a family of client-side data, algorithms and applications

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

House of Lords committee for Regulating The Internet is seeking submissions before 11th May.

Cybersalon will hold Open Workshop to formulate a combined submission.

The Lords have posted a set of specific questions/format and during the workshop we will address each of them in depth. Space limited so please book early.

Workshop Leaders: Helen Keegan (Mobile Marketing), Eva Pascoe and Ben Greenaway (Cybersalon)

Join us for an evening of discussion on Ethics in Mathematics, a relatively neglected field with high potential to make tractable improvements to society. This bold statement rests on the premise that mathematicians are extremely valued by society and often end up in powerful places.

Our speaker is Maurice Chiodo, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, bye-fellow in mathematics at King’s College Cambridge, co-ordinator at the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society and lead investigator of the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Project.

• 18:00 - 18:30 Networking and arrivals
• 18:30 - 19:00 Maurice Chiodo introducing the field and current challenges
• 19:00 - 19:30 Q&A
• 19:30 - 21:00 Themed focus groups that revolve
• 21:00 - 22:00 Unfacilitated conversation

Drinks and snacks will be provided.

It’s great that Government Digital Service has done so much for services and products that affect citizens lives, but…

• What is government not building?
• What are the services that are outsourced to third parties?
• What does that mean for accountability?

In this session we’ll hear from some cancelled projects and third party services that are core to democracy in the UK.

Further reading: https://github.com/paulmaltby3/digitalpolicyreadinglist/blob/master/Digitalpolicyreadinglist.md

Prototype games to explore complex systems.

Newspeak House invites you to a roundtable focused on political data and modelling, hosted by:

Dr John Bryden, Research Fellow at Royal Holloway. John’s research focuses on modelling the behaviour of political groups and developing methods to study political activity on social media, especially on Twitter.

John Sandall, Fellow at Newspeak House. John is an independent data science consultant. In April 2017, he created SixFifty in order to predict the UK General Election using open data and advanced modelling techniques.

The event will be very informal, and we particularly welcome activists and practitioners with no academic background. The event will be held in the Newspeak House Drawing Room. Space is very limited, so please register as soon as possible. We reserve the right to refund tickets depending on capacity changes up to three days before the event.

Snacks and drinks will be provided.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

With the growing interest in so-called ‘dark’ political advertising, fake news, and unfettered online abuse, Governments around the world have been attempting to regulate and clamp down on social media platforms. Is it all in vain? Can it be done? Should it? What can practically be enforced?

Join us to listen, learn, and question on the 3rd of April.

Speakers to be announced.

Spaces are limited so please register

Screening of short documentary “When Citizens Assemble”, panel discussion and Q+A

Panel - additional members to be announced:

Patrick Chalmers – director and producer of When Citizens Assemble, pilot episode for the All Hands On documentary series on democracy. Journalist and author of Fraudcast News.

Ireland’s efforts to break a decades-old political deadlock over its de facto abortion ban inspired a bold political response. Its politicians agreed to create a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle the issue.

A random pick of Irish people deliberated on the highly contentious question. One hundred people took part, balanced for age, gender, social class and region. They heard from experts, campaigners and women directly affected by the ban. Their conclusion, reached in April 2017, recommended radical liberalisation.

The assembly’s work helped bring on a national referendum on abortion in 2018, when Irish voters will have a chance to change abortion laws.

Ireland’s approach was similar to the one it used on same-sex marriage, which voters approved in 2015. Both mark breakthrough moments for all those wondering how politics could be done differently. Rather than leaving decisions to elected politicians, The Irish showed how public wisdom can help cut through controversy.

At a time of deep dysfunction in our electorally driven politics - what issue wouldn’t lend itself to a citizens’ assembly approach? Where might things be on Brexit, on Scottish independence, poverty and other social justice questions given access to public panels addressing such questions?

When Citizens Assemble is the first in the global, nine-film series All Hands On. The series focus will be the state of world democracy and real-life efforts to radically improve it using the ages-old device of public juries. Follow the films, or get involved directly to help fund and publicise it, by signing up for project updates via this link.

When Citizens Assemble was made possible thanks to help from founding partners the newDemocracy Foundation and Common Weal, who gave support in cash and kind.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Glyn Wintle, experienced penetration tester and security industry professional intersperses infosec horror stories with insights, tools and tips for keeping your users and their data safe.

This talk is scheduled to last 1 hour, with time for questions and an opportunity to meet others from the Police Rewired community afterwards.

Refreshments will be provided.

Are you a software developer interested in the media or economics? Or a journalist interested in technology’s capacity to inform and empower?

Join us for this informal brainstorming evening hosted by Economy, a non-profit organisation that aims to make economics more accessible and relevant to the public. Economy wants to experiment with innovative technologies that can change people’s consumption of news and make economics less confusing. They also believe that bringing people together from different fields is the best way to spark creativity. You don’t need a deep knowledge of economics, just an interest in helping the public make better life choices.

Swap ideas. Meet interesting people. Share a beer.

PROGRAMME:

6:30pm: Registration and networking

6:45pm: Introduction from Economy

6:50pm: Group Brainstorm 1: How could we use technology to facilitate immediate interactivity and action around economic topics?

7:10pm: Group Brainstorm 2: What type of products could we design to embed a little bit of economic learning and literacy into people’s daily routine?

7:30pm: Debrief and networking, followed by the pub

Economy is a public education charity promoting accessible, engaging and pluralist economics. We produce accessible, relatable, engaging content on the subject for our digital platform, www.ecnmy.org, and run economics crash courses in marginalised communities across the UK. We also campaign for economics to be statutory in schools, and work with economic institutions to create spaces for people to engage with their policies and ideas in an accessible way.

Evening and workshop with Stuart Prior (Wikimedia UK) and Denise Norris (Accenture Operations).

Targeting marginalisation in academia, RCA Students of Unbias is teaming up to run a workshop on equality with Wikimedia and Denise Norris focusing on Women (Cis & Trans) / LGBTQIA+ experiences in IT and in information access online.

Unbias.cc is a creative commons project that continues to seek collaborative and like-minded supporters keen for systemic change and an egalitarian, inclusive culture to challenge western and androcentric hegemonies. As gender and race bias is a well-known problem within higher education, our ambition is to join forces with academics, activists, and web developers to improve ease of access to web-based information featuring women, people of colour, non-western origin and LGBTQIA+.

Our work is revolving around finding a multitude of functions to increase equality in representation and access to marginalised perspectives. A first proof-of-concept response to the issue at hand pioneered the Unbias plugin supported by Wikimedia.

Event schedule

• 4:00 - 4:10 Short introduction and welcome by Unbias, hosting the event, and a safe space policy brief.
• 4:10 - 5:00 Speakers Stuart Prior and Denise Norris presentations and a joint Q&A.
• 5:00 - 7:30 Workshops in groups according to skills and interest, with different focuses.
• Elena Falomo leading a speculative session on ‘rethinking equality in information access - what else must be done/how can it be addressed differently?’
• Stuart Prior leading a workshop ‘Editing Wikipedia: A guide to improving content on the online encyclopedia’ by using the Unbias format, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Unbias_Format
• 7:30 - 8:00 All reconvene and present their process and outcomes.
• 8:00 - 8.30 Thanks to all - stay for a chat!

How can charities consume and publish open data?

A meetup featuring presentations and discussion from Mor Rubinstein (360Giving), Nick Jewell (DataKind) and Simon Johnson (British Red Cross).

Throughout history, citizens have come together to respond to major societal problems and work towards common goals.

Today, technology is rapidly changing the way we live, work, and play, and new pressing problems are arising. Social media echo chambers, fake news, net neutrality, misuse of personal data, ethics of artificial intelligence. These are but to name a few.

Most recently, the Facebook Cambridge Analytica exposé has shown millions of people are being impacted worldwide.

The Fourth Group ran a petition calling to hold Facebook to account. It garnered the support of over 175,000 people in a matter of days and helped put pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to commit to appear in front of US Congress and investigate other cases of misuse of data by third party providers.

Now, to build on this momentum, The Fourth Group is exploring the potential of creating a new union of citizens to hold technology to account.

This union of citizens would be an organised group of people, non-partisan and independently funded, whose aims would be to ensure advancements in technology serve the interests of all citizens, leaving nobody behind.

This union of citizens would aim to:

• Understand what citizens around the world believe are the major issues we need to collectively respond to in the digital age;
• Develop citizens’ knowledge and skills to empower them to take impactful action for real world change;
• Work with governments, businesses, and civil society to bring about the change we want to see in the world, and;
• Build a world where technology leads to progress for us all, leaving nobody behind.

This month, we are hosting a meeting to explore this idea further and to see if there is a desire to make this happen.

We are charging a small nominal ticket fee of £5 for general admission, with free entry to founding patrons. To become a patron, go to www.patreon.com/UnitedCitizens. All proceeds will go to the early development of this project. Registration

Join us.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the US Senate to answer questions about the misuse of Facebook users’ personal data. This is in response to pressure from the public, media, politicians, and organised civil society.

The Fourth Group will co-host a live viewing of his testimony with Newspeak House in London. To attend, please register here and we will send updates accordingly.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, The Fourth Group started a petition signed by over 175,000 people calling for Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of US authorities and to investigate other misuses of data by third party providers. Mark has agreed to both of these actions. We also called for him to appear in UK Parliament which he has refused to do.

Details of the petition can be found here: www.change.org/TalkToUsMark

An afternoon + evening of election-related coworking, hosted by Democracy Club, Tech For Good and Citizen Beta at Newspeak House. Open to all, from experienced political technologists to those who are just interested. Bring a computer.

1/ Councils announce candidates today, but not as structured data - we all need this data so let’s aggregate it together! We’ll be here to help if you don’t know how to get started.

2/ Let’s share assets and expertise: 2018 Local Elections Tech Handbook

Kicking off with lunch at 1pm through dinner at 7pm and carrying on until everyone goes home!

Hear the story so far on our mission to end the housing crisis, meet other YIMBY activists, get involved with our plans for the council elections, and more!

londonyimby.org

What: Jam for Change is a big arts Jam Session. We want people to come along and make art, music, video games and any content you can think of. At the end of the following week we will bundle it all together and sell it to raise funds for women’s aid.

The aim: raising money for Women’s Aid, to stop violence against women! You can join in person at Newspeak House, or take part online from the comfort of your own home.

Ability required: Absolutely none! we will be providing lots of support and materials, feel free to bring along children. They will find it easy to get involved and make content during the Jam.

The theme: party games!

Date: 10am - 6pm, Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th April 2018

Come make stuff together in a friendly space full of first-time jammers, experienced devs, and people who’ve never done any game development whatsoever.

We will offer support for everyone and even some of our own tools and entire games you can use to simply mod and theme yourself. Even if you have no experience whatsoever you WILL be able to make a game or two.

We will spend 8 hours each day together having fun and making things! It should be inspired by the theme, but can be as weird and wonderful as you like: a digital version of Pass the Parcel, or a twister inspired boardgame! Don’t worry if it all goes wrong! At the end of it, we shall have something fun.

At the end of the next week the creations will all be bundled together and sold to raise funds for women’s aid.

Lightning talks:

• Victoria Krakovna: Victoria is a research scientist at DeepMind, where she works on AI safety. Her PhD in statistics and machine learning at Harvard focused on building interpretable models. Before joining DeepMind, she co-founded the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization working to mitigate technological risks to humanity and increase the chances of a positive future.
• Robert Miles: Robert is a computer scientist and online educator with an interest in AI, particularly the risks and safety issues around advanced AI systems. For the last year or so he’s run a YouTube channel, making videos explaining our best understanding of the nature of the risks posed by emerging AI technologies, and the technical research currently underway to understand and mitigate those risks.

Schedule:

• Doors open: 7:00pm
• Lightning talks: 7:30pm
• Drinks & moderated discussions: 8:00-10:00pm

Limited places, register now (£5)

If you are interested in scholarship or activism on the topic of digital labour and the future of work, then consider joining our regular meet-up series that will be held in London.

We aim to meet from 7pm have a few drinks and talk about topics related to digital labour, the platform economy, digital gig work, and online freelancing.

Hosted by

• Mark Graham (@geoplace), Professor of Internet Geography at @oiioxford, researching digital labour, gig economy, economic geography, critical data studies, development, and digital divides.
• Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock), Fellow at LSE researching digital labour, sociology of work, resistance, videogames, and streaming. Publications: https://t.co/udwCHIzjhh + https://t.co/F66wMq9SSy

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A design thinking inspired open conversation around innovating health in the UK

• What innovation programs and efforts are currently happening?
• How can entrepreneurs and innovators respond?
• What data, tech developments, and patient tools need development and better utilisation?
• How could blockchain be used in the health sector?
• What responsibility do pharmaceutical companies help innovate healthcare?

The event opens with a panel of experts discussing current innovation initiatives, the NHS outcomes framework, and their experiences ath the forefront of the NHS.

We will then open it out to a fishbowl format to continue developing ideas and discussion points, using design thinking as a guiding framework for exploring possibilities.

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Drinks & nibbles will be available.

Doors open at 6.30pm, debate begins promptly at 6.45pm

Paolo Gerbaudo, Rodrigo Nunes and Nick Srnicek discuss the consequences of digital technology for political organising.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

CAST will be running a workshop on the 28th of March with charities and funders, to explore how a set of digital principles might help the sector to create and fund better digital services.

There will be tea, coffee, lots of biscuits and plenty of time to network with other attendees.

Just sign up here and we’ll send you a calendar invite and the full agenda nearer the time.

More background here

Any questions, email tori@wearecast.org.uk

City Hall have launched a “listening exercise” to help the Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell and his Board fulfil the Mayor’s aim of making London the world’s leading Smart City.

We believe that a Smart City should also be a Networked City, where community-led mapping, technology and network-building combine to address social isolation and ensure an inclusive, fair society in a rapidly-changing world.

On March 27 2018 we are holding two events:

In the afternoon we are running a workshop for anyone involved in mapping assets and networks in London communities, or interested in learning how to do that.

We’ll share the results of our exercise in mapping the London mappers, to show who is doing what. We’ll do some hands-on work with Nicolas Fonty and Barbara Brayshay of Justmap, and also Drew Mackie of Connecting Londoners, who is using network mapping software Kumu and Sumapp. And we’ll discuss how we may form a Community of Practice to continue learning together.

• 14:00 - 17:30 workshop and mapping exercises
• 17:30 - 18:30 networking and refreshments

In the evening we’ll share insights from our workshop, hear different perspectives from our panel, and open up for discussion.

• 18:30 - 21:00 panel dicussion (speakers from Smart City, Connecting Londoners and #waywayahead) and group work

“A better politics awaits us, beckoning us forward. It’s up to us – all of us – whether we recognise that call and take the required actions. Key to these actions will be to harness technology more wisely and more profoundly than before.”

These are the opening words of the new book by chair of London Futurists, David Wood: “Transcending Politics - A Technoprogressive Roadmap to a Comprehensively Better Future”.

In this event at London’s Newspeak House, David Wood will be sharing some of the key analysis from his book, and inviting the audience to advance the creation of the better politics which technology can enable. Topics that will be covered include:

• A integrative vision of sustainable abundance for everyone - and the technologies needed to achieve that outcome
• Why technological change is presently making politics worse rather than better
• Ten legitimate causes of the fear and unrest that are destabilising society - and suggested technoprogressive responses to these issues
• The key role of the philosophy of transhumanism in accelerating the transformations needed for humanity to navigate through the existential landmines lurking in the near-future
• The fundamental importance of “super democracy” alongside the three traditional “supers” of transhumanist thought: super longevity, super intelligence, and super wellbeing
• The technological changes that can enable better humans and better politics to co-evolve over the next 10-20 years
• The opportunity to transcend the present-day divisiveness of right-wing vs. left-wing politics
• A roadmap of practical next steps.

People who attend this event will have the opportunity to purchase a physical copy of “Transcending Politics” for £10 (cash) - reduced from the standard cost on Amazon of £12.

People who would like to start reading the book ahead of the event can obtain it here: paperback or Kindle ebook.

More about the book: https://transpolitica.org/projects/transcending-politics/.

More about the author: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dw2cco/

The Social Change Agency warmly invite you to the launch of our report: Lost Voices: Digital campaigning and its impact on the lived experience, funded by JRCT. Over the past year, we have been researching the role of digital campaigning in increasing democratic engagement - particularly by those who are most affected by the issues at hand.

We have collated our insights after over 70 interviews with charities, tech providers, MPs and those working with marginalised communities, to compile this report. The report will include key findings and recommendations, along with a tool to help organisations better interrogate their digital campaigning practices.

This event is free and open to all. We rarely get the chance to think critically about our digital campaigning practices. This event is intended to provoke, challenge and provide fertile ground for innovation. We can’t wait to see you there!

A casual meetup for those who make games!

Please contact @Jupiter_Hadley if you would like to bring your game to show off, we’d love to see what you’re working on!

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Our second session is about corporate networks. We are reading a highly cited yet controversial paper that describes the structure of transnational networks of corporate control. For the adventurous, we also suggest trying out the possibilities of network analysis using a dataset from the Paradise Papers.

We’re seeking to link two ideas: the potential of “big data,” which is most commonly used to describe people, to tell us more about companies and their role in the world; and the power of social science to give us new angles to explore from.

In our sessions, we’ll explore existing datasets about companies including government-administered registers, scraped platforms and social networks as well as Panama Papers-style megaleaks. A corresponding reading will inform both how we use the data as well as the questions we are asking – “cooking the books” by looking for new meaning in raw data about companies.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Join us to celebrate one year of Research for Action.

How can research support grassroots movements? Can research be a tool for action? How can we avoid replicating oppressive structures such as class in our research work?

The co-operative Research for Action was set up a year ago to support campaigning for social, environmental and economic justice. This far, we have been focusing mainly on local authority finance and democracy. For this event, we want to bring together researchers, journalists and activists to discuss the relationship between research and action - and to celebrate our first anniversary!

The event will start with a panel discussion (speakers TBC soon), followed by interventions from the audience. After the discussion, there will be music and refreshments. Please join us!

Newspeak House is wheelchair accessible. If you have other access needs, please get in touch at info@researchforaction.uk.

Entry is free, but please register so we know how many people to expect: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/research-for-action-tickets-43164664674

This event is for anyone interested in new approaches to improve the prospects and power of workers.

“The opportunity for tech-led, pro-worker innovation are many, but there are just too few people pursuing this agenda. That’s what we want to change.” - Gavin Kelly, CEO Resolution Trust

We want to bring together a community of people who can help develop, fund, support and use new WorkerTech solutions. For example, these could be tools that help workers organise and increase bargaining power, boost skills and pay, and curb insecurity.

“Machine learning” and “AI” are everywhere, but what is machine learning exactly about, and how is it different to e.g. blockchain?

We will provide a gentle introduction and overview for people who are not exposed to computer science and maths, but still want to know what it is all about.

There will be a presentation with some exercises and time to mingle at the end. You will come away with a basic understanding of what machine learning is, what it tries to solve and how, and what it is not.

Doors open: 7:00pm

Presentation starts: 7:15pm

£5 Registration

After many successful hacknights, this is the first side project hackday. It started as a bunch of friends who wanted to work on side projects in the evening after work and not do so by themselves. Come join us and participate!

Everyone can come and bring their side project along. There will be space to sit down and work. Whether it is a mobile app, a novel or a painting, every project is welcome. Show it to people, get motivated and make unreasonable progress on it.

Light refreshments will be provided.

£5 Registration

As a socially motivated product person you want to build products that make the world a better place. Maybe you work for a charity, a not for profit, government or a foundation-funded startup.

So you prioritise your product roadmap to maximise positive social impact, right? Hopefully!

But here are a few things that can disrupt this plan:

• Need to focus on revenue generation
• Funders who are too interested in growth/scale
• Political imperatives
• Priorities of senior stakeholders (internally and externally)
• Your boss went to a conference and wants to build that shiny new AI / big data / machine learning / virtual reality / flying car feature

This is a meetup to share the things that stop us and discuss strategies for maintaining a product roadmap that’s focussed on social mission.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

The second meetup for government digital folk to share their work and ideas around designing case-working systems.

• 10:30 - 11:00: Arrival
• 11:00 - 12:30: Morning session including short talks from the Universal Credit team, Citizens Advice and FutureGov
• 12:30 - 13:30: Lunch break (sorry, there’s no budget for food)
• 13:30 - 16:00: Afternoon session Workshop (to be confirmed)

Please register: https://attending.io/events/designing-caseworking-systems-2

Attention is activism’s most crucial resource, and social media has revolutionised the competition for it.

In many ways, social media has empowered activists and fuelled positive change. But could the trade for our attention be hijacking our free will, and even our democracy?

Join Unicef Next Gen London at this charity event to ask whether social media is empowering or enslaving our generation, with panellists:

• Professor David Runciman: Head of Politics and co-director of the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at Cambridge University.
• Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu: co-organiser of the Women’s March London, lawyer and founder of Women in Leadership.
• James Williams: winner of the 9-Dots Prize for his groundbreaking research into the ethics of attention and persuasion in the digital age, recipient of Google’s highest honour during his ten years’ employment at the company.
• Nimco Ali: anti-FGM campaigner and founder of Daughters of Eve, named ‘Woman of the Year’ by Red, and ranked as one of Debretts’ 500 most influential people in Britain.
• Richard Wilson: founder of Stop Funding Hate, the viral social media campaign challenging hate advertising in British Tabloids.
• Jamie Bartlett (Chair): Author of The Dark Net and Radicals and Unicef Next Gen London Committee Member.

The panel discussion will start at 7.30pm until 9pm, arrivals from 7pm with time for chat and drinks after.

All proceeds will go to Unicef’s emergency appeal for the children of Syria.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Dr Alan Watkins, Nick Loader and Simon Jones present their plans to create a digital platform to understand the opinions of citizens and extract wisdom from the crowd.

Dr Alan Watkins is recognised as internationally through his work on leadership and human performance. He has a broad mix of commercial, academic, scientific and technological abilities and over the past 18 years he has been a coach to many of Europe’s top business leaders. He is the author of “Crowdocracy, The End of Politics”.

Nick Loader is Head of Production for CSM group, and has 20 years as a media specialist. He works across digital content creation, brand development and strategy.

Simon Jones specialises in strategic communications and reputation management for governments, corporations, organisations and individuals globally. Over the course of the last 20 years he has advised chief executives and chairs of global organisations, in addition to managing complex and global communications campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands (including Barclays, BBC, BSkyB, Coca Cola, Facebook, Vodafone.

If you cannot attend, subscribe for updates: https://www.everyoneintheworld.org​/take​-action​/

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

In February 2008 mySociety’s Freedom of Information platform WhatDoTheyKnow.com was born.

10 years on, the site is the biggest online archive of Freedom of Information requests in the UK, and has over 6 million visits a year.

With 119,218 users making over 447,000 requests, the site has helped millions of people to get the information they need to understand the workings of public authorities, and to hold them to account.

WhatDoTheyKnowPro, a new powerful toolkit which provides extra functionality for journalists and other people who use FOI in their jobs, has also just been launched.

Now all of that is a reason to celebrate!

mySociety will host an evening of drinks, nibbles and presentations to reflect on the last 10 years, and to look forward to what the future holds for WhatDoTheyKnow.

As spaces are limited, this event is by invitation only and you must present your invitation on arrival. To request an invitation, please fill in this Google Form and mySociety will get back to you.

We have to talk about YouTube. Over 4bln videos are hosted but is it a force for good or evil?

YouTube and Google know your deepest desires and darkest fantasies, but also your home location and which is your local pub. How do they get your data? What is the secret sauce in their algorithm that makes you come back for more and more YouTube videos? Meet with YouTube researchers revealing what can be unearthed via scraping and reverse engineering of recommendation engine. What makes YouTube tick? Can we reclaim it?

CHAIR: Alessandro Gandini (King’s College) – Lecturer in Sociologies of Digital Media and co-editor of Journal of Convergence YouTube Special Issue

PANEL

Sophia Drakopoulou (Middlesex University) – Researcher of Networked Tech and co-editor of YouTube Special Issue in Journal of Convergence (January 2018)

James Woodcock (London School of Economics) - research on what makes You Tube tick.

Panel will be joined by YouTube Vloggers, e-sports commentators and edu Vloggers

Join the discussion on the cryptic nature of YouTube algorithms. The emergence of intermediaries, Multichannel Networks (MCNs) and affiliate marketing agreements like MCNs claim to help YouTubers making money faster. Although YouTube is a platform seemingly characterised by the amateur video – the truth is that it is dominated by a myriad of commercial channels. What is really going on with the battle for your eyeballs, attention and emotions? Are we losing the opportunities for new video start-ups?

Data scrapping provides one method to attempt to understand how algorithms work. The way follow-up videos are determined can make or break a YouTube channel, but it remains undisclosed to users and your kid may end up watching “Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach For the First Time” or worse.

The recent changes in the terms of joining the partner programme have caused quite a big upheaval amongst small time You Tubers. Small channels now need to have longer viewing hours, longer length of membership and subscribers before they qualify for monetisation. Check out the winners and the losers and have YOUR say on video algos.

With the launch of the Open Banking Standard, it’s a timely moment to look at the new ways banks and other utility companies are using data and making it available.

Stevie Graham, founder of Teller, will talk about emerging patterns that help people access and share utilities data. We’ll be announcing more speakers in the coming weeks.

trustanddesign.projectsbyif.com

Exploring the minefield of class, racism and neoliberalism which informed the EU referendum result, Brexitannia - the first film about Brexit - portrays the people of a once powerful empire as they negotiate their identities in a world that is changing faster than ever, and in which power appears to lie further and further from people’s own hands.

In this first of a series of occasional screenings presented by Unite Community, we will be joined by director and Tower Hamlets resident Timothy George Kelly, and special guests, for a post-film discussion.

Free entry.

Informal chats around web analytics, tracking and user privacy.

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Our first session will begin with a short article about the history of the corporation and a discussion about the nature of companies.

We’re seeking to link two ideas: the potential of “big data,” which is most commonly used to describe people, to tell us more about companies and their role in the world; and the power of social science to give us new angles to explore from.

In our sessions, we’ll explore existing datasets about companies including government-administered registers, scraped platforms and social networks as well as Panama Papers-style megaleaks. A corresponding reading will inform both how we use the data as well as the questions we are asking – “cooking the books” by looking for new meaning in raw data about companies.

The Commons Platform Co-Creation Group are building a secure, open source, decentralised commons-owned social network for community organising, activism, resource-sharing, crowd-sourcing, open access research, education and data, independent media, ethical commerce and a new economy.

Creating a more equal world where everyone can create solutions for themselves

Come along and meet other members of the group, get out some post-its and map out a plan for the Commons Platform. This workshop will be part visionary, part practical, methodical and thorough in places, and all hopefully fun and nice with great people. And lots and lots of post-it notes!

What is our collective dream/mission for 2025? What do we want to achieve in the next 5 years? Where could we realistically be in 2 years? What is our plan for the next 3 months, what are all the things we need to do and how are we going to do them?

If you are not able to be there the whole time please let me know what times work for you between 12 and 5 so I can work out how to fit your particular skill/interest area into the time you are available. If I don’t know what your interests are yet let me know!

If you are not already a member of the Commons Platform Co-Creation Group please contact Sophie Varlow sophievarlow@btinternet.com to find out about how we work and our values/aims.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Join us for our first informal meetup and find out more about the community for coders and makers that want to make a difference in policing.

Could new plans to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” have unintended consequences?

Hear from ORG campaigns manager Mike Morel about how the Government is working with social media companies to decide acceptable standards for online content.

Learn how heavy fines could encourage the use of automated censors that can hurt free speech, and how murky definitions of ‘harmful content’ give social media companies unprecedented control over free speech online.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Lightning talks:

• Federated Learning: the data privacy holy grail
• Deepfakes: porn today, propaganda tomorrow
• UK Gov announces Office of AI: what should we expect?

Hosted by Newspeak House Fellows:

• Ekin Can Genç, Director at Politik Consulting, former Research Associate at Global Politics of AI Research Group
• Andreas Kirsch, former Research Engineer at DeepMind, former Software Engineer at Google Zurich

Schedule:

• Doors open: 7:00pm
• Lightning talks: 7:30pm
• Drinks & moderated discussions: 8:00-10:00pm

Limited places, register now (£5)

If you are interested in scholarship or activism on the topic of digital labour and the future of work, then consider joining our regular meet-up series that will be held in London.

We aim to meet from 7pm have a few drinks and talk about topics related to digital labour, the platform economy, digital gig work, and online freelancing.

Hosted by

• Mark Graham (@geoplace), Professor of Internet Geography at @oiioxford, researching digital labour, gig economy, economic geography, critical data studies, development, and digital divides.
• Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock), Fellow at LSE researching digital labour, sociology of work, resistance, videogames, and streaming. Publications: https://t.co/udwCHIzjhh + https://t.co/F66wMq9SSy

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

We are facing an age of massive political change. Racist nationalisms, pervasive gendered violence, the environmental breakdown, corporate power and precarious jobs — the system we live in doesn’t work for the majority of us and it is crumbling. But how can we fight inequalities in the long-term if we don’t know what we’re fighting for? DEGROWTH — SYSTEMIC ALTERNATIVES #1 is the first in a series of workshops where we imagine how the economic, political and social order could be different in the future.

Degrowth theory takes a political ecology perspective to challenge the idea that unlimited economic growth is the best way to organize our economies and lives. The movement demands that we scale-down our obsession with consumerism and shrink the economic system, leaving more space for human cooperation and ecosystems.

Together with our speakers, we’ll be exploring how degrowth can contribute to a future we want to live in. Is it possible to degrow our economy within a global capitalist order? What would a degrowth economy look like? What is the future of work and energy production? Can we live locally in a globalised world? And is degrowth really possible in a world of rapid automation and technological change?

Speakers:

DOROTHY GRACE GUERRERO is head of policy at Global Justice Now. Before, she worked for Focus on the Global South and other organisations in the Philippines, Thailand, Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa. She works on and writes about degrowth, climate change and energy issues, the impacts of globalised trade and investments on people’s livelihoods in Asia, China‘s new role in the global political economy and other economic justice concerns.

AARON VANSINTJAN is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on economics, politics, cities, and food. He is a member of Research and Degrowth and the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability. He recently edited the book In defense of degrowth and is a co-editor at Uneven Earth.

Register for a free ticket by clicking on the eventbrite link above.

For more information on degrowth, visit https://degrowth.org/.

Our Future Now is a group of young activists based in London; we are part of the Global Justice Now youth network. LIKE OUR FACEBOOK PAGE (https://www.facebook.com/OurFutureNow/) to stay informed about what we’re getting up to and our next Systemic Alternatives workshop.

What a difference a year makes! Social change often feels like a long game but more and more we are seeing incredible women harness the power of digital to create impact quickly.

Just days into 2018 the energy, conversation and activism of the #MetToo movement has translated into action with #TimesUp raising $15M for women to challenge sexual assault, harrassment and abuse in the workplace. And the year is only just beginning!

For WeHuddle’s first event of 2018 we are bringing together amazing women who show that it is possible to turn ambitions into action quickly. We’ll discuss our own activism goals for 2018 and hear tips and tricks to inspire us to make this the year we turn our goals into reality.

Come along to get the inspiration and support you need to make 2018 an impactful year for you!

We’ll be joined by:

Paula Akpan, co-founder of the ‘I’m Tired’ Project and social media coordinator for gal-dem magazine, and Nicole Crentsil, founder of Unmasked Women. In 2017 Paula and Nicole crowdfunded and launched The Black GIrl Festival, the UK’s first Black British festival for women and girls that celebrated and explored what it means to be a Black woman in the UK.

More speakers to be announced soon.

Doors open 6.45pm discussion starts at 7.15pm.

WeHuddle supports world changing women (all women!) through community, events and resources. Our events are open to all and proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the organisations represented by our speakers.

After the sell-out success of our first event, we look forward to starting 2018 as we mean to go on.

Come join us! Tickets are £6.50

Local elections on 3rd May: Let’s get ready! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_local_elections,_2018

Share your ideas, strategies and plans so we might collaborate and not duplicate effort. Bring a laptop if you can.

For the general election last year we did this: bit.ly/GE2017TechHandbook

Possible discussion points:

• What do Londoners want from election tech?
• What data is or will be available?
• What are you planning in terms of digital engagement?
• What’s happening re voter registration?
• What’s happening re voter awareness?
• What tech could be mobilised to help raise awareness and encourage participation?
• Who’s running hustings? Can they be digitalified?
• Agenda & pre-event discussion gdoc

Democracy Cafe, a London-based network organisation focused on creating new technological tools for democratic debate, engagement and decision-making, is organising a day-long event at Newspeak House on the 4th of February, in which political activists from across Europe can meet and discuss pressing political issues in an informal “Cafe” setting.

• 09:45-10:00 Room open in Newspeak House
• 10:00-10:30 Introduction, Live streamed on Zoom
• 10:30-11:30 Meet each other and Presentation of topics
• 11:30-13:30 First Democracy Cafe Round - Practising Democracy and Use Cases
• 13:30-14:30 Lunch break at Newspeak House
• 14:30-15:00 Feedback session
• 15:00-18:00 Second Democracy Cafe Round - Events and Use Cases
• 18:00-19:30 Wrap up and feedback
• 19:30 Wrap up and drinks at Newspeak House

Join a conversation with Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher and Wikimedia UK Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid on the Future of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.

As we reach 50% of the world’s population having access to the internet, what does the digital arrival of the Global South mean for the Wikimedia movement and its goal to give every human being access to the sum of all knowledge?

How will the movement deal with issues like the digital gender gap, and the problem of the representation of women and non-European people on Wikipedia? How is the community dealing with the problem of information verification in the ‘post-truth’ era? How should Wikipedia be used in academia, and how should educational and cultural institutions get involved in the Open Access movement?

Come and find out how the Wikimedia movement is addressing these issues and ask Katherine and Lucy anything you want to know about Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wikidata is the intersection between wikis and big data. You can upload data about almost anything to Wikidata, and then use its search functions to query this data in any language.

Started in Germany in 2012, Wikidata now comprises over 42 million items, and with some basic coding knowledge, you can ask it questions like ‘show me all the children of Genghiz Khan in a cluster tree’, ‘What are all the cities in the world with a female mayor’. and ‘show me all the cats with photographs on Wikipedia’.

Wikidata is an important tool for researchers, journalists, scientists and anyone else who wants to systematically study large quantities of data, and new data is being added to Wikidata all the time.

Come to a hackathon hosted by Wikimedia UK to find out how Wikidata works and how you can use it. Experienced Wikimedians will show you everything you need to know to start asking Wikidata questions which can help you research the subject areas you care about. If you are a more experienced coder or Wikidata user, we will have an advanced stream with developers there to show you more complex things you can do with Wikidata, and tools you can use to make the most of its vast possibilities.

Training will include:

• Introduction to Wikidata - editing Wikidata items
• Using SPARQL to write queries and search the data
• A-Z of useful tools (Visualisation and upload/data management)
• Wikidata games
• Importing data to Wikidata from spreadsheets

Refreshments will be provided, and participants should bring their own laptop to work on.

Following the hackathon there will be a talk with Katherine Maher, the head of the Wikimedia Foundation. You must sign up to guarantee your seat!

Radical Philosophy, a UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy, is relaunching as an open access journal with a redesigned website and renewed editorial energy.

Please join us to celebrate with celebratory drinks and copies of the newly-designed journal, issue 2.01, hot off the press.

Free tickets but mandatory registration

Build a decentralised microservice platform for the Commons!

Platform.Earth is a vision of a microservices architecture to support human organisation - to digitally enable all sorts of stuff that seems tedious and bureaucratic, but which is necessary for legal constitution, for good democratics, for effective debate - and make these easy, so that the maximum space for the human interactions - the real work of groups - can be as free, as creative, as joyful, as beautiful, as serious, as it wants to be. #darVOZPlatformEarth #darVOZParty

We’ll be designing a visual language for argument maps.

We have the opportunity of engaging with some coders who work in the area of argument / decision mapping - of building the data structures and graphical tools that we will need to present the Ethical Framework in effective ways.

The current tools are not quite as rich as we might need them to be. This session gives us a chance to show these projects what we are doing, discuss the potential reach of the Ethical Framework, discuss the use cases and the qualities which will be needed.

This work will carry forward into working with developers on Friday and a session on Sunday, too. #darVOZargmaps

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Trevor Hilder will run his one-day, workshop course on Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. Trevor learned directly from Beer in the 1990s, and has experience of using the model with great success. Highly interactive sessions, limited numbers. Book soon!

A four hour workshop to teach the fundamental concepts of how organisations work, based on the work of Professor Stafford Beer in the field of management cybernetics, which he founded in the 1960s.

Beer applied these concepts to fields as diverse as managing steel production, publishing, banking and economic policy. I learned them from Beer in the 1990s and since then have applied them with great success to understanding organisations and building better (software) systems to free people to get their work done with the minimum of bureaucracy.

I recently taught these ideas to the COO of an organisation with an annual turnover of £30 million which reduced his working week from 100 hours to about fifteen!

The workshop will be in depth and highly interactive, and I will be helping participants work on their own interests as we go along. It will consist of two sessions of about two hours each, with a break for lunch in between:

• 11:00 - 13:00 Introduction to the Viable System Model (VSM).
• 13:00 - 14:00 Lunch.
• 14:00 - 16:00 Overcoming Social Barriers to Organisational Change - the Moral Modalities Framework (MMF).

How would you design a currency that strengthened democracy? Is debt-based currency inherently oligarchic? Is it possible for money with a monopoly on issuance to play well with effective democracy? Does size matter? How is the scale of operation of money systems related to the scale of operation of democracy? What are the parameters of money systems? What are their implications? How do they interact - with each other? With their social setting? Can we design money systems with any confidence about their large-scale systemic features? To what extent do currency systems exhibit formally complex properties?

Bitcoin has lifted the lid of Pandora’s money-box. It is now incontrovertibly the case that many characteristics of money are simply design decisions that get made. That many types of currency are imaginable, with wildly disparate characteristics and implications. At this point the important question is - what type of money will work best with the kind of society we would like? It’s time to institute the study of money as a design problem - to pull money, squirming and struggling, into the light, and begin to map the possibility space more thoroughly, more seriously, more operationally than ever before.

COME AND ENGAGE We’ll be running a World Cafe / Unconference approach - identifying areas for discussion, grouping up to open them up, re-grouping to share. Th podcast studio will be open for polemics, interviews, debates, summaries. We’ll be looking to identify key areas for exploration/research/documentation.

darVOZ will be soft-launching a creative currency, a mutual credit currency intended to facilitate all sorts of creative and collaborative work in the areas addressed during the week.

Wiki 2.0: Ward Cunningham, inventor of wiki, has been working on a full-on re-imagining of the wiki approach in a project called Federated Wiki - where your pages are your own, with lightweight and flexible navigation and multi-format content, but with a beautiful and liberating new dimension, whereby any user can fork, remix and adapt content from any public page, while preserving a full accreditation history.

Come and see what this amazing tool can do. #darVOZWIKI

A week long Holochain Sprint-athon; a hackathon, but with definite coding projects (of course, you are welcome to roll your own!).

The principal focus will be on LiquidWiki - a step change in the functionality and collaborative power of wiki. We’ll also we working on mutual credit currencies and argument mapping.

Running alongside this, there will be a series of evening DEMOCRACY CAFE style events, to provide inspiration, content and ideas to feed in to the coding. The week will be rounded off with two DemocracyLab events over the weekend, exploring new modes and tools for democratic design and constitution of organisations and institutions. Full Programme here.

Podcast studio too! #darVOZweek

The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam event (game creation) taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. Get together and make a game in 48 hours.

This Global Game Jam hub is organised by Games for the Many, a collective of game developers and political activists using the power of play to impact politics.

Over 2.2 billion people worldwide will be playing games in 2018. A hit game is not only fun, but also an opportunity for a transformative and educational experience. As technology, politics and urbanisation make our lives more complex, games can help us thrive in this new post-truth world by allowing us to learn faster about things we need to know.

Cybersalon.org will host a panel on how game creatives and social innovators can put spotlight on real-world challenges like state and work surveillance, fake news and anti-democratic practices of modern governments while providing inspiring game experiences.

Speakers

• Rich Metson – game designer and OFF GRID co-author. The game reveals the world of surveillance and invites player to explore the avoidance and defense techniques.

• Amanda Walker –”Fake It to Make it” US-based web games author and interactive designer interested in fighting propaganda and confusion in Mainstream Media in US and beyond (joining via Skype from US)

• Osmiotic Studios – Hamburg-based authors of “Orwell” game, sharing the key points from the development and potential of the game for impact

• Ben Greenaway – Cybersalon’s games’ reviewer who will discuss Riot and also impact of AI and AR in Games for Change

• Chair: Rosa Carbo-Mascarell – London-based game designer and Corbyn Run game co-author, Creative Director for Game Jam and Games For The Many

Cybersalon will be hosting a Summer 2018 competition for Game Creators Challenge and will incubate/support projects with production and fundraising support. We are looking for AI applications in Games for Social Change, AR as well as web-based, mobile and board games that aim to bring fun to civic issues.

Open Rights Group Legal Director Myles Jackman joins us at Newspeak House to illustrate the critical importance of legal action in the fight to defend our digital rights.

Learn about ORG’s record of achievements at the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the Royal Court of Justice in London. We’ll also survey fast approaching legal challenges in 2018 involving age-verification technology, protecting free speech online, and fighting the Government’s mass surveillance programme.

No experience or knowledge is necessary for this FREE event! All you need is an interest in protecting our human rights in the digital era.

We want to hear from you, so there will be plenty of time for questions and group discussion. Join us!

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

In The Box Board Games is hosting a party to celebrate the launch of NewSpeak The Boardgame! And where better than at Newspeak House?

There will be a couple of short presentations from interesting people, and then there will be the chance for you to try out the game for the first time.

Drinks and snacks provided, but you must register

The Brexit vote sent a shockwave through the political establishment in the UK and across the world, but there have been allegations that foreign states such as Russia tried to influence the vote. These include accusations of thousands of bots being set up to sow discord in order to destablise the European Union. Some Members of Parliament have even called for a judge-led inquiry into the possibility that Russia meddled with the referendum.

But is it all true? And if it is, did it really have an impact on how people voted on Brexit? What can or should be done to guard against social media warfare in the future? Join us to listen, ask questions, and learn on the 5th of January.

Speakers are to be announced in due course.

Spaces are limited so please register

This is a casual GameMaker Meetup where we will discuss development in GameMaker and game development in general. Feel free to come along if you are interested in GameMaker and game development!

Please contact us if you would like to bring your game to show off, we’d love to see what you’re working on! Feel free to bring down a computer and put on your game.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

January’s meeting will be where we determine the next few months of network work. We have a substantial amount of money in the bank, many members and a strong track record of work, but strategy and capacity problems have led to an impasse about how to move forward.

So January’s meeting will be a pot-luck of proposals and ideas for out future.

ALL RHN MEMBERS ARE INVITED TO PUT FORWARD PROPOSALS FOR WHAT WE DO WITH OUR MONEY, TIME AND RESOURCES OVER THE NEXT 12 MONTHS AT JANUARY’S MEETING.

PLEASE BRING A PROPOSAL, OR TEN, THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE NETWORK DO FOR US TO DISCUSS.

NOTHING TO HIDE is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument.

The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers.

NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

An evening of food, drink, music, and political technology, co-hosted by Citizen Beta.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

The Games for the Many team would like to invite you to our people powered festive party at Newspeak House with our friends and supporters.

We’re rustling up a hearty feast, traditional treats and a selection of games for the merry.

Doors will open at 7.30pm with a festive feast, before Newspeak’s main space opens up for us at 9pm for music, dancing and games on the big screen.

Stories behind interaction design from artists, designers, scientists and makers of all kinds working on Climate Change.

Civil Society Futures is a national conversation about how English civil society can flourish in a fast changing world. Come and share your hopes and fears for the future, the changes you’re seeing in civil society, and together co-develop specific visions for what civil society might look like ten years from now.

“An inquiry into the future of civil society suggests concern about the present. In politics this relates to concerns about a democratic deficit, and a series of public issue crises: an environmental crisis, a refugee crisis, and health and housing crises.

This is set against a backdrop of concerns about fake news which adds to and reflects a lack of trust in public actors. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer (2017), between October 2016 and January 2017 trust in government fell from 36% to 26%; in business from 45% to 33% and in the media from 32% to 24%.

Britain also has a significant ‘trust gap’ of 19% between ‘informed publics’ (‘in the upper income quartile, university educated and with a declared interest in politics and the media’) and those with an income of less than £15,000.” - initial research report

Before the event we will send out a poll to help create a frame for the discussion - make sure you register.

The event will be hosted by Marietta Le who is an Engagement Manager at BetterPoints, and a founder and activist working on civic tech initiatives in Hungary.

Use the hashtag #CivilSocietyFutures or mention us at @civsocfutures on Twitter.

Please note that for the purpose of summarising the takeaways of the discussion the event will be recorded (audio).

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Fabio Natali will be giving a presentation on the Cryptobar installation, a project aimed at spreading the word about privacy (and privacy-enhacing technologies) in an artistic and accessible way.

How does the UK become the world’s most advanced digital society?

In his first keynote speech since becoming Shadow Digital Minister, Rt. Hon. Liam Byrne MP will draw on his history of Britain’s entrepreneurial revolution to set out the roadmap for developing Labour’s digital manifesto over the year to come.

Liam Byrne MP’s speech will be introduced by Rt. Hon. Tom Watson MP, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition.

Afterwards, Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, will lead an ‘in conversation’ with Liam Byrne, with time for questions and answers from the audience.

A drinks reception will be served following the formalities.

Please make sure to register

Any questions, please contact Demos’ Events team on: events@demos.co.uk

In the summer of 2013, front-line police officer’s from the Metropolitan Police’s Commissioner’s 100 volunteered to set up and run the first UK Policing Hackathon - Hack the Police. The entire event was a voluntary effort to develop and trial new technology and new ways of working. Invitees were both serving front-line officers, and independent software developers.

This year, we’re bringing the event back to further explore the themes of:

• Better first hand evidence and reducing suggestion.
• Improving comfort and building rapport in the interview room.
• Tools for better police wellbeing and mental health.

We aim to once again engage with developers, designers, researchers, and officers. We’ll also have representatives from the Forensic Psychology Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Two contemporary artists critique media manipulation in this pop-up art show.

Gone are the days of conventional 9 to 5. As we strive to redress our work-life balance;

• How can we help each other to ensure our energies are focused where they should be?
• How can we best leverage and sustainably build, our constant connection and ever expanding network?
• Cut through the (white) noise and be connected to gigs where we can both give value and feel valued?
• What are our personal value systems? How ready are we for skills-sharing and non-monetised working?

Please join facilitator Alexandra Wright, ceo/founder of Able app, for a special meetup celebrating and exploring work in the gig-economy. During the session you will have the opportunity to collaborate with other independent workers, and begin to build additional support networks together. Additional presenters/facilitators tba

• What is the current state of play with digital tools and social change?
• How have digital tools impacted the work of social change?
• What is the future of digital tools for social change?
• What part do human relationships and connection play in today’s digitally enabled world?
• To what extent has digital technology changed everything?

A discussion hosted by The Sheila McKechnie Foundation & mySociety

Register

Celebrating 20 years of Cybersalon techno-futures

8pm - a debate on Human And Machine with Alessandro Gandini (Kings College) and tech trade union activist David Dahlborn (Sweden Trade Union), chaired by Dr Sophia Drakopoulou (Middlesex Uni)

9pm till late - DJ set by Simon S

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Blockchain (a digital, decentralised, public ledger of transactions) forms a core component of Bitcoin, the worldwide cryptocurrency, and is often talked about for its potential in other aspects of society.

Due to the secure and transparent nature of blockchain, it is touted as a concept that could be used for online voting platforms not just for representative elections, but for direct democracy, liquid democracy, and participatory budgeting.

If you’re interested to find out more about blockchain and how it can be applied, join us to listen, ask questions, and learn on the 6th of December.

Speakers:

• Dr David Galindo - Senior Lecturer in Computer Security, University of Birmingham
• Further speakers to be announced.

Spaces are limited so please register

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A fortnightly reading group. For this session, we’ll be talking about academia and research, with a particular focus on how Brexit will affect Britain’s standing as a place of research excellence and innovation.

Join this facebook group for updates.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Over the past two years Fako Berkers and Edward Saperia have created an experimental framework called WikiFeed. It allows you to create open source algorithmic newsfeeds using semantic data and metadata from Wikimedia.

We think this could allow new transparent and collaborative approaches to editorial policy, and also be a powerful way to discover stories in niche areas.

We’re running our first open workshop to experiment creating custom feeds. We’ll teach you everything you need to know and be on hand to support. You’ll need to bring a laptop. Remote participation is also possible - get in touch via ed@newspeak.house

The workshop is being run on both Saturday and Sunday. Both days are the same; it’ll be a short intro followed by free time to experiment with the framework. Please register so we can gauge numbers.

• Intro: 1pm - 1:30pm
• Workshop: 1:30 - 4pm

A more detailed introduction to the underlying technology can be found here.

On the basis of our working model, we are building our ethical network with each session. Come and learn about the approach, and add your own perspective to the ethical framework!

You can examine the network interactively here - for more detail, click on any circle and open the info panel using the three small dots mid left.

Over the past two years Fako Berkers and Edward Saperia have created an experimental framework called WikiFeed. It allows you to create open source algorithmic newsfeeds using semantic data and metadata from Wikimedia.

We think this could allow new transparent and collaborative approaches to editorial policy, and also be a powerful way to discover stories in niche areas.

We’re running our first open workshop to experiment creating custom feeds. We’ll teach you everything you need to know and be on hand to support. You’ll need to bring a laptop. Remote participation is also possible - get in touch via ed@newspeak.house

The workshop is being run on both Saturday and Sunday. Both days are the same; it’ll be a short intro followed by free time to experiment with the framework. Please register so we can gauge numbers.

• Intro: 1pm - 1:30pm
• Workshop: 1:30 - 4pm

A more detailed introduction to the underlying technology can be found here.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Tom Steinberg (@steiny) has decided to start a book club/reading group for Newspeak House folk and their most thoughtful friends.

The club will focus on books that relate to politics, activism, techno-social change, the news media, government innovation and failure.

This month we will be reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

Drop tom an email to tom@tomsteinberg.co.uk so he knows you’re interested.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Brexit is happening. And whatever level of hardness it eventually takes, we are all going to have to live with it. It makes sense then to gather and talk about how we plan to weather the storm.

There will be winners and losers from Brexit and I think it makes sense to sit and talk lucidly about the consequences we foresee, and what actions we can take. Hopefully this group will be as pragmatic as it is utopian.

There is a lot of negativity and despair in the news about Brexit, and some of it is certainly warranted. But rather than falling into apathy, we can do something wonderful by coming together reminding ourselves of the potential positives that will emerge over the next few years.

The plan is to host this as a fortnightly discussion group held at Newspeak House. Join this facebook group for updates.

Chaired by Newspeak Fellow Awais Hussain.

• What are the broader psychology biases that cause people to vote in different ways?
• How possible is it to change them?
• Can we use psychological insights to improve participation in politics?
• How can we improve public knowledge of how political systems work?

A roundtable discussion chaired by Dr Lee de Wit, author of What’s Your Bias

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Open Rights Group presents a talk by Joyce Hakmeh on the use of cyber crime laws to criminalise criticism of governments in the Gulf states on social media. She is a legal and development expert working on the Middle East and North Africa region since 2006.

Her areas of expertise include cybercrime, rule of law, good governance, international criminal justice, and international aid. She is researching cybercrime legislation in the Gulf countries and has worked for organizations including UNDP, IFRC, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, as well as for NGOs and media organizations.

Rich and Nati have been supporting non-hierarchical organisations for more than five years, co-founding Loomio (a worker co-op building software for collective decision-making) and Enspiral (a network of self-organising companies):

We’re currently touring Korea, USA, Europe, and South America, meeting with all kinds of entrepreneurs, activists, coaches and organizers who are trying to work with less hierarchy and more collaboration: people in democratic workplaces, intentional communities, startups, collectives, and NGOs.

In our journey we’ve discovered that every group faces common challenges when they try to work non-hierarchically. In this workshop we’ll share 8 collaboration patterns that have been proven to help groups overcome these common failure points, from group culture, to technology, decision-making and flattening power imbalances.

Most importantly, we don’t just tell people about participatory organizing, we practice it together, co-creating the workshop and learning by experience. You can bring your real challenges that you are facing in your team, organisation, or collective and we’ll work together to design solutions you can try immediately.

“Through these patterns I could see how my past adventures with non-hierarchical groups had fallen apart. It gave me new ideas to bring back to my own fledgling cooperative. I imagine that everyone in the room was experiencing a similar revelation; the uncovering of something known but also unnamed, the implicit patterns that are present in every group of humans, which so often are never identified, seemed here to be explicit, finally.” - Drew Hornbein, Good Good Work

To maximise accessibility, we have a sliding scale of ticket prices. If you can’t afford a discounted ticket, but you really want to be there, send us an email at nati@loomio.org. We have a few scholarships available.

Spaces are limited, register here.

Find more information about us and our workshops on our website.

Mass hallucinations, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions have been a challenge for long duration space missions for decades and can only become more prevalent as we embark on Mars missions.

Join us at ‘Survive on Mars: Life in Isolation’ to learn from Dr Vincent Giampietro about the mental health issues astronauts face in space and train your brain like an astronaut. We will be exploring solutions to the mental health problems using design thinking.

Dr Vincent Giampietro is a Neuroscientist and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Neuroimaging at King’s College London (KCL). His main research interest is in imaging brain functions, in health and in disease, with a current focus on developing MRI-based neurofeedback as a novel neurotherapy.

Vincent combines his research activities with his innate curiosity for space through tailored educational sessions on the role of neuroimaging to study astronauts’ brains and to monitor their mental health and cognitive functions before, during, and after their missions.

Doors open at 7.00pm. There will be plenty of time to meet and collaborate with like-minded people.

See you there!

Registration

How can civic technology be used to fight corruption in the UK?

Join Transparency International, mySociety, Members Interests, Campaign Against the Arms Trade and more for an evening of show and tells, food and drink, and networking at the interface of anti-corruption and civic tech.

• 18:00 – Open and refreshments
• 18:30 – Welcome: Corruption and Civic Tech
• 18:35 – Presentations (TI-UK, Members Interests, mySociety, CAAT)
• 19:00 – Group breakouts: Q&A’s, problem-solving
• 19:30 – Reporting back
• 19:45 – Networking
• 20:30 – Close

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

The aim of this project is to work towards the development of some real projects that build out spaces of non-market value-creation and access as sustainable (and hopefully replicable and/or scalable) bubbles of engaging and useful human interaction that lie outside capitalism.

Such projects need careful imagination, design and consideration; to achieve sustainablility and scalability while deliberately standing outside the commoditising market system is deeply challenging. Wikipedia is our poster-child - something of enormous and continuing value, co-created by hundreds of thousands of people with no thought of market exchange, that would either pop like a bubble or simply re-emerge somewhere else if anyone attempting to buy it and monetise it.

Wikipedia has achieved this for systemisable knowledge (there are side projects like wiktionary and the like which extend the model to other areas than encyclopedia style systemising).

Knowledge was perhaps the low hanging fruit - all humans use and co-create knowledge, and systemised knowledge is eminently digitisable.

What other areas might we consider? Starters for ten: reputation/trust, intermediate currencies designed to resist amassing of capital, co-curation of medical experience, co-curation of social experience, platform co-ops.

With Winner-Take-All Platforms like Amazon, Airbnb, and JustEast, many small, local businesses are facing a huge challenge in delivering more orders online whilst maintaining a strong profit margin. This is a stand against the Extraction Economy. This meetup is for high street and local businesses with a strong connection to their communities - who want to use technology to reach more people and sell more goods, whilst finding a way to strengthen their local area in the process.

Have you had negative experiences selling your food or products through third party platforms online, and you want a place to share your frustrations and struggles? If so and you are eager to learn how and where you can do it better…

This event is for you. Hosted at the Hub of everything that intersects technological, economic and social change…

Evening Format:

6:30pm - 7:00pm: Arrival and Drinks

7:00pm: Introduction and insight by hosts

Josiane Smith, Country Manager, Digital Town and Project Lead, smart.london

You’ll learn about better ways to sell more of your orders online (make more money, get more online traffic, connect with the city and the world) through a visionary, new (and free) smart cities platform. For more info - check out https://smart.london

7:30pm: Pitches by 3 small businesses or restaurateurs who have stories to share about their online selling experiences - the good, the bad and the ugly! (Please contact Josiane if you would be interested in sharing your story.)

8:00pm: Speed Learning - the opportunity for those with tips and tricks about eCommerce to share what they know with other local businesses and restaurateurs who are new to online sales and/or online delivery and are eager to learn more.

10,000 deaths in London each year have been attributable to human-made particle air pollution. It’s time to demand change.

This open meeting will discuss why direct action is necessary to tackle the air pollution crisis and how East Londoners organise their own actions.

Stop Killing Londoners - Cut Air Pollution, is an inclusive direct action network organising short sit-downs & dance sessions on London’s most polluted roads. We are working with other groups in the city to create an escalation of protests this autumn to force the politicians to take concrete action.

We offer support and advice to local communities wanting to organise for drastic pollution reduction.

For more on the campaign follow twitter.com/stopkillingldn and like our page fb.com/stopkillingldn

Register

After 40 years of neoliberalization, the promised end of history has led to a decomposition of established hierarchical systems, including politics. This process has culminated in Brexit and Trump. While there are strong reactions against these, the current of political change cannot be rewound back towards neoliberalism. However, alternatives based on the logic of networks and Peer to Peer are emerging and gaining attention.

Join Stacco Troncoso from the P2P Foundation to discuss on how Commons-based peer production — the relational dynamic behind projects such as Wikipedia and Linux — can prefigure new heterarchical systems for dealing with complexity, and how the figure of the “commoner” can be seen as an emancipatory political subject. The discussion will also analyse the municipality coalitions which successfully won local elections in many of Spain’s major cities and how this process contributes to what we call a Commons Transition.

This year, the service design fringe festival team put a focus on inclusion and diversity in our work.

We ran an event in collaboration with UKBlackTech and FutureGov back in June to get service design in front of the BME community, and we ran a workshop about D&I with service designers to start to uncover the problem a little more.

This event is for us to collectively figure out what the value of diversity and inclusion is to the service design industry.

The service design industry is still finding its feet. We have the problems of a teething industry - there’s still some difficulty in persuading clients of the value of service design, and when we get those contracts, there’s a great deal of explaining to do to enable projects to be successful.

People in organisations that want to hire service designers can have trouble providing evidence of the approach’s effectiveness to their colleagues with decision making power.

People transitioning in to service design have difficulty finding junior roles, regardless of their past experience in other professions.

And those with a little experience in service design find themselves starting teams in organisations where they have to build a service design practice from scratch, with little support, and a great deal of pressure to prove that service design works.

This session is an open discussion forum about the issues in the service design industry as it is today. Come to share your woes - you’ll likely find that you’re not alone - and to together come up with potential actions to make a difference to these issues. The session won’t end without some actions being identified! We’re focused on being constructive :)

We held a similar discussion event in April attended by festival volunteers - it was validating to attend, and we’d like to offer the opportunity for you to attend a repeat session.

The festival is designed to be an intervention to tackle some of the industry’s problems. Your input in this session could help the festival’s future direction. The festival is community-run, and this event may bring to light an opportunity for you to get more involved, and benefit your own career at the same time.

The Spider’s Web, Britain’s Second Empire is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial, to a global financial power.

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands.

Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance.

How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider’s Web sets out to investigate.

There will be a Q&A after the screening, participants to be announced.

Website • Trailer • Tickets

An evening of short talks and conversations around Parliament, data and democracy.

If you’re a librarian, statistician, academic, historian, technologist, designer or just interested please come along.

Speakers

• Dan Barrett, Head of Data and Search, Parliament Digital Service
• Anna Scott, Head of Content, Open Data Institute
• Samu Lang, Technical Director, Parliament Digital Service
• Rachel Coldicutt, CEO Doteveryone, Trustee Fawcett Society

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Politics is meant to be ‘the art of the possible’ – yet the defining political developments of recent years have been events widely declared ‘impossible’ until they happened. How do we find our bearings in a time when the boundaries of political possibility are repeatedly breached?

Over five days at Newspeak House, Dougald Hine has been hosting conversations with artists, technologists, thinkers and doers about this. On the last night he is opening it up to anyone who wants to join and hear a bit about where the conversations have led – and maybe try out some of what has been talking about.

He’ll be joined by guests including Billy Bottle and Liz Slade, and probably some of the others who have been involved over the weekend.

Here are some of the starting points for their conversations:

• This suggestion from Will Davies in the LRB: ‘The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism.’
• These lines from theatre-maker Chris Goode: ‘my sense is that only seldom is the problem that we ‘don’t know’ – or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough. The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront that knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness.’
• This Compass report from Indra Adnan on the future of political parties.
• A series of occasional posts Dougald wrote, starting the morning after the UK general election of 2015, which people seem to have found helpful in making sense of unexpected political events.

If you are interested in scholarship or activism on the topic of digital labour and the future of work, then consider joining our regular meet-up series that will be held in London.

We aim to meet from 7pm have a few drinks and talk about topics related to digital labour, the platform economy, digital gig work, and online freelancing.

Hosted by

• Mark Graham (@geoplace), Professor of Internet Geography at @oiioxford, researching digital labour, gig economy, economic geography, critical data studies, development, and digital divides.
• Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock), Fellow at LSE researching digital labour, sociology of work, resistance, videogames, and streaming. Publications: https://t.co/udwCHIzjhh + https://t.co/F66wMq9SSy

Communal meals at Newspeak House, 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.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Discuss the categories of action that are most appropriate , here and now, to further the agenda of a post-market paradigm shift.

Pictfor is hosting a Summer Reception to introduce our All-Party Parliamentary Group.

Members, Parliamentarians and potential future members are invited to apply to attend. Please also pass the invitation along to new and young employees - with a particular emphasis on young people and those new to the tech and political sectors who may not have engaged with us before.

Please join the waitlist for this event using your work email address. Once we have approved your request, your registration will be confirmed and you will be sent further details of the event. This event will introduce Pictfor to a wider network, engage young people working in tech and policy, while also exploring the future of tech.

This interactive, interview-style panel event will discuss:

• What is the future of tech?
• What skills do the next generation working in tech need to excel?
• How will Generation Z shape technology?

BCS will be sharing findings from their new report on diversity in the tech sector.

Speakers:

• Darren Jones MP
• Catherine Knivett, Principal Policy Officer for Digital Skills, Greater London Authority
• Maxine Mackintosh, Co-Founder, One HealthTech
• Barry Whyte, COO, Decoded
• Chair: Professor Tom Crick MBE, Trustee, BCS

More speakers to be announced

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It’s the structured sister to Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, and it provides a common place to gather and re-distribute data that can be reused by anyone.

In this short event we’ll be examining what it is possible to do with Wikidata - using UK political data as a springboard. Whether you are interested in building an application, doing some analysis, or just experimenting, this is for you.

This workshop will be divided into two parts:

• A brief introduction to Wikidata: cool tools and tricks for using it
• A hackathon to use, visualise and improve the data

Join us if you’re interested in learning some new tricks, or to understand how Wikidata can be useful to your work or your organisation. If you’re interested in political data, or have experience in visualising or building tools to work with data, come along!

Julio Alejandro will give an overview of new cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, ZCash, Litecoin, Steem, Dash, Wings, MCAP, IoTa, Voxel, Numerai, Indorse, Decent, Kin, Storj, Siacoin, Maidsafe, Monero, ZCash, Dash Gnosis, Augur…

…and how they allow distributed functionality that give new ways of solving problems in prediction markets, attention economy, smart cities, privacy, machine learning, distributed computing, mixed reality, ownership, digital identity, and more.

Julio Alejandro is director of three Blockchain companies in London, UK Foreign Correspondent for Excelsior, Founder & CEO of Humanitarian Blockchain. He has lectured, lobbied, and participated in transnational projects with the United Nations, the European Union, and the University of Cambridge.

Register

This month we’re looking at the various routes people have taken to become Service Designers and the skills needed to succeed.

• How does a doctor become a service designer?

• How could a background in music help in the design process?

• Do service design courses prepare you for life as a jobbing designer?

• Why do so many UXers make the leap?

Our fascinating speakers will be telling us a little bit about their personal experience and ruminate on the essential skills needed to make a great Service Designer.

If you’re thinking of becoming a Service Designer this event will help you understand the may and varied routes that your peers have taken before you. If you’re a seasoned-hand it will remind you of the diversity of experience and how vital that makes our discipline.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

This session will think about the most engaging and fruitful ways of connecting our membership into the work of the Project, as we develop the Ethical Framework that will underpin a Progressive Ethics (for more detail about this, look here - exciting and effective ideas have been developed).

This membership has built itself - there has been no outreach, no large event, no recruitment drive - the idea of a Progressive Ethics clearly has the potential to engage.

Looking through the list, the signs are that we are an excitingly diverse bunch, with a wide range of interests and skills.

Clearly, not all members will come to Working Session events (although they are engaging and exciting experiences - do give it a try!), but people don’t join a Project without some idea of contributing to its development: at this session we will come up with ways of opening participation and engagement out beyond physical Meetups.

This session is a complete event, with its own topic for discussion and consideration, built around the idea of participatory development - no prior engagement is necessary! No future commitment is required!

Assemblies for Democracy will be having another planning group meeting at Newspeak House to prepare the meeting for an alliance for a citizens’ convention on the constitution. Any interested observers are most welcome to attend.

See this post for more info.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

On Wednesday 3rd August our friend and colleague @MalwareTechBlog was arrested by the FBI in Las Vegas after the Defcon/Blackhat security conventions.

Many know him for his integral role in helping analyse, explain and mitigate the WannaCry ransomware worm - particularly for registering the sinkhole domain which slowed the attack and saved upwards of millions of computers from infection and inestimable damages.

In the UK and possibly elsewhere, it is entirely plausible that his heroic contributions prevented loss or injury to human lives.

MalwareTech has been indicted by the US DOJ and faces charges relating to alleged involvement in the Kronos banking malware in 2014-2015. No evidence has been presented at this stage to substantiate the claims and under US and international law he is considered innocent until proven otherwise.

Understandable concern is being felt and important questions are raised regarding how a UK citizen and highly-regarded member of the security researcher community came to be arrested by US authorities. The possibility of decades of imprisonment due to the disproportionately harsh sentencing regime in the USA compared to the UK and the prevalence of coercive plea-bargaining give cause for significant alarm.

Within the community of information security researchers and practitioners the dangers of being criminalised for efforts to address malware and improve computer security are all-to-familiar. With the arrest of MalwareTech, especially after such conspicuous and laudable contributions in responding to cyberattacks, there is a serious risk that the already strained trust between the hacker community and law-enforcement and government authorities will be eroded further and significant “chilling effects” on the willingness of volunteers to assist with computer security will be felt at a time when their help is most needed.

We owe it to our friend and colleague, to his family and loved ones, to ourselves as a community and society at large to ensure that MalwareTech’s rights are upheld, that his brilliant potential to contribute to our collective security is not squandered, and that relations between the hacker community and state authorities are not harmed for the common goal of maintaining internet and private computer security.

Please attend if you are able, or contribute remotely, so that we can respond together in an effective and responsible manner to resolving this situation in the best interests of everybody concerned.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Tech Against Modern Slavery is an event in aid of World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, brought to you by Free_D and the London Tech for Good Meetup to raise the profile of human trafficking and explore tech’s role in addressing it.

Human trafficking is a crime that exploits women, children and men for numerous purposes including forced labour and sex. The International Labour Organization estimates that 21 million people are victims of forced labour globally. This estimate also includes victims of human trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation. While it is not known how many of these victims were trafficked, the estimate implies that currently, there are millions of trafficking in persons victims in the world (http://www.un.org/en/events/humantrafficking/)

This event will explore tech’s role and responsibility in prevention, prosecution, rescue, and reintegration; from the perspectives of charities, startups and big tech companies.

We’ll be hearing talks from:

• Siavash Mahdavi, tech entrepreneur & co-founder of Free_D
• Phil Bennett, Program Architect at Salesforce

And a panel discussion from:

• Katherine Prescott, co-founder of Free_D
• Gail Kent, Global Public Policy Manager, Facebook
• Justine Currell, Executive Director, Unseen
• Sarah Brown, Lead Analyst, Stop the Traffik
• Min Teo, Strategy, Techfugees

Hosts:

• Jessica Stacey, London Tech for Good & Bethnal Green Ventures
• Ellie Hale, London Tech for Good & CAST

Doors open at 6 pm, talks start at 6:30 pm. There will be time for questions and networking after the panel discussion.

Join MakeSense with Local Welcome and their communities at Lunchtime on Sunday 30th of July for what is promised to be a very unique Holdup, MakeSense Design Thinking Workshop!

Come to Connect, Cook, Eat and experience first hand what the project is and who the project serves… and then Challenge yourself brainstorming and building a strategy to grow the Local Welcome movement!

Local Welcome project combines digital service design with traditional community organising. At the heart of it, they help refugees and locals cook and eat together. The experience of this shared activity helps atomised communities build solidarity and find common ground. They spent 2016 running test events throughout the UK, in Berlin and the States, connecting small groups of Syrian refugees and local residents to cook and eat together.

Now its time for them to do the next important step!

Everybody is Welcome! Due to the challenge we think that people who loves and practice User Research and Design, Marketing Campaigns and Community Building will LOVE to be part of this challenge. Let’s solve this all together!

Don’t be Late! We recommend to arrive at 11:50am, because at 12:00pm we start our group activities.

MakeSense is an international community that rallies SenseMakers in 128 cities across the world to help social entrepreneurs to solve their challenges. By putting together our skills and ideas, we can help social entrepreneurs create and develop their businesses and solve the most pressing issues faced by society in such areas as: education, health, environment, food, waste, refugees, etc. MakeSense is all of us. It’s an open project that brings together a community of passionate people.

A workshop to set a common direction for The UK Transhumanist Party, something to inspire many towards a better future.

Using design thinking methodologies we will aim to align different voices around a single goal and strategy for the future of The UK Transhumanist Party.

A discussion about what the experience of Newspeak House looks like for women at the moment, and how we may be able to improve it.

A special event featuring Peter Krafft who has just finished his PhD at MIT Media Lab.

In his own words:

In my work, I develop computational models to reveal patterns in human social behavior and computational perspectives to guide that behavioral modeling. In this talk I will present a modeling framework I have developed that organizes my own thinking about the structure and function of social systems. I will then present varied models that can reveal topic-specific communication networks in complex organizations, information silos during rumor spreading, and political preferences in the American electorate. I will conclude with a discussion of potential future areas of interest to me, including participatory mechanism design, computational political theory, models of public engagement with science and technology, and models of “fake news”.

Talk followed by drinks & discussion.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Sophie.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiandpolitics/

Due to strong demand, registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-politics-episode-v-tickets-36275140923

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A meeting to discuss James Darling’s Membership Relationship Management Prototype:

“The majority of successful digital products in existence today are built on two possible organisational models: atomised individuals interacting with each other, or a centralised organisation (typically a company) interacting with its users (typically customers).

You can see this forced dichotomy playing out in the language of [the campaign] sector; you have ‘traditional organisations’ trying (and mostly failing) to engage with the ‘grassroots’. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but neither are particularly effective in 2017.

Traditional organisations are pulled into creating bureaucracies that are better suited to a corporate company of the 1990s. ‘Volunteers’ suddenly have to behave more like staff members, while new members who are unable or not yet willing to make such commitments begin to see the organisation as a professionalised company to be a customer of, rather than an active member.

Meanwhile, grassroots organisations struggle to create any useful bureaucracies at all, rapidly collapsing under their own weight if they try to expand or build power. They are too risky for power to engage with seriously. Without simple, public ways for new members to get involved, they often end up cliquey.

I feel there is the possibility to build new bureaucracies, largely written in open source code instead of rulebooks (because it’s 2017), that break down this dichotomy, and allow smaller grassroots teams to help and be helped by the more centralised and professionalised HQ. This prototype was a stab at that.”

• https://medium.com/@abscond/membership-a-prototype-ea822b2683b#.57x1z2avb
• https://github.com/james/membership

The launch of Matthew Blakstad’s second novel, Lucky Ghost.

Please RSVP to rosie.stephen@hodder.co.uk

This summer, The Fourth Group is hosting a hackathon to see how tasks politicians are expected to do can be automated.

These tasks include: Understanding voters’ preferences; writing speeches; making strategic decisions in regards to policy proposals, and; addressing problems faced by constituents.

We’re looking for people with experience in politics, data analytics, machine-learning, and design.

If you’re interested in joining, contact join@fourth.group

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Digital Democracy is a question that has been heavily debated in recent years at a time of intense development of practices of online decision-making. New digital democracy softwares, online services and applications are all manifestations of the vitality of this discussion, as are initiatives and experimentations launched by both emerging and established political parties, national parliaments and city councils.

However, often we are overlooking the degree to which the common label “digital democracy” hides the presence of a great diversity of directions and approaches. While some of these practices project the vision of a direct democracy, in which participatory practices can wholly substitute all forms of representation, other lines of development take a more pragmatic view, seeing digital democracy as a way to address some of the inconsistencies of representative democracy, and constructing a continuous feedback loop between represented and representatives.

How do these competing visions of digital democracy, the participatory and representative ones map onto existing practices and projects? What are their underlying criteria, visions, and claims to legitimacy? Which of these models of digital democracy is more effective and which one is destined to prevail in the long run?

The workshop will bring together theorists and practitioners of digital democracy from different European countries to explore the emergence of competing models of digital democracy, their theoretical inspirations and their practical developments.

Public meeting - Radical Housing Network members, campaigners, friends, residents and all others are welcomed to this meeting to discuss:

• What housing campaigns have organised in the wake of the Grenfell atrocity.

• What campaigning for better housing looks like after Grenfell - on safety, estate regeneration, tenant rights, privatisation, council housing - and more.

• How, and for what, can we campaign - in our home, our areas and together?

• How housing groups - across all types of tenure and property - can work to ensure Grenfell marks a transformation in how we house people.

All welcome.

The film “Waynak”, which means “Where are you” in Arabic, is a six-part web documentary which was filmed in 2016 and produced by MakeSense presents men and women who have developed practical solutions (from arts, to theatre and technology) to problems encountered by refugees, and shows us how to move from screen to reality.

You can watch the trailer here.

The documentary was screened at the Cannes festival last May and was very well received. It was also awarded best international non fiction at the Melbourne WebFest in July 2017 !

In the last session, we looked at the components (technical and social) that could be assembled to build a bullshit detection system.

Discussion of each of these components generated questions, alternative approaches, awkward issues.

This session , we will look in more detail at a particular component that is part of the imagined ethical engagement system this Project is aiming for - an ethical chat-bot.

Why a chat-bot? Well, when thinking about building an ethical framework that can engage widely - both to help them traverse the ethical frameworks we might build, and to learn from people about the questions and the ethics that they might bring to bear - some sort of simple ethical chat-bot always seems like something to explore.

What would people want from such a thing? What should it try to do? What should it try not to do? Could it be used as an aid in building ethical frameworks? Can we allow it to give automated ethical suggestions - or should these always come from people?

No doubt we’ll come up with many more questions, and many answers too.

What we’ll aim for is a ‘starter-for-ten’ specification for what an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) ethical chat-bot should do.

Come celebrate what we’ve achieved together over the last year!

Includes so many elections, much data! And we want your braaains on what’s next…

(Democracy Club is a community interest company that uses open data, design and technology to give every voter the information and participation opportunities they need, in a way that suits them. We are non-partisan and we work openly. Come say hello!)

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A breakfast event looking at how product and behavioural design principles could be used to improve the policy-making process, with the idea of bringing together a mix of product designers, behavioural scientists along with policy-makers/civil servants to investigate the idea of how we can create a ‘well-designed democracy’.

We’re delighted to say we’ve got some excellent speakers confirmed:

• Dr Michael Hallsworth, Director at the Behavioural Insights Team – on using behavioural economics to design better policies
• Glyn Briton, Chief Strategy Officer at Albion – on designing ‘democratic brands’; some lessons from designing GiffGaff, a pioneering democratic brand
• Temi Ogunye, Citizens Advice Bureau – presenting research on how people practically engage with democracy from a day-to-day perspective
• Chris Quigley, Delib – on ‘playocracy’: the use of gaming mechanics to build engagement in policy

Breakfast will be provided and, of course, there’ll be plenty of tea and coffee available.

This event is part of the Practical Democracy Project, a series of events organised by Delib dedicated to looking at how technology can best be used to make every-day improvements to the democratic process – with a particular focus on policy-making at local and central government levels.

The overall aim of the Practical Democracy Project is to design the ‘ultimate democracy user-journey’. On one side, we’ll be mapping out in practical terms how to create the best democratic user-journey for citizens, using technologies that dominate people’s everyday lives; on the other side, we’ll be mapping out the optimal user-journey for government officials/policy makers/elected officials. The key point being that democratic processes are a two-sided affair, which need to be optimised for both citizens and government if they’re to work.

For more info or to kick in ideas, drop us a line on Twitter: @delibthinks

Register: Eventbrite

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

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!

Speakers

• Sam Jeffers (The Shop) - Who targets you? The inside scoop and results of the elections most talked about new tools
• Hayley Davidson (Crisis Action) - Creative Coalitions

We’ll be unveiling a further list of kick-ass speakers for this event over the coming weeks. Expect more learnings from the snap General Election campaign to be among them.

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.

If we can we will try and organise some pizza to be delivered after the event to allow people to keep talking.

Wot you waiting for? #wineandwotsits

Red Pepper meets to launch the latest print issue of Red Pepper Magazine - Empire Will Eat Itself - and chart out the path it takes from here.

Register: Eventbrite

homelesshack17 is for anyone interested in helping solve homelessness in this city and beyond.

According to Crisis, more than 8,000 people slept rough in London last year. That number has doubled since 2010. The problem is much bigger than that, though - more than 100,000 people each year apply to UK local councils for help with homelessness, and that number is increasing by more than 10% a year.

Experts from charities, service providers and government will come together with service designers, policy professionals, data analysts, developers, researchers and people with lived experience to see if we can create some useful things to help.

There will be people who know what’s needed, people who know what data is available and where to find it, and people who can take on the ideas and prototypes from the event and find ways to make them happen.

Friday 23rd June

• 10:00 to 12:30: presentations from experts who work on homelessness in London to help hackers understand what’s needed
• 13:30 to 17:00: open space style event for everyone to talk about their ideas for ways to help
• 17:00 to 23:59: form self-organising teams and get to work

Saturday 24th June

• 09:00 to 16:00: work in self-organising teams to design solutions and build working prototypes
• 16:00 to 17:00: show and tell
• 17:00: finish

Everyone with energy and ideas is welcome. This will be an inclusive, open and collaborative event. #Homelesshack is not only for people with special technical skills - come along if you have ideas, energy and any relevant skills or knowledge to offer. Please don’t worry if it’s your first time at an event like this - everyone is welcome and there will be plenty of help and support on offer.

If you are interested in scholarship or activism on the topic of digital labour and the future of work, then consider joining our regular meet-up series that will be held in London.

We aim to meet from 7pm have a few drinks and talk about topics related to digital labour, the platform economy, digital gig work, and online freelancing.

Hosted by

• Mark Graham (@geoplace), Professor of Internet Geography at @oiioxford, researching digital labour, gig economy, economic geography, critical data studies, development, and digital divides.
• Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock), Fellow at LSE researching digital labour, sociology of work, resistance, videogames, and streaming. Publications: https://t.co/udwCHIzjhh + https://t.co/F66wMq9SSy

A post-election planning meeting to work on the Citizen led Constitutional Convention.

Observers welcome.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Build something for the election? Come and talk about what you did.

Also please add it here: bit.ly/GE2017TechInitiatives

38 Degrees is the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

A short introduction, followed by discussion, then for those who want to (everyone, hopefully!), a workshop session.

We’ll develop practical ideas for how a framework of entities, each taking responsibility for some aspect of an issue, can work together to make efficient and effective assessments.

We’ll think about how these entities can operate both as algorithms and as human-powered decision makers.

This is about starting to develop a product - the relationships and mechanisms we’ll develop will underpin the workings of an ethical framework that can interact, can deliberate, can make recommendations.

Spend election night at Newspeak House with a load of democracy nerds.

This will mostly look like a bunch of people furiously using laptops, but there’ll as much conviviality as is possible under the circumstances.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

On Sunday 4th June election fever will be in the air: candidates crying clockwork catchphrases, pundits pontificating on polls, every citizen considering the choices before them. In other words, the perfect time for an election hackathon!

Schedule

• 9am: Doors open & breakfast
• 10am: Opening remarks from Newspeak, SixFifty & e.g. Democracy Club
• 5pm: Pizza
• 7pm: Presentations
• 8pm: Wrap up, prizes, pub

Help promote a tactical voting tool

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

EXPLORE OPEN COMPANY DATA & MAP CORPORATE NETWORKS

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism.

It’s been four years since the tragic events at Rana Plaza, where lack of safety and humane working conditions were exposed due to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. This FlashHacks, we’ll be digging into the corporate network of apparel brands.

“There was barely any publicly available information about the apparel brands that were using the Rana Plaza factories. Activists searched through the rubble for labels and interviewed survivors. For decades, such secrecy has been the norm in the garment industry. While a handful of companies, like Adidas, Nike, Levi’s, Puma, and Patagonia, began publishing details more than a decade ago, others have recently joined. By the end of 2016, at least 29 apparel companies were disclosing some information about their source factories. Yet, company commitments to transparency about supplier information are inconsistent, with widely varying standards for what they choose to disclose. Many brands have held out completely.” - Human Rights Watch

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 125 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Register

AI & Politics is back. With #ge2017 around the corner we ask: Can Facebook Win Elections?

Short talks, followed by drinks & discussion.

Speakers to be confirmed.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Sophie.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiandpolitics/

Due to strong demand, registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-politics-can-facebook-win-elections-tickets-34778022000

Join us for the launch party of CorbynRun, a game about building a movement to beat the Tories. You’ll get to try the game and chat to the makers.

Games can change the way you think. They’re more than just entertainment, they can help engage, teach, influence, spark conversations and start movements for change… and perhaps have an impact in the election.

What is Games For The Many?

Games For The Many is a new grouping of Labour members, creatives, gamers and tech enthusiasts, passionate about making games. From Melenchon’s Fiscal Kombat, to Molleindustria’s Phone Story, to UsVsTh3m’s 2010 viral election games - games have shown a meaningful capacity to help promote and develop ideas and messages, and they’re fun to boot!

This Meetup is going to bring together people and organizations working in (open) data for development.

We will feature speakers whose organizations have launched or are soon to launch a data portal for development purposes, speakers that will discuss responsible data handling for development, and others who are using large tranches of data to inform their work.

While we have some speakers secured already, we encourage anyone working on an exciting (open) data for development project to get in touch for an opportunity to speak!

How can decentralised technology change management, incentives and discovery in attention-content markets?

In today’s attention-based economy, institutions who hold power over data access and discovery can dictate what content and collaborations will be successful and what we spend our attention on.

Paweł Wojtkiewicz is a data scientist and phd candidate from Warsaw School of Economics. He will talk about his work implementing a system that manages and incentivises the creation and spread of content that people find beneficial while creating transparent environments where singular content creators and normal viewers can thrive as individual units.

Design Jam is a one-day brief to prototype event to work cool disruptive topics. This Jam’s theme will be politics and the upcoming election with the final brief being announced on the day of the Jam.

Why? We want to meet people, make things, learn, have fun doing it, and build a community of awesome people.

I’ve never Jammed before. What should I bring? Bring your laptops, coding environments, iPhones and iPads, Sketchpads, writing / drawing implements, cameras and video cameras, and whatever else you need to make sweet stuff. We’ll be finding ways of creating quick-and-dirty prototypes for testing, and then building convincing mockups by the end of the day.

Here’s the schedule (we try to stick to this, but we can change it up too):

9:00 - Doors open and breakfast begins. Groggy conversations and coffee.

10:00 - Topic presentation! We’ll give you some background and inspiration to get started with.

10:30 - Making teams and brainstorming session 1! Each team member will do rapid sketches of 4-8 different ideas. Then we’ll put them up, discuss and prioritise.

11:00 - Brainstorming session 2! Each team member will sketch a single idea. Then we’ll dot-vote and choose direction.

11:30 - Team discussion & finalizing idea

12:00 - Break for lunch

13:00 - Building your prototype begins here! This can be a sketch, paper prototype, html click dummy, a website, a video about your service or anything else that can be used for quick and dirty testing with real people.

15:30 - Testing with peers and on the streets!

16:00 - Prototyping, round 2! Refine Refine Refine!

17:30 - Finalise your presentations! Make them awesome, have fun!!!

18:00 - Final Presentations We’ll take 5 minutes with each project and see what you’ve built, and what you’ve learned.

19:00 - End of the day We’ll head to a local pub to celebrate and generally have a great time :)

Someone familiar with the matter will give an inside view on the NHS systems.

Chatham House Rules.

Generation Rent and PricedOut are holding a joint social in London to introduce prospective volunteers to the organisations’ activities.

The organisations are both mobilising private renters to take action to improve the rental market, and to support more housebuilding.

The activities that the volunteers would be signing up for include:

• Developing online tools for people to support housebuilding in their local areas
• Using public data to create an evidence base to support policy change
• Devising systems of holding local councils to account over their housing responsibilities

A subsequent training session in June, run by Generation Rent to equip volunteers with the skills and knowledge to start or get involved with a housing-related campaign.

This social offers an opportunity for people who have not been involved before to find out more and meet like-minded people in an informal environment.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

This is an opportunity for community activists and voluntary organisations in London to get support for their priorities in this election.

We will focus on three sets of questions:

• What are your priorities, who has similar priorities & how can we work together to achieve them?
• What is the London manifesto and how can you use it?
• How can you influence candidates to support your priorities?

Election campaigns are a national conversation about priorities. While most attention is on competing candidates and Brexit, the election is also a chance for you to draw attention to issues in your community, tell politicians what you want and get their support.

Key facilitators / presenters:

• Titus Alexander, Democracy Matters – top tips for influencing
• Matt Scott, LVSC – update on London manifesto
• Women’s Resource Centre / ROTA
• Community Sector Coalition – update on manifesto (tbc)
• David Wilcox, Social Reporter- Networked City / Connecting Londoners
• Newspeak House fellows – Josh; Edward tbc
• Just Space – Richard Lee tbc

We will have refreshments, small groups discussions and a plenary to share ideas and get support for what you want out of the election.

Come along and get support for what you want politicians to do for your community and for London.

Please book so that we get enough refreshments for you!

Come and celebrate three years of WebRoots Democracy by attending this year’s anniversary event: take back ctrl: digital democracy, post-brexit

After the ground-breaking referendum last June, we will be looking at the future of digital democracy in the UK, setting out WebRoots Democracy’s next steps, and bringing together those in the democratic participation and civic tech fields.

A drinks reception to celebrate the launch of Jamie Bartlett’s new book Radicals.

Based on two years of field work, Radicals follows the people and ideas of outsider political movements, from psychedelic pioneers searching for oneness to futurists promising immortality to anarcho-capitalists founding new nations to communes trying to create a new model for life. As the mainstream of politics seems to hollow out, Radicals poses the question: are these groups the future of politics?

Join for drinks and snacks, perhaps even some very light conversation about politics that is definitely not business as usual.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Technologists + History of Technology = History Hack

History Hack is an experiment to see what happens when you get technologists to read classics from the history of technology. Before each episode we’ll all read a text. Then we will meet up for a hack where we use the ideas from the reading to build amazing new things.

Episode 1 starts with an absolute classic: Langdon Winner’s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Winner explores a radical idea: technologies aren’t neutral inanimate objects. They have political agendas just like humans do. The essay totally reshaped the field. Let’s explore how it can reshape the way we build things.

Read the essay. Then come to Newspeak ready to brainstorm and be creative.

Journalist and filmmaker Billie JD Porter (BBC3, Channel 4, Vice) and ThinkNation invite you to an urgent summit addressing the state of political engagement across the UK.

It is a critical time for people across the UK, and on June 8, a decision will be made by all those who choose to vote. The third major vote in two years, constituents across all generations are said to already be ‘fatigued’ by the prospect of once again returning to the polling booth, but young people’s future remains at stake.

The event will be opened with the screening of “USE YOUR VOICE” - a short film that explores political disenfranchisement of the younger generation.

The film will be followed by a series of short interviews live on stage with Summit host Billie, mixed with talks and audience discussions with thought leaders across media, education, politics. Crucially, young people will be speaking on behalf of themselves.

Our agenda is not to sway people’s vote, but to call a state of emergency in encouraging young people TO vote.

This isn’t about party politics. This is much more important.

CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS:

• Lord Jim Knight (ex Labour MP)
• Abi Wilkinson (The Guardian)
• Danny Fahey (Thirty Pound Gentleman)
• Hannah Clare (Chair of the Young Green Party)
• Simon Childs (Home Affairs Editor, Vice UK)
• Mhairi Fraser (Director at Conservative Future Women and Parliamentary Assistant)
• Mete Coban (Founder My Life My Say)
• Shelly Asquith (Vice President Welfare National Union of Students)
• Kathryn Corrick (Founder Represents)
• Areeq Chowdhury (Chief Executive, WebRoots Democracy)
• Kenny Imafidon (Young Political Commentator)
• Jim Waterson (Political Editor Buzzfeed UK)
• Gemma Styles (Writer / Digital Influencer)
• Anna Rose Barker (Chair British Youth Council)
• Liv Little (Editor-in-Chief gal-dem)
• Isaiah Hull (writer and perfomer)

Schedule (subject to change)

6:45pm: Doors open for registration

7:00pm: Welcome by “Use Your Voice” event host, Billie JD Porter, who will also be joined onstage by some of the young people from “Use Your Voice” video

7:10pm: Screening of “Use Your Voice”

7:20pm-7:35pm: In Conversation: Billie talks with three of the young people from the video exploring what they learnt from their Brexit experience, and how they are engaging with GE2017

7:35-8:00pm: “Why do young people feel especially disconnected from politics?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A

8:00-8:30pm: “Should politics be taught at secondary school?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A

8.30-8.55pm: “How can we make sense of politics in the new media age?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A

8.55pm-9.20pm “Shouldn’t politics belong to everyone?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A9:20pm: Launch of Use Your Voice: The Toolkit. Billie is joined by with three young people who will explain why the Toolkit is important.

9:30pm: Networking/drinks

10:00pm: Finish

We’ll start with a short presentation on how the Ethical Framework is currently imagined - how it works, how it gets built, how it can be used.

Then we’ll get some proposals for ethical dilemmas that we can explore - choose two or three, and explore the ethical issues they raise - and work out the Ethical propositions that capture these issues.

We’ll make linkages between these, look for patterns that underly and unify them, perhaps, discuss their characteristics (what specifics of the problem affect how they apply? Do they interact with other issues? What is their relative importance?).

We’ll explore using Kumu to capture and represent all of this, and see how we can link these issues together, beginning to see what a network of ethical propositions looks like.

On the 11th of May, each councils will release a document called a Statements of Persons Nominated, which details the candidates for the upcoming election. We need to manually enter this information into a database so that more useful things can be done with it. Come and help!

Newspeak House Fellow Alex Parsons went to TicTec 2017, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference focused on the impact that civic technology and digital democracy are having on citizens, decision makers and governments around the world.

At this event he will talk a bit about what he learned there.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

An evening of short talks and conversations around Parliament, data and democracy.

If you’re a librarian, statistician, academic, historian, technologist, designer or just interested please come along.

Rob Blackie talks about elections.

The rough agenda will be:

• Why seats matter more than votes
• The numbers that matter: Electorate, turnout, hard vs. soft voters
• The two PIGs that drive campaigns (Persuasion, identification, getting out the vote)
• Which voters matter most?
• Messaging

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Come and join us this Saturday to collaborate in the creation of online and offline tools to support voters to access the information they need to decide who to vote for in GE2017.

We can think of 4 themes to work around that might provide a useful focus for the day but are happy to hear other proposals at the start of the event when we’ll use an ‘OpenSpace’ approach to chose what topics to work on. This builds on much of the work that’s been happening in the past days and weeks.

We invite people with skills in UI, digital, data, political science, activism, media and communications to join us for a co-design session to build on and contribute to a range of initiatives which aim to build a progressive alliance and enable data-informed tactical voting on 8 June.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

OpenIDEO is a global community working together to design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges. Come along to the launch of the London Outpost if you want to:

• Use design thinking for issues you care about.
• Exchange ideas with people everywhere.
• Help projects get off the ground.
• Connect with others in your community.

As well as introducing you to OpenIDEO London we will use Human-Centred Design to tackle a current challenge: How Can We Provide Higher Education for Refugees?

Draft Agenda:

• 6.30pm Poster Session
• 7.00pm Welcome and Introduction to OpenIDEO London
• 7.30pm Challenge: How Can We Provide Higher Education for Refugees?
• 9.30pm Community Development
• 10.00pm Close

Keep abreast of developments by following @OpenIDEOLondon on Twitter.

Ludum Dare is a global event where you create a game from scratch in a weekend based on a theme. The theme is voted on by the community and revealed at the beginning of the jam.

There will be:

• Lightning fast internet speeds
• Showers
• 24 hour access
• Free food and drink
• Optional self-care activites
• Tables and chairs

What to bring to a game jam:

• A laptop and charger
• Pens, paper, whiteboards - whatever you need to get creative
• A sleeping bag and a pillow
• A matt or blow-up mattress

Money from ticket sales will all go towards providing free food and drink. If you are a student or unemployed and cannot afford a ticket get in touch at r.carbomascarell (at) gmail (dot) com.

Learn more about Ludum Dare: http://ludumdare.com/

Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ludum-dare-game-jam-at-newspeak-house-tickets-32981465451

In the past months, speculation over whether Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will run for president has intensified. After the Trump victory, nothing of this sort seems impossible. Would such a shift establish a democratic tech utopia - or would it marginalise dissent in a way unseen even in 20th century dictatorships?

LightClock presents: ZUCKERBERG 2020?

Join us for our panel debate and our provocative games over drinks.

Panelists include:

• Anoosh Chakelian (senior writer; New Statesman)
• Brandon Jackson (creative technologist; Kano)
• Tom Paskhalis (statistics of political social media; London School of Economics).
• Game master: Sarah Stein Lubrano (The School of Life)
• Moderator: Anna Gát (founder, LightClock)

There’s going to be a UK General Election on Thurs 8 June.

Last time around, Democracy Club — a non-partisan group of technologists — used digital tech to help voters get better informed about their candidates. We reached millions of voters.

This time, there’s lots more stuff we can do — with your help! And we want more ideas!

This will be an open space session where we get together to talk data infrastructure, how we use that data, how we know what voters want, how we can use it, test it, research it.

Everyone is welcome — from activists to designers to techies — so long as you’re willing to do stuff!

A quick first draft of our plans, questions, resources etc is going in this Google Doc: https://goo.gl/8WtZvc

Not in London? Organise your own meetup and add it here: https://goo.gl/Mbbo2p Tweet it @democlub and we’ll help publicise it!

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Freedom of Information and Openness - why bother? The past, present and future of transparency in the UK

This event looks at why politicians push openness, how they try and back out of it and what happens once the policies are in place. It will look across FOI and Open Data in the UK and offer some thoughts on what may happen to the transparency agenda with Brexit.

Speakers

• Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck College, University of London
• Martin Rosenbaum, BBC, FOI expert

The discussion coincides with the publication of Ben’s new book on this topic, ‘The Politics of Freedom of Information: How and Why Governments Pass Laws That Threaten Their Power’. The first chapter is available online here.

Tom Steinberg (@steiny) has decided to start a book club/reading group for Newspeak House folk and their most thoughtful friends.

The club will focus on books that relate to politics, activism, techno-social change, the news media, government innovation and failure.

This month we will be reading Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Expect strong characters, a fascinating fact/fiction hybrid, Leninist dogma, and linear programming.

Drop tom an email to tom@tomsteinberg.co.uk so he knows you’re interested.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

We’re meeting up to hear about what’s new with decentralised apps, the Redecentralize Radar and have some drinks!

What is redecentralization?

We’re at the start of a new information revolution. The last one was the printing press.

It took centuries for us to work out how to use print fairly. Concepts like copyright, the novel and libraries were formed, which we all take for granted now.

Although it seems like lots has happened… personal computers, the world wide web, smart phones… Really, it’s only just begun.

The original Internet was decentralized. Anyone could set up parts of it. That’s why it won.

For various reasons, control of our information technologies is increasingly falling into a few hands. Some big companies and Governments.

We want it to become decentralized. Again.

Join ORG London for a discussion with ORG Legal Director Myles Jackman and feminist pornographer and sexual liberties campaigner Pandora Blake, about the Digital Economy Bill and what it could mean for you.

Myles Jackman who once described online pornography as “the canary in the coalmine of free speech” and is best known for his cutting edge practice in obscenity law and sexual freedom of expression.

Pandora campaigns for sexual freedom, read her Guardian article about the Bill link

Find out more about the Bill link

Meeting for volunteers for Generation Rent and lettingfees.co.uk to update and expand the database of letting fees ahead of the consultation on letting fees.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

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 and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Who is speaking?

We will be unveiling our full speaker line up over the coming week but it includes

• Penelope Gibbs - Director at Transform Justice on Herding cats- how one campaigner tried to persuade the criminal justice sector to reframe it’s messaging
• Jess Day - Campaigner, Let Toys be Toys
• Laura Osborne - Head of Corporate Affairs, Which?
• Rachel Collinson - Donor Whisper for most of the big charities you have ever come across!
• … and 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? #wineandwotsits

Join us for the launch of the OpenOwnership Register: an open data register of global beneficial ownership, in the public interest.

The revelations of the Panama Papers have shown that anonymous company ownership bears an unacceptably high cost for society and business. On the anniversary of this game-changing leak, we are launching a tool that will bring information about who owns companies out into the open. By linking beneficial ownership data from worldwide corporate registries and other sources, and by providing a clear, consistent mechanism for data collection, the OpenOwnership Register will help reveal the transnational connections between people and companies and build a culture of corporate transparency.

Get a first look at the pilot version of the OpenOwnership Register.

Take a tour of the platform and learn how it will enable governments to crack down on crime, allow companies to verify who they are really doing business with and empower civil society to investigate and campaign against injustice.

The launch will be webcast worldwide. We welcome your questions before or during the launch on the Twitter hashtag #OpenOwnership or via email to info@openownership.org.

Speakers

• Chair: José M. Alonso, Director of Digital Citizenship, the World Wide Web Foundation
• Maggie Murphy, Senior Global Advocacy Manager, Transparency International
• May Miller-Dawkins, Senior Global Advocacy Manager, The B Team
• Zosia Sztykowski, Project Coordinator, OpenOwnership

This live event will be streamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckC_EIvny9U

Timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Panama Papers leaks, this event will convene a range of journalist, data/tech and civil society actors to share research and findings released in the year since the leaks, share plans and brainstorm collective actions to make progress.

Programme:

• 8:30 Registration
• 9:00 Introduction, by Gerard Ryle, Director, ICIJ
• 9:15 – 10:45 MiddleMen, Mansions & Maseratis: new research and tools
• • Drew Sullivan, OCCRP on brand new leaks
• • Max Heywood, Transparency International on brand new research on money laundering through luxury goods
• • Zosia Sztykowski, OpenOwnership on new tools
• • Rachel Davies, Transparency International UK on property
• • Oliver Bullough, journalist on getting the money back
• 10:45 – 11:15 Networking break
• 11:15 – 1:15 Pitches and plans
• • Naomi Hirst, Global Witness on golden visas
• • Nick Mathiason, Finance Uncovered on tax disclosure
• • Madeleine McCarroll, B Team on Ownership Transparency
• • Robert Palmer, Open Data Charter on what next
• • Emma Prest and Rishi Kumar, Datakind on data science in investigations
• • Alix Dunn, The Engine Room on support for making the right data/tech choices in projects
• 1:15 – 1:30 Wrap-up
• 1:30 – 2:00 Lunch

• Ever found yourself stuck behind a corporate desk wondering what happened to your dreams of changing the world?

• Ever wondered how to leverage the resources of your company for global justice causes?

• Ever wanted to meet other young professionals with a similar passion for doing good?

EA Workplace Activism is a new project aimed at answering these questions - we use the power of our workplaces to maximise our positive impact, and help others do the same. You can make a real difference within and through your company - come and find out how at this informal, discussion-based event. Tickets are free via Eventbrite. We have a few speakers:

• Jo Macrae (GiveDirectly & former Head of UK Humanitarian Policy). Speaking about GiveDirectly’s pioneering work to administer direct cash transfers to the poorest households in East Africa.

• George Howlett (EA Workplace Activism/CEA). Giving an overview of our workplace activism to date, and discussing how we can leverage corporate resources for high-impact causes.

• Dr. David Reinstein (Exeter University Business School). David’s innovative ‘Give-if-you-Win’ initiative seeks to raise charitable donations from corporate bonus pools, via asking people to commit amounts in advance.

• 12:00-13:20 Intro to Effective Altruism workshop
• 13:20-14:00 Lunch (separately ticketed)
• 14:00-17:00 Workplace Activism Launch
• 14:10 Short talks on workplace activism
• 14:50 Discussion on workplace activism
• 15:20 Break
• 15:40 Activism brainstorming & planning
• 16:40 End + feedback + stay for a drink

This event will be the pre-launch the effective altruism workplace handbook: http://eaworkplaceactivism.org/handbook-overview/

How can machine learning affect the political process?

Short talks, followed by drinks & discussion.

Miles Brundage - Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future for Humanity Institute and a PhD candidate at Arizona State University in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. His research is focused on policy challenges in artificial intelligence. He is also affiliated with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation (VIRI), and the Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI). Miles will be talking about progress in AI and its long-term policy implications.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Shad.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiandpolitics/

Due to strong demand, registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-politics-episode-iii-tickets-32469821109

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

What we believe about the world affects the decisions we make every day, whether we are citizens or presidents. Bad information means bad decisions, and it corrodes trust. Join us and our special guests on the 27th of March at Newspeak House in London to discuss fake news and the misinformation ecosystem, and how best to respond.

The Panel

• Richard Allan, Vice President Public Policy EMEA at Facebook
• Peter Barron, Vice President Communications and Public Affairs EMEA at Google
• Rob Owers, Head of News Partnerships EMEA at Twitter
• Jenni Sargent, Managing Director at First Draft News
• Will Moy, Director at Full Fact

The Host

Bill Thompson, BBC

The Event

Full Fact is the UK’s leading factchecking charity, and has been at the forefront of automated factchecking. We’ve been to a lot of events about fake news recently, but none quite provided the opportunity for people to hear directly from the key players. So we organised this. We hope you enjoy the evening. The event will be live streamed. You can follow the Full Fact twitter account on the night for the live feed. Tickets are free. However, Full Fact is a charity, so if you would like to donate we would be very grateful.

Tickets will be released in batches:

First batch released on Weds March 15th at noon

Second batch released on Weds March 22nd at noon

Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/full-fact-presents-not-the-fake-news-tickets-32541136415

An evening for all freelancers to learn about setting up cooperatives.

Self-employment is booming in the capital. Freelancing can be liberating, but all too often this comes at a price: isolation, precariousness and insecure pay.

Join us for an evening of discussion, meeting like-minded freelancers, and hearing from speakers including Pat Conaty and Alex Bird (Co-operatives UK), and Kayleigh Walsh (Outlandish - a tech cooperative of freelancers).

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Come to the launch of “The Mask and The Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest” by Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.

From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debout in Paris, contemporary protest bears the mark of citizenism, a libertarian and participatory brand of populism which appeals to ordinary citizens outraged at the arrogance of political and financial elites in the wake of the Great Recession.

The book draws from 140 interviews with activists and live witnesses of occupations and demonstrations to explore the new politics nurtured by the movement of the squares of 2011-16 and its reflection of an exceptional phase of crisis and social transformation.

• 7:30 Paolo will present his book and discuss the relevance of the progressive populism of the 2011 occupy wave for contemporary politics
• 8:00 Response by journalist and author Dan Hancox
• 8:30 Debate
• 9:00 Drinks & mingling, and the chance to buy signed copies of the book.

Sarah Kavanagh from the National Union of Journalists will be joined by Pam Cowburn, Open Rights Group’s Communications Director, to discuss the implications of the proposed Espionage Act.

Join us for a discussion and Q&A followed by a trip to the Brewdog pub next door.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Tom Steinberg (@steiny) has decided to start a book club/reading group for Newspeak House folk and their most thoughtful friends.

The club will focus on books that relate to politics, activism, techno-social change, the news media, government innovation and failure.

I’ve decided to rocket forward from the 19th century to the 21st, looking at a book that’s mainly about the lessons from the Bernie Sanders campaign: https://goo.gl/Jg0aIW

Drop tom an email to tom@tomsteinberg.co.uk so he knows you’re interested.

If you’re involved in Another Europe Is Possible, or an allied or interested campaign, feel free to join us for an evening of fun, politics and socialising.

We’ll have a quick presentation about what Another Europe is doing - including our fight against hard Brexit, campaigns for free movement and migrants’ rights, and Stop Trump. Exciting speaker TBA.

And then we’ll spend the rest of the evening getting to know each other and having a nice time.

Please make sure to get a ticket through the Eventbrite in order to give us an idea of actual numbers.

We invite you, whether you’re in London or afar, to a weekend of learning, making, and doing to advance Open Research Data. The event is hosted by SPARC and the NIH as part of an international celebration for Open Data Day.

At its heart, Open Research Data is about making it easy for you and others to see, use and share data (to find out more, read this). This simple idea is powering some of the largest breakthroughs of our time and our event aims to celebrate and accelerate the power of Open Research Data.

We invite you, whether new or old to Open Research Data, scholar or citizen, in London or across the globe, to join us for this weekend to make, hack, contribute, try, teach, design, test, learn (or just about anything!) in the name of Open Research Data.

In London, we’ll provide fast wifi, power (both for your laptops and your bodies) and a program that will spark ideas and collaborations for the weekend.

If you can’t make it to London, join us online from wherever you are. We’ll be documenting and discussing ideas before, during, and after the event for remote participants. As a remote participant, expect to be able to pitch and discuss your ideas for the weekend with all attendees!

Program

Each day will run 9am - 6pm. We’ll provide breakfast, lunch, and snacks (including coffee, of course) with informal dinner & drinks each evening. The program is designed to be lightweight and flexible to allow the maximum time for doing.

Day one

• 9-10 am: Breakfast
• 10-12 am: Introductions & opening / pitches
• 12-1 pm: Lunch
• 1-6pm: Working with occasional lightning talks

Day two

• 9-10 am: Breakfast
• 10-12 am: Working with occasional lightning talks
• 12-1 pm: Lunch
• 1-6 pm: Working with occasional lightning talks

Ideas for the Weekend

We’re organizing ideas & more details on the program here. It’s up for you to decide how you spend the weekend, but if you’re short on ideas, here are some of ours:

• Trying to find / reuse an open data set
• Building engaging (and open) visualizations of open research data
• Adding some field-specific examples to Data Carpentry lessons
• Building a software library (Python module/ R package/ Ruby gem etc.) to facilitate access to and processing of open data from specific sources
• Building a set of Wikidata SPARQL queries for a specific field
• Harvesting data from the supplementary files of scholarly publications
• Participating in research-related activities that others are planning for Open Data Day
• A data-centric walk around the neighbourhood
• Improving documentation for any of the above
• Adding a “research data” section to the Open Data Handbook
• Improving Wikipedia pages around or with open research data
• Writing data management plans
• Writing data-centric grant proposals
• Make your own data FAIR
• Test out reproducible computational tools such as Binder, R-Shiny, CodeOcean [we can supply a list of resources]
• Prototype a tool to leverage the open datasets in eLife or in repositories (Zenodo, Dataverse, etc)
• Prototype a tool to make it easy for researchers to share/discover/consume comprehensive, open and FAIR data
• Devise a mechanism to incentivise deposition, review and reuse of datasets

EXPLORE OPEN COMPANY DATA & MAP CORPORATE NETWORKS

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism.

We’re turning the monthly FlashHacks into every few months to make sure we can accommodate more people & partner with NGOs. We’ll be releasing more information in the lead up to the event!

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 125 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Register

Since the last People Before Pixels meetup, almost a year ago, a lot has happened politically and in how we design public sector services. But we’ve seen the rise of one question that now seems to dominates both: who do you work for?

The language we use to describe the people who use public sector services has been changing. ‘Human centred design’ has turned to ‘user experience’ and now to ‘designing for citizens’. How has this impacted the way we include people who use digital services? How do we talk about individual users as a group of people? And how do these groupings change our expectations of their behaviour? Will designing for citizens empower people using public sector services? What are the user needs for empowerment and how will we design for it?

Speaker: Rose Rees Jones @rosebotanic

I will be kickstarting a new round of monthly people before pixels with this discussion. This meetup welcomes anyone who is interested.

As always my fifteen minute talk will be followed lively conversation and drinks.

Doors: 6.30pm

Talk: 7.00pm

If you’d like to speak at this event or host a future event let me know: @rosebotanic, #pb4pixels

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

How can machine learning affect the political process?

Short talks, followed by drinks & discussion. Speakers TBC.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Shad.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiandpolitics/

Due to strong demand, registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-politics-episode-ii-tickets-32095092285

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

An evening of short talks and conversations around Parliament, data and democracy.

If you’re a librarian, statistician, academic, historian, technologist, designer or just interested please come along.

Speakers

• Dan Barrett - head of data and search at Parliament Digital Service - www.twitter.com/dasbarrett
• Tony Hirst - Open Data Journalist https://www.twitter.com/psychemedia
• Michelle Isme - Product Manager @gdsteam working on open registers https://www.twitter.com/icoo
• Oli Hawkins - Statistical researcher at the House of Commons Library https://www.twitter.com/olihawkins
• Steve Goodrich - Senior Research Officer at Transparency International UK https://www.twitter.com/stevejgoodrich
• Megan Lucero - Director of the Data Lab at @TBIJ // Formerly Data Journalism Editor at @thetimes and @thesundaytimes https://www.twitter.com/megan_lucero
• James Smith - Head of @ODILabs, party leader of @havesomenew, founder of @CleanwebUK, and chair of @CDCSSGUK https://www.twitter.com/floppy

How can digital tools be used to make information on agriculture development funding more accessible, and more actionable?

Join us to hear pitches from expert developers from across the world - sharing their plans to use state-of-the-art technology to improve aid and agriculture data.

This session is a public culmination of a week-long tool accelerator. Hear insights from our panel of judges, and provide your questions and feedback through an audience-choice session.

About the Initiative for Open Ag Funding

The Initiative for Open Ag Funding supports efforts to tackle hunger and food insecurity by improving the availability and quality of agricultural investment data. We know that in 2014 roughly $8.3 billion of official development assistance (ODA) was disbursed for agricultural-related development. However, we cannot accurately say where it was spent, who benefited or what that assistance achieved.

The Initiative for Open Ag Funding is aimed at ensuring that agriculture and food security practitioners have the data they need to answer those questions, with the ultimate goal of increasing the effectiveness of efforts in the sector. By improving access to this data, organizations will be better able to coordinate, find partners, identify promising approaches and target their assistance.

To that end, we are hosting a four day tool development workshop where specialist software developers will explore agriculture-relevant data needs, and build a series of prototype tools to address them. These include:

• Improving the workflow for geocoding IATI data;

• Approaches to merge improvements into IATI data without requiring updates to publisher’s source systems;

• Improved API and query-tools for access to enhanced agriculture funding data;

• Greater awareness of IATI amongst key stakeholders;

• Improved user-friendly interfaces for access to open agriculture funding data.

Join us on the final day to hear the outcomes of the challenge, as the development teams present their ideas on how we can use data to tackle world hunger.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

We are not the only sufferers of ugly referendums. In Colombia, a recent national vote to end a fifty year war with the FARC guerrillas failed by 50.2% to 49.8%.

Ed Maklouf has just returned from three months living with and studying the political processes of remote Colombian communities: the FARC guerrillas, indigenous Arhuaco indians and Amazonian indians, afrodescendiente communities, and citizens of Bogota, Cali, and Medellin.

Come and hear about the history of their local decision-making processes, how their communities understood and responded to the peace referendum, and Ed’s experiments augmenting their politics with new technology. A talk followed by discussion.

Ed is writing a book about consensus “Hands Up - the history of voting” and is the founder of Gather, a social impact startup that makes democracy tech for citizen science, citizen reporting, and voting/consensus. He studied group communication at Stanford University, developed the Siine Keyboard, and now aims to improve collective agreements using both technology and historical research.

• Workshop: 1pm-5pm
• Meetup: Digital Democracy & EU (drinks and pizza!) 5pm-7pm

How well are we using online and digital technology to take part in politics? Do platforms already exist for engaging with politics from a local to European level, or do we need to create something new? If so what, and how?

Bring your ears and your ideas to explore with others which online tools/platforms could be most powerful for people to engage with politicians and help you get your opinions heard where it matters.

You’ll have the opportunity to meet a variety of international people with expertise in the field of digital democracy, but we want to hear your expertise too. We hope you will develop thoughts and ideas about how you would like to engage in politics and input your ideas - whether you know a little or a lot!

Be part of an international programme - this event is part of a series being run in Paris, Iceland, Latvia, Slovenia, Amsterdam, Athens and Brussels as part of a European Commission funded investigation into how best to engage people with legislation making. It aims to explore the tools available and crowdsource the requirements for engaging citizens.

How do we give power to the people - could digital democracy be the answer? Be part of deciding the future. Priority on the waitlist for tickets will be given to people aged 30 and under.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

How can machine learning affect the political process?

Short talks, followed by drinks & discussion.

https://etherpad.net/p/AI+Politics

Speakers:

Jonathan Penn - Jonnie Penn is a doctoral candidate and Rausing, Williamson and Lipton scholar at the University of Cambridge. His current research explores the history of artificial intelligence, 1950-69.

Dhruv Ghulati - Dhruv is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factmata, an artificial intelligence startup solving the problem of automatic fact checking, rumour detection and fake news detection using natural language processing. Dhruv will be talking about the role of fact checking and fake news in today’s society.

Sam Applebee - Sam is the founder of Super Global, a social enterprise connecting humanitarian projects with expert technologists. At AI startup Satalia he explores the role of organisational purpose for AI companies. He holds an MSc in Global Governance. Sam will talk about openings for AI-stack technologies in civil society, and pose some challenges to cooperation.

Others TBC. If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Shad.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiandpolitics/

Due to strong demand, registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-politics-episode-i-tickets-31060675316

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

The Housing crisis is a ‘wicked’ problem, with multiple causes and effects. Clearly though, a key piece of the puzzle lies in the way we finance the development of new homes. Throughout much of the 20th century, we have largely been dependent on the speculative land development to finance the delivery of new homes, typically financed by short-term loans from major banks.

As that model becomes increasingly less viable in many areas, as other diverse modes of development grow and as digital technology allows more kinds of lending and contract-making, what new innovative models can we imagine to finance homes and neighbourhoods in the 21st century?

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Through hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, Debt Resistance UK have obtained a dataset of LOBO loan contracts. These are risky and expensive loans miss-sold to local authority by financial institutions, to the detriment of public services.

We’ve already processed much of the information, but by opening it up to others we can realise its value. So join us on the hack day, to make new analyses or visualisations, to help complete the dataset or just to get to know others working on pressing issues in local finance.

All of the data will be published online. Some is already there. See the council of Newham as an example: http://lada.debtresistance.uk/local-authorities/newham/

People with all kinds of skillsets are welcome. We will provide clear step-by-step guides on how to participate for those who prefer it.

People in London are getting together at Newspeak House, but the hackathon will be run online so you can participate from any part of the country as long as you have an internet connection.

Register & find out more

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

To avoid over-crowding, entrance will be strictly limited to people who »»» sign up in advance «««

This event is the second of a series of joint meetups between GlobalNet21 and London Futurists.

An important debate over ethical principles has become overdue. Should the widespread disruptions of the digital age alter our conceptions about morality and ethics? Which ethical principles from previous eras should we continue to uphold (perhaps with extra urgency)? Are there new considerations and realisations that we would want to inform our decisions about the future of technology and the future of humanity? In such discussions, what should our starting point be?

Rapidly advancing technology is placing within our reach unprecedented power to remake human bodies, human minds, and human society. Age-old constraints and limitations are being swept aside. But just because we now have the opportunity to remould human character, it does not follow that we should take these steps. If our viewpoint is too short-sighted, or too techno-centric, we might miss the bigger picture. We might edit key features of human nature in ways we’ll soon come to regret. Like King Midas of old, we may discover that our wishes have devastatingly bad consequences.

This is no mere academic discussion. It has profound real-world consequences. Engineers are awaiting input from philosophers for the “moral guidance” modules of powerful new robots and AIs. Politicians, likewise, are looking around for assistance in drafting legislation governing new technology. What advice should we be offering?

The panellists:

• Dr. Stephen Minger, former Chief Scientist, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, and former Senior Lecturer in Stem Cell Biology at Kings College London

• Others to be announced

About London Futurists:

From http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/

This group is for people who are interested in the future and maybe want to help shape it.

The acceleration of technology means that the near future may bring radical changes to all of us. Major developments in technologies like anti-aging, nanotech, genetics, computing, robotics, and geo-engineering are going to make the next few years very exciting - and possibly also very dangerous. We could gain god-like powers - but we might also lose sight of our humanity, and destroy everything that we used to hold dear.

What’s your view? Are things improving? Too slowly or too quickly? Are we are entering a new golden age? Or is the potential “Technological Singularity” something to fear? What does it mean to talk about “Human 2.0” and “Humanity+”? Or perhaps you view such talk as techno-hype? Maybe you just like the practical side of technology and want to find out more about possible paradigm shifts?

Anybody is welcome to this group - you don’t have to be a Techno Geek or work for some futuristic company to be in our group. The future applies to us all!

Come join in the debate - have your opinions voiced and maybe make some interesting new friends.

All we ask is that members treat each other with the respect they would want for themselves. Our group has members of many ages and backrounds. We have many different perspectives on what the future may bring and like to share different ideas with each other. We approach the future with a open mind and sense of humility. Our group mission is to introduce you to some of the ideas, advancements and people who are making our future happen today.

About GlobalNet21:

From http://www.meetup.com/GlobalNet21/:

“GlobalNet21 is the leading forum in the UK for discussing the major issues in the 21st Century. We share a common concern for the sustainability of both our planet and the people on it. With almost 20,000 network members in the UK and abroad, we are making the debate, and democracy, more accessible by enlarging the Public Square and using social networks.

“As well as a network of individuals we have also set up a collaborative network of organisations to exchange good practice and transfer knowledge so that we can learn from each other. This network is cross boundary and includes local authorities, housing associations, universities, community groups and social enterprises. Our aim is through dialogue to celebrate diversity and develop community self-resilience and sustainability at a time of unprecedented social and environmental change.”

To avoid over-crowding, entrance will be strictly limited to people who »»» sign up in advance «««

A consortium of voluntary sector funders are soliciting a major review of local level activity, particularly as regards to digital strategy. Come and contribute to the report in the first of a series of facilitated workshops, where we will review examples of innovative projects and present new user research for discussion.

In this session, we’ll look at “Slipham”, a project simulating a fictional London borough.

Our previous workshop in May at the Centre for Ageing Better was attended by 45 people from over 30 organisations, and focused on how we could help older people discover the ecosystem of digital services aimed at improving their wellbeing.

Come to the second of our series of talks given by members of the Open Rights Group community.

Ever since the Snowden revelations in June 2013 there has been a growing awareness of the depth and breadth of the data we generate and how it renders us into ever more traceable objects of surveillance. The profoundly asymmetrical, political economic dimensions of the production and circulations of data have led to deeply problematic power relations wherein every keystroke, website visited or application downloaded are now rich sites of potential surplus value. With the proliferation of mobile platforms, digital footprints are expanding rapidly, especially those of young people. More…

Speaker: Jennifer Pybus, Senior Lecturer in Advertising at London College of Communication

There will time for a Q&A afterwards before we de-camp to the pub. Please come along and bring any interested friends.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Food, drink & festivities! Come and celebrate the end of a very long year.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

This month we will be learning how to scrape data from the web using Nightmare.js, a node.js-based browser automation library.

Make sure to bring a laptop, as we will be following a tutorial together as a group. No programming experience is required.

After the tutorial, we will be staying in Newspeak House for an early Christmas party to celebrate the end of the year. Since we have no sponsor this month, it’s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beer or other beverage). There’s an off-licence a few doors down.

Be sure to check out the collaborative hackpad and add links to cool data journalism-related stuff you’ve seen in the last month for the show & tell section!

Schedule:
- 7:00 Doors open
- 7:30 Show & tell
- 7:45 Tutorial
- 9:00 Christmas party!

Have ideas about what we should cover next year? Add them here.

Dr Shamil Chandaria will lead a discussion on:

• Understanding longevity trends
• The science of life extension
• The importance of developing super-wellbeing in conjunction with super-longevity and super-intelligence
• Social and economic implications of super-longevity

Shamil is a philosopher, entrepreneur and technology investor. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy within the School of Advanced Study at the University of London and Senior Advisor at Google DeepMind.

We’ll also have a talk from Katz Kiely on how we can better help people manage change and the importance of autonomy and a feeling of fairness in helping people thrive in change. Katz is a communication strategist who has worked with the UN, Ogilvy and other international organisations.

Exponential View events are hand-curated, participatory events tackling the most interesting and challenging questions of the day.

Your brains will be challenged and contribution expected, so we will serve dinner and drinks during the evening to keep you fuelled up.

Advance registration is required (£75).

Tom Steinberg (@steiny) has decided to start a book club/reading group for Newspeak House folk and their most thoughtful friends.

The club will meet once every 6 weeks, and will focus on books that relate to politics, activism, techno-social change, the news media, government innovation and failure.

Next up, a book about the moment when Britain truly became a democracy for the first time, and the amazingly tense and occasionally surreal events that it took to get us there. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, that’s absolutely perfect! That means you should really enjoy reading our second bookclub book ‘Perilous Question’ by Antonia Fraser.

Drop tom an email to tom@tomsteinberg.co.uk so he knows you’re interested.

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Technological advance has long promised a world of leisure and liberation. Yet, embedded within class relations and capitalist production, for the mass of people automation has meant ever-intensifying exploitation.

Can technology’s revolutionary potential be captured for a different future, or will it remain wedded to the domination of capital?

Michael Roberts, radical economist and author of ‘The Long Depression’, discusses past and future technology in relation to the class struggle and capitalist crises.

Nick Srnicek, author of ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’, argues liberation can only be achieved through the acceleration of technological innovation.

»»Register (for free)««

Pol.is is currently in use by the vTaiwan initiative, through which hundreds of thousands have taken part in forming government policy on contentious issues such as regulation of Uber and AirBnB. Following the success of vTaiwan, Pol.is is now being experimented with by movements around the world. Attend this workshop to experiment with the platform and see what it can do.

More details tbc

Recommended reading:

• vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberunk Frontier of Democracy
• wiki.p2pfoundation.net/V-Taiwan_Process

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. Did you know that OpenCorporates has millions of records on non-profits and community contributors have created corporate groupings on them?

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Register

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Communal meals at Newspeak House, open to members and non-members alike.

BYOB, suggested donation £5.

Ration Club is run by volunteers from the community. If you’d be interested in cooking, contact ed@nwspk.com

Come to the first of our series of talks given by members of the ORG community.

We’ll be kicking off with a session on surveillance and totalitarianism in literature, and how the nightmarish world of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ can still be seen as relevant for the digital age. The talk will be lead by Dr. Simon Willmetts, lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull.

There will time for a Q&A afterwards before we de-camp to the pub. Please come along and bring any interested friends.

Artifical intelligence and deep learning are both interesting topics no matter where you choose to apply them. Many have thought of the considerations of AI in education, music, security and automation, but not a lot of practical thought has been put into AI and politics. At AI + Politics, we’re aiming to build politically disruptive AI. Though what does this mean? This could mean anything from an AI politician to a deep learning algorithm that changes people’s political persuasions over time.

Some of the tools you may consider using at this hack are Tensorflow, Keras, Alchemy & OpenCog.

Come along and build something with AI that will advance the inevitable robot apocalypse.