A Bureaucracy of Unlearning: Speed, Structures, Democracy

Sascha is an author and social entrepreneur who has led transformative work in innovation in government procurement around the world, reinventing how cities use their resources to better serve the public. More than 130 global cities used Citymart, the organization that Sascha founded. Sascha trained as an architect in London and has worked with communities, social entrepreneurs and governments in cities in fifty countries. Sascha has been a New America Fellow, is an Ashoka Fellow and a non-resident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He published a book called The Slow Lane, about how big change doesn’t come from quick fixes, but thoughtful, slow work.

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.

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.

Indy Johar is an architect, co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and most recently Dark Matter, Studio Master at AA.

Indy, on behalf of 00, has co-founded multiple social ventures from Impact Hub Westminster to Impact Hub Birmingham, along with working with large global multinationals & institutions to support their transition to a positive Systems Economy. He has also co-led research projects such as The Compendium for the Civic Economy, whilst supporting several 00 explorations/experiments including the wikihouse.cc, opendesk.cc. Indy is a non executive director of WikiHouse Foundation & RIBA Trustee and Advisor to Mayor of London on Good Growth.

Most recently he has founded Dark Matter – a field laboratory focused on radically redesigning the bureaucratic & institutional infrastructure of our cities, regions and towns for a more democratic, distributed great transition.

Dark Matter work with institutions around the world, from UNDP (Global), McConnell (Canada), TFL, GLA (London) to Bloxhub (Copenhagen)

He has taught, lecturedat various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; Architectural Association, University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.

Caroline Paulick-Thiel is a strategic designer and expert in responsible innovation. Trained in Design (BA) and Public Policy (MPP), she has extensive experience in developing and leading participatory processes to address public challenges. Since 2015, she is the director of Politics for Tomorrow (politicsfortomorrow.eu), a non-partisan initiative that promotes public transformation and collaborates with political-administrative institutions from the local to the highest federal level in Germany. The current flagship project addresses the period between 2022-2025 as a drastic intervention space – especially for the strategic alignment of organisational routines (10×100.cc).

Since 2020, Caroline has been supporting the Senate Chancellery of Berlin and CityLAB as part of the Smart City core team in the co-creative design of the new digital strategy (strategie.smart-city-berlin.de). For the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, she initiated the Academy, which has provided space for experiential learning and creative responses to public issues since the event’s conception in 2018. In addition, she is a member of various advisory boards and teaches “Public Design” in different disciplines.

After studying art and architectural history at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, Monika worked in London’s galleries and service sector. In 2014, she returned to Lithuania as part of the ‘Create Lithuania’ programme and worked on attracting and retaining international students, the staffing policy of the National Library and the attractiveness of the civil service. She also completed the MA in Politics and Media at the Institute of International Relations and Politics at Vilnius University. In 2016, he joined ‘Create Lithuania’ programme management team and has been working mainly on the topics of talent attraction and public sector innovation.

After finishing studies in Lithuania, South Korea and Switzerland Ieva was working in the metal processing industry. However, in 2016 she joined public sector programme “Create Lithuania”. It led her to work with the national strategic management system reform, afterwards she continued work with different projects (improving the migration system based on the business’s needs, improving integration possibilities for foreigners, etc). In 2021 Ieva joined the management team of Create Lithuania. Currently she helps to form, plan and implement projects.