Reimagining the Building Blocks of Democracy

Elina Makri, Achilles Tsaltas

2023 English Imagination & Creativity Organisational Culture & Governance

How can we make liberal democracies more resilient in meeting 21st century challenges?

Could a new Global Centre for Democracy help us to enact such change at the necessary speed to address our current crises?

This session dives into these questions and more. It explores the specific policy recommendations required to reshape our bureaucracies for 21st century needs, and reflects on how we could spark grassroots movements to exert pressure on policy makers to adopt and implement such changes faster.

Elina Makri

General Manager, The Democracy & Culture Foundation

Elina Makri has worked as an independent, cross-border journalist and co-founder of media projects across Europe. Since 2014, she has worked closely with tech professionals on the creation of technological tools. She is the co-founder of Alpha + Omega, a data analysis platform to help math-challenged journalists and other professionals, as well as the co-founder of Oikomedia, a platform designed to help cross-border collaborations of media professionals.

Prior to joining the Democracy & Culture Foundation, she was a Marie Curie fellow working at the intersection of cognitive science and journalism, researching the role of conscious and unconscious mental processing in data journalism. She has conducted data investigations about water mismanagement as well as international migration.

Born in Athens, Elina studied law in France, international and European law in Belgium and has received training on data journalism and computational reporting at the Columbia Journalism School.

Achilles Tsaltas

President, The Democracy & Culture Foundation

With an impressive background in publishing and circulation spanning over 30 years, Achilles Tsaltas has worked in pivotal roles for companies such as News Corporation, The International Herald Tribune and, since 2014, as vice president of international conferences at The New York Times. It is here that he launched the Athens Democracy Forum and Art for Tomorrow and developed a passion for democracy and culture.

In 2019, Achilles founded the Democracy & Culture Foundation to organize and host the two conferences he launched during his tenure with The Times, while continuing to maintain close links with the paper in terms of curating and moderating the events.

With the future growth and development of the two conferences secured under the nonprofit structure of the Foundation, Achilles and his team have a mission to make the events more consequential, driving impact by partnering with organizations to turn solutions into action.

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Elina Makri, Achilles Tsaltas

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