Niba

Some time ago, I started building an AI negotiation coach. A negotiation coach is someone who helps a person prep for a negotiation via the sokratic method and, on a limited basis, expert advice. It follows the principle "I am an expert in negotiation, but you are an expertin YOUR negotiation."

I never finished this, as detailed below. I offer this project up to anyone who is interested in building it, or some version of it, or building a completely different thing inspired by it. I can tell you how to do negotiation coaching, and advise you on the lessons I learned so far about building with LLMs.

I abandoned this project after realizing two things:

1. Building things is not a priority for me (The hard part isn't building, it's testing and quality control!)
2. I was not entirely sure how to do negotiation coaching

Since then, two things have happened

1. I have begun doing negotiation coaching, and developed a practice
2. AI has gotten a lot better

The URL below shows the half-baked app. It shows the basic logic and flow, but it uses old models, has no quality control and I honestly don't even remember what process it's attempting to follow.

https://planning.negotiation.solutions/

Very much in the spirit of this programme, I vibe coded the platform you're currently using over the last couple of months with one of the fellows from last year. It's fully multi-tenant, so if you fancy setting up your own college now you can - I recommend it!

Scope-wise, the idea is for this platform to be the primary way that you engage with faculty, not a home for all of the communication in the programme; that's for you to make for yourselves, and it's why only faculty can post here. Otherwise though, let me know if you have any feedback or ideas!

There is growing appetite for alternative ways of designing social media to give users ways to escape X, Facebook, TikTok and the like - and not just in the political technology community. In some quarters, particularly in Europe, there is growing political attention to this topic with high profile initiatives like rebuild.net (championed by former EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager) and #SaveOurSocials. Bluesky in particular is being used and discussed ever more widely.

There are various theories of change for how these platforms could displace existing Big Tech and/or protect democracy - many of which are perhaps over-optimistic and need to be challenged and refined.

I can discuss with Fellows about some of the core innovations and methods underlying alternative social media design - such as interoperability and federation, "public value" AI systems, pro-social design, and middleware.

I can also discuss framing questions around the hoped-for benefits of the design. Who do you hope uses it, and how, in order to achieve your desired change (and is that realistic)? What is your conception of your user groups and their needs, and does that need refining or researching? What existing tech, if any, are you hoping to displace - and if so, how?

Some material for starters:

https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/

https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-platform-power-making-middleware-work/

https://www.prosocialdesign.org/

https://www.oliver-marsh.com/sideways-looks-35-a-better-internet-part-1-also-hayfever/

https://www.oliver-marsh.com/a-better-internet-part-2-also-mermaids/

Machine learning and AI algorithms are used for decisions that impact people's lives, such as assessing insurance risk, credit approval, and screening job applications. And these algorithms can sometimes discriminate against protected groups.

I am particularly concerned about proxy discrimination, where seemingly innocuous characteristics (e.g. postcode, size of car engine, etc) act as stand-ins for protected characteristics (e.g. race, sex). Even when protected characteristics are excluded from models, they can still discriminate via the proxies.

As a professional in economics and causal inference, I break this problem down through the lens of causal analysis. By understanding how inputs causally impact a model's outputs, we can assess if and when discrimination arises.

Further reading:

• Implementing Anti-Discrimination Policies in Statistical Profiling Models (2011)
• Reuters: Insight - Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women (2018)
• Discrimination-Free Insurance Pricing (2021)

Organising events in Newspeak Hall is one of the great perks of studying at Newspeak House; a fully equipped event space that holds up to ~100 people. It's hosted thousands of events for the college, everything from meetups to conferences, unconferences, dinners, hackathons, parties, exhibitions, lectures, co-working, debates, book launches, concerts, world cafes, fishbowls, screenings, workshops, and roundtables.

If you're interested in designing something together, I am happy to offer advice and support with event design, facilitation, logistics, catering, promotion, community strategy, and almost anything else you might need. Don’t worry if you don’t have a very clear idea of what you’d like to do yet - we can figure that out together.

I also manage the diary of the hall; it's a busy programme of community events, private hires, and events organised by fellows and faculty. As Fellowship Candidates, you will book dates through your agent. You might not be able to secure a specific exact date, but usually we can find a slot. Typically single day events are booked around a month in advance.

Finally, events should always be considered as part of a wider community strategy. I've written a short guide on how I typically approach this, though community-building is a fast-moving field with many open questions...

Developed by military practitioners over two hundred years, wargaming is a practice used regularly by a range of organisations and actors, from the British Army to Greenpeace. What was originally used for training Prussian military officers in the 19th century, giving them a safe space to experiment, practice and make mistakes without serious consequences, has developed as an analytical, experiential and educational tool deployed for an array of contexts, far beyond its original scope. 

For activists, campaigners, civil society groups and those trying to change the world, wargaming offers a crucial practice, one that is becoming increasingly valuable as the legal, financial and human costs of political action increase. Wargaming provides capacity-poor civil society groups, campaigns and activists, a safe-to-fail space to test their assumptions, red team their plans and train organisers, rather than learning on the fly in public.

Wargaming for social change is an emerging field with few practitioners and a limited history. In the UK, examples of what can be done include the situationist ludic-science group Class Wargames, who have prepared wargames to simulate a run on the pound, activist training games focused on negotiating compromise under stress, running a newly elected radical council and games for trade union organising. Red Plenty Games have also produced similar games, such as Parts Per Million and the Social Strike Game.

Meanwhile, in the US and Hungary, political simulations such as 2020 Transition Integrity Project and the 2026 Hungarian Election Simulation have been used to inform pro-democracy coalition strategy in authoritarian contexts. The field of civil society wargaming is as yet still largely undeveloped, which presents a real and exciting opportunity to shape a new field and practice.

I have been playing, designing and facilitating wargames, serious games and recreational megagames for over a decade as a member of Class Wargames and now as an Associate Partner at serious games consultancy Stone Paper Scissors. I can help fellows design and facilitate wargames and serious games and provide guidance on their use. I can also teach the design and adjudication skills so you can run your own, or together as a cohort.

Note - this topic differs from "Building power through play". Whilst those games are focused on communication, persuasion and campaigning, these are for educational, analytical or experiential purposes.

As a Residential Fellow of the first cohort of the Newspeak House Fellowship back in 2016, I have maintained a connection and presence in the Newspeak House space for over 10 years. I lived in the house for 15 months between 2016 and 2017, through a very politically turbulent year marked by the EU Referendum and the 2017 General Election. As a Fellow and member of the NH Faculty, I have engaged with and seen how various cohorts have spent their time in the space. I can offer my thoughts on how best to engage with the Fellowship and how to use your time most effectively in this space.

As the cohorts have changed, so too has the Fellowship, but the fundamentals remain the same - these include: the importance of gathering and convening your communities in the space. Using the building to run events and experiment. Actively managing the community and catalysing opportunities for diverse groups of people and organisations to mix, meet, build friendships and work together. Invite your people, invite your networks to the Ration Club weekly community dinner. Attend as many community events in the college as you can manage and discover new people and practices. Invite communities to run events in the space, introduce them to others and volunteer to help them run events in the space. Immerse yourself in and help strengthen the networks of those within your cohort, the wider Fellowship and existing communities and networking in Newspeak House. Use the space - it’s yours, want to run a conference, speed networking, festival or party - go right ahead. Ground your thinking, experiments and projects in the problems and challenges of existing political and civic communities. Actively reach out to faculty, we’re here to talk things through, assist and get stuck in - invite us.

Be political - Newspeak House is a space for working to build power, technology and the means to build a better world. Be bold, adaptive and experimental in your approach and act with an abundance mindset. You are here to collaborate together as a fellowship, not work in isolation - incubate each other's ideas and be a critical friend. The fellowship is an opportunity for you to explore, dip into things, and draw upon community resource - before contributing to broader civic and political technology impact through your end of year prototypes and projects. As Fellows of Newspeak House, you are stewards of a community resource - water it, nurture it.

If any of this sounds useful, get in touch. Your time here is what you make of it and remember, have fun.

The AI adoption story in the nonprofit and education sectors is nothing like the tech-industry one: budgets are tiny, risk tolerance is low, safeguarding is paramount, and the gap between staff already using ChatGPT personally and organisations with any actual policy is enormous. I watch this from both sides – building AI products used in hundreds of schools, and advising charity leaders on what to actually do – and regularly brief nonprofit working groups on the state of play.

What's worth knowing: teacher AI adoption is far ahead of school policy; the DfE has a framework worth reading even outside education because it's had to be ahead of the curve in official responses; charity adoption is high at the individual level and thin at the organisational level; and the biggest practical wins are boring – drafting, admin, resource adaptation – not moonshots. The interesting design question is building AI tools for sectors where trust must be earned structurally: what data you touch, what you never touch, and what stays human.

Reading/links

• DfE: Generative AI in education – the official UK position
• Charity Digital Skills Report – the best annual data on charity-sector adoption
• Chalk – our teacher tool; a live case study in earning trust in schools

Like every emerging paradigm before it, the space sector seems to inspire a mix of optimism for the future and deep concern that it will entrench or overwhelm the laundry list of problems we already have. For others (perhaps most), it feels like an irrelevant distraction. We often hear something along the lines of "what about all the problems here on Earth?" But that framing is a false choice. Earth and space systems are linked. And what happens in space will shape life back home, from the integrity of our democracies to our ability to address issues like climate change and inequality. Space is also a rare thing: a literal and figurative vacuum in which to test new ways of living, working, and making decisions together. It is, in many ways, the perfect place to test truly innovative civic tech.

Key Question/s: What does space actually need from civic tech, and what can civic tech learn by treating space as a proving ground for systems built from scratch?

The focus of a lot of my recent work, from a Lunar Governance sim to a participatory space policy initiative and current academic research on “Democracy at a Distance.” I’ve also worked with organisations like the Open Lunar Foundation, LunARC, MoonDAO and more recently the Planetary Society, who are all supporting different kinds of civic purpose in space. With so much going on out of public view, there’s a huge opportunity being lost to design civic infrastructure for a domain that doesn’t yet have entrenched systems. The feedback loop between off-world experiment and on-world implementation isn’t limited to science.

Moderation is more than the sum of the decisions made by community management teams on social media platforms — it is ultimately the social contract that upholds norms within online spaces, and with that comes a great degree of power to define goals and borders of those spaces. In a sense, moderation is the politics of the online domain.

This topic is about the various approaches to moderation, including Bluesky’s composable moderation via 3rd party labellers, and the Fediverse’s approach of independently moderated islands that are part of a decentralised ecosystem.

This topic examines the most basic unit of human collectivity beyond the individual. How do we organize intimate interdependence? What can alternative kinship structures teach us about care, resource-sharing, and decision-making at small scales? The family is often the laboratory for collective practices.

• Lewis, Sophie. Abolish the Family. Chapter 1: "But I Love My Family!"

• Helen Hester "Promethean Labors and Domestic Realism"