About us

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival celebrates outstanding innovation in the public sector and its contribution to a better, more sustainable, and more just world. It brings together bureaucrats and their allies – those who, at all levels of government, fight for the common good and make a difference.

Our mission: We want to cultivate a more positive attitude towards the public sector as well as more drive and eagerness to experiment withinin the public sector.

We do so in two ways: First, we organize the annual Creative Bureaucracy Festival – this year in its third edition and, for the first time, completely online. Second, we want to become the digital library for bureaucracy at its best – a platform for good ideas and creative minds, open for business year-round.

This year’s festival is the third iteration of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival: We’re already looking back at and building on two festivals packed with ideas for making bureaucracy better. Since 2018, we are giving public sector innovators and their allies a platform for exchange, inspiration, and support – both at the festival and year-round online.

The initiative is built on the decades-long work and international network of the British urbanist Charles Landry – author of, amongst other works, “The Creative City” (2000) and co-author of “The Creative Bureaucracy & its radical common sense” (2017). When Charles met the publicist and entrepreneur Sebastian Turner, our story took its course: An idea turned into a festival.