Campaign Lab Summer Hack Night!

Back after re-scheduling due to the heatwave! london has a housing crisis, the data to understand it, and argue for fixing it already exists House London is a one-day data sprint hosted at Newspeak House bringing together data scientists, urban planners, and policy thinkers to do one thing. take london's planning and housing data, and tell the most compelling and well-evidenced story you can with it, no toy problems 🧸 £150 cash prize to the best analysis, as voted by your fellow hackers this is House London #0, the first in a monthly series. £500 in prizes across this event and its follow-ups in September and October, voted by your fellow hackers just real datasets, real inquiry and real answers. we're shaping policy briefs, dashboards and models that could actually shape how london gets built 1 august 2026 | newspeak house, london | free entry

A meetup for members of the rationalist diaspora, including but not limited to LessWrong, Astral Codex Ten, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement. You don’t have to identify as a rationalist to attend: if you think we seem like interesting people you’d like to hang out with, welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited. This time we'll have Robin Hanson as a guest, giving a talk on Cultural Drift: "Our Big Oops - How We Broke Humanity’s Superpower, And Can’t See How To Fix It." Hanson is an American economist and author. He is associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Hanson is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute’s Foresight Exchange and DARPA’s FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule): used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point (where Hanson was Chief Scientist), and has conducted research on signalling. He also proposed the Great Filter hypothesis. Doors open 6pm, talk + Q&A 7pm-8pm, socializing from 8pm

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones. Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop! 🙂 All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left. What is Campaign Lab? Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning. Any questions, thoughts or ideas - do get in touch and say hi! noam@campaignlab.uk

Qualia Research Institute is non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings. This is a meetup for the community around QRI in London. Chris Percy (twitter), a researcher with QRI, is going to give a talk: “What is Valence (hedonic tone)?” Chris's talk in his words The 'hard problem' of consciousness has had plenty of attention: why should any physical or functional phenomenon be accompanied by experience? This talk argues that a parallel 'hard problem' of valence has been largely ignored: Why should any experience feel good or bad? QRI has a conceptual solution in the form of the Symmetry Theory of Valence, originally developed by Mike Johnson (see also: 2020 overview). But it's far from a complete theory. It's not even clear what requirements a theory of valence should account for. Or how we would assess the quality of those accounts across competing theories. What even are the alternatives to a Symmetry Theory? This talk will discuss these alternatives, suggesting that none of them satisfy an initial set of requirements that we'll describe. The question is, how do we get from here towards a more complete answer? More than a talk, we want to invite you to a discussion. The talk is based on a draft paper that Chris Percy and Asher Soryl first started with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson (QRI's President & Director of Research) on in 2024. Our progress on this particular paper seems to have stalled! We need fresh ideas and challenging eyes. Please come along and help. Unconference The talk by Chris will be followed by unconference, a participant-driven conference with write-in schedule on the wall. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space. We had several unconferences previously, so might've been to one already — this one will have a similar format. The unconference topics don't have to be related to the topic of the talk — they can be any of the general QRI topics: consciousness research, psychedelic

PaperJam Game Jam is like a book club, but instead of a book we play a videogame, and as well as discussing it, we make paper prototypes inspired by it! This time, we’re looking at Live Scream: "Navigate a haunted forest with chat as your eyes. You don't see anything, but chat does. They see something, in the distance. Are you sure you want to know?" All are welcome, but some basic familiarity with boardgames or game design will be helpful. It generally goes like this: Arrive at the event having played Live Scream. If you don’t find time to play, don’t let that stop you from coming. We discuss the game: Why is it fun? What are the systems in it and how do they work? etc We eat dinner together: there are a dozen places on the street that do takeaway of various cuisines. We try and make paper prototypes inspired by the game. A selection of materials are provided, but feel free to bring your own. We play and discuss each others’ prototypes.

What happens when every council agenda, committee paper and meeting minute becomes searchable? Our partners at Poteris have developed a powerful new scraper that collects data from council websites across the UK, creating an unprecedented dataset of council minutes, agendas, reports and other public information. Now it's time to build with it. Join Campaign Lab for a hack day exploring what becomes possible when this information is easily accessible. We'll bring together developers, designers, campaigners, researchers and civic technologists to prototype tools that can help improve local democracy and political campaigning. Potential ideas include: Tools that make local government more transparent Better ways to monitor council decisions and policy changes Campaigning and research tools built on council activity AI-powered search and summarisation Dashboards, alerts and data visualisations New civic technology that helps residents, journalists and campaigners engage with local government Whether you're interested in coding, product design, data science, UX, politics or simply have a good idea, there'll be opportunities to contribute. We'll begin with a short introduction to the dataset and its capabilities before breaking into teams to explore ideas and build prototypes together. Who should attend? Software developers Data scientists Designers Campaigners and organisers Civic technologists Local government enthusiasts Anyone excited by the potential of open public data Come and help turn a remarkable new dataset into tools that strengthen civic participation and democratic accountability.