Funding the Commons Forum Berlin

Johanna Sieben is the Director of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, a platform that highlights creative approaches to public sector work and brings together people from government, civil society, and beyond to explore how bureaucracy can be a driver of democratic and societal change.
Since 2022, she has led the festival’s development, helping to shape its programme, partnerships, and strategic direction. The festival is based in Berlin and draws more than 2,000 participants each year, with contributors from around the world. It provides a stage for both high-level public sector leaders and those working behind the scenes — aiming to showcase a broad range of perspectives on how government can work differently and better.
Johanna’s work focuses on creating spaces for exchange across silos and hierarchies, and on surfacing public sector innovations that often remain invisible. She is particularly interested in the everyday work of implementation and in the creative capacities that already exist within public administrations. Her aim is not to idealise bureaucracy, but to ask what becomes possible when we take its role seriously as a democratic infrastructure.
Johanna has worked with public institutions, independent initiatives, and cross-sector collaborations — always with a focus on building bridges between disciplines and making complex work more accessible.
Johanna studied Cultural Studies and brings both analytical and practical perspectives to her role. She believes that public institutions can and should be places of care, learning, and experimentation — and that creative bureaucracy is not a contradiction, but a reflection of the public sector’s potential to adapt and respond to today’s challenges.
At the festival and in her broader work, Johanna seeks to connect people who are working towards more imaginative, inclusive, and democratic forms of governance.