Democracy beyond elections - UNDEF funding

All Hands On will be the documentary partner for a project that is sponsored by a United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) grant, and which will be implemented by Australia’s newDemocracy.

The project’s full title is Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections, and there are three main deliverables. The first is a handbook for “Democracy Beyond Elections”, which will act as an instruction manual for the design and administration radical, deliberative democratic processes. The second is a series of three representative pilot projects which will show the range of issues that well-designed mini-publics or citizen assemblies can be used to address. And the third component is a documentary film about one of those pilot projects. All Hands On will produce this documentary. As Iain Walker, Executive Director of newDemocracy, says:

We’ll be completing a documentary on one of those projects. We know that there are those, particularly in elected office, who are going to want to see not just what it looks like on paper, but who are the people, how do they work together, what are their experiences of the project?

Iain Walker, Executive Director, newDemocracy

Iain can be seen in conversation with UNDEF’s Annika Savill in this newDemocracy announcement of the project.

So at the time of writing we know that we’ll be making a film with UNDEF funding, but we don’t know where and we don’t know the exact nature of the deliberative process that we’ll be documenting, nor the issues that its participants will be tackling. Current status: grateful, excited, curious.