Mission
To ensure that the institutions that help Britain to make good collective decisions do not fail at their task just because they can’t adapt to the internet age quickly or skilfully enough.
Our Goals
To bring about clear improvements to the way that public-interest institutions make decisions.
To ensure that no institution fails to serve the public simply because it cannot fully take advantage of modern technology.
To bring about the creation of a range of new organisations and initiatives that fully explore the possible applications of technology to the political process.
Programmes
The focus of Newspeak House is the infrastructure and processes by which very large groups of people make collective actions and decisions.
For example, in a traditional model democracy, people join together into pressure groups to influence political parties. Political parties synthesise these into visions for how a country should operate, typically with the help of researchers and academics. These visions are evaluated by journalists and disseminated to the electorate, who use this information to select representatives. These representatives form a parliament that creates policy, which is then interpreted and executed by the civil service.
Technology has significant implications for every part of this ecosystem. All of the groups and institutions involved are simultaneously having to grapple with digital transformation, for which they are poorly equipped. One of the discoveries that led to the founding of Newspeak House is that there are many people working independently on similar problems. For example:
- how to accurately represent groups of people
- how to manage volunteer networks at scale
- how to deliver agile digital services
- how to maintain a repository
- how to publish
The goal of Newspeak House's programmes are to bring these groups together to identify and solve these common problems. To begin with, there are three:
- Map community activity
- Support organisers
- Community connector fellowships
Map community activity
Whenever there are problems, people come together to talk about them - it's here that we can discover common needs and solutions. All those associated with Newspeak House, be they staff, fellows, members or volunteers, commit to seeking out places where people are discussing political technology and recording them in the Community Map.
Support organisers
Newspeak House supports community organisers with
- free meeting space in Newspeak Hall
- advice and assistance from The Dean and The Fellows
- the material in this handbook, particularly [organisers' guide] and [community map].
Community connector fellowships
Newspeak House operates a residential Fellowship programme. Fellows live at Newspeak House and commit to immersing themselves in a wide variety of relevant communities, making new connections and spreading information. They will also be organisers themselves, creating new channels to expose latent community activity they discover in their exploration, and championing projects with cross-sector relevance.