Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way:
A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract.
The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the project to some sweatshop. The project will exceed its initially planned costs and timeline by a factor of two or more. Once completed, the final product will consist of a clunky frontend allowing the user to fill a form. After the user has completed the form, it will be distributed via e-mail to the low-level clerks. They will print it out and process it by typing the very same information into another software running on their work computers. Print again. Then the user has to schedule an appointment at the local administrative office to get the form signed and stamped in person. Upon completion, the finalized form will be faxed to the next administrative authority in the chain.
The frontend runs on a Raspberry Pi located somewhere in the administrative building. That server will of course be turned off when all administrators have left the building (save energy!), meaning the frontend will only be available during weekdays from 8 am to 1 pm.
German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part. That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns out to be even worse:
As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwork. For some projects you'll be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even worse.
Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g. "cheapest wins".
So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and nothing that remotely works end-to-end.
I actually had to work with two German government agencies, digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them. There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle, but no show stoppers.
I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.
Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy: It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is usally works like this:
A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together.
Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court.
The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures.
Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company.
To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out.
It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken.
Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress.
For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.
For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes. Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is, is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12 random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need to file them and simply not show them to me).
And last time I called the tax office the woman on the phone told me she can't answer a specific question I had because she would need to get my printed out file for that from the cabinet down the hall so I will have to call again later. 27 years. This is where we're at.
Except it won't be a raspberry pi, because one of the people will have convinced upper management that the load MAY be excessively high so it needs to be a mainframe grade high available cluster that will need to be requisitioned first.
Actually the whole government digitalization in Germany isn't as backwards as it seems. In some cases it might be even cutting edge solutions. One positive example is for instance Elster, the tax declarations are paperless since years, saving lots of money for tax consultants.
But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse. Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also positive example like the Corona app where the design was changed after criticism.
That said, I don't think a municipal government has many degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)
I am not sure why you keep calling France "Germany :)
The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the ministry of health and education.
For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start.
Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files. Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used it.
After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same.
I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I have a raspberry pi I do not use.
Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an unrelated application with the actual information from school. It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application every year.
The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but blocking everything else.
Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the deadline.
Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10 years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is explitely stated that the app will not be used for identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be used for?
I am angry because despite my utter love for my country, anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots who have no idea about what a computer is.
I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so that my patriotism can revive.
I believe this is just reality for a lot of Governments with procurement biddings. Just replace here the IT solution with other projects like construction (very profitable or so I hear), mining, office supplies like laptops, and etc.
It's such a cliché that I'm already tired at this point. I'm completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil candidates).
Coming from Estonia it is hard to believe how Germany still requires you to show up at government entities. I thought Germany was a very advanced country. I've done everything online for the past 10 or so years, having to only show up to the police to retrieve my new national id card or passport once it's ready, but every other service is entirely online: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/
1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that fixed"
2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK ≈ $0.093 / €0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N different options, with the most obvious being number one - "Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up"
3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting firms.
4. The consultants start to work with the department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the department/directorate is located.
5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months.
6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT department of the directorate.
7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years, until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting firm wins the new bid.
8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to consolidate products.
In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the single-page form.
The buddy thing (and most of the other aspects) is the same for Switzerland. Additionally, you need to integrate 26 systems built with different technologies, one for each Canton. And some of them won't even have an API but will upload the data using CSV in a FTP folder
When the wind stops, the form goes offline because the Pi uses 100% renewables. Last month the form went offline during a windy period because the neighbours complained about the wind noise the micro-sized windmill was producing: nimby.
Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the early morning, yet here is what I encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Bürgeramt: THIRTY people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened: 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't possible).
There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there need to be metrics against that which have consequences.
> German apartments don’t have apartment numbers. If your name is not on your mailbox, postal workers can’t deliver your mail.
This can also cause delivery failures the other way around - a friend in Germany once sent me a package but didn't bother writing the apartment number on it because she assumed the postman would use my name to find the right box. Instead it got sent right back to Germany. (Austrian bureaucracy is just as unforgiving as German, they just have different rules to follow...)
My sister sent a parcel this week with presents for my daughter's birthday (Happy birthday Ruby!), from Norway to the UK. She filled in all the spoiler customs parts but must have gotten stressed and completely forgot to write our street name and house number. Just my name, post code and country.
3 days later our postie knocked on our door and asked if this parcel was for us!
We don't live in a big city but still it is a town of 20,000 so not that rural where everyone knows you, so I was impressed that they cared enough to try to figure out the address. Granted the post code narrows the search down.
I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post office in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not being 100% by-the-book.
Even within Austria there are differences: i used to live in Innsbruck with an address written 4-51 (meaning street number 4, door 51) and then moved to Vienna, street number 2, door number 14. But in Vienna 2-14 means the big building with street numbers 2 through 14. My building was not big, you could physically see it is street number 2. Well, i never got that letter.
They do (at least sometimes?). They are just not listed anywhere and barely used. I have my number in my contract, and e.g. Vatenfall have it to connect the meter number to the flat number.
This reminds me that recently I, here in the Netherlands, had to send a letter and made the mistake of writing it in the wrong format (to/from), but still the address in where it should be 'from' was really small, and 'to' was really big. To make things clear, I decided to just prefix "To: " and "From: " thinking it would be enough.
Surely enough, 2 days later I received the mail back at my mailbox. Wasted 2 euros ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just needed a single stamp, but they stamped on both so I couldn't even try to reuse it. And I also posted on the mailbox for "other zip code" rather than "close by zip codes".
I don't know if OCR or a person messed up. Well, definitely a person (me)...
"The Bürgeramt also wants to know that you live on the second floor on the right."
Meanwhile in Sweden, the government instituted a nationwide "Dwelling Units Register", where each apartment etc is uniquely numbered.
There is a precise way to number apartments based on the floor number, order of front doors on each floor etc.
Do you live on a steep hill, and have to go down two floors to reach your apartment which has windows facing out the other side of the building? No problem, the numbering system handles that.
Nit: I’d probably avoid saying “you’re done” when nothing was done, the user still needs to deliver it themselves. Saying “done” makes it look like it took care of it all, to a distracted person.
I was trying to think of how to word what has been accomplished (and finished, as far as the website is concerned) and was having a hard time of it, but your idea to just flip the whole thing on its head and say “warning: you’re not done” is just so elegant in its simplicity. Well done (pun intended)!
I hope this starts a trend of digitizing many aspects of the German bureaucracy, official or otherwise.
I've sitting on my hands for the last three months to fill out some paperwork. Additionally, I have to apply for this specific appointment via email a few months in advance and it takes weeks for them to reply and if there's any back and forth, that's a few more weeks.
I love Germany, love the bureaucracy too, I just hate the lack of digitization.
My German passport expired a few years ago and in Berlin the wait time to get a new one was months. Flew to Boston for work (on my American passport), and had the German embassy there do it... in 48 hours. Berlin is peak-level incompetent.
For some U.S. tales, e.g., the challenges of digitizing California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) sign-up process, see the excellent Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy CTO of the United States and now the founder of the non-profit organization Code For America. [0]
(Memorable passage: A civil servant described a complex government policy as having been "vomited" onto an impenetrable sign-up form — for my contract-drafting course, I stole that as the label "barf clause" to describe long, wall-of-words provisions such as the 357-word "Fragment 1" in an example I had students rewrite in class last week. [1])
Bureaucracy in Germany felt to be equal in magnitude to what I was used to from the United States (which is to say: bad), but the character of the bureaucracy's toil in Germany felt incredibly archaic.
I hate to give the author of this tool any despair: if you think managing your Wohnsitzanmeldung is hard, wait until you decide to move away from Germany (to another country) and attempt to sever/cancel your contracts. The cancellation process is nightmare mode.
I'm surprised to hear that. As far as I know, the US doesn't have anything quite as ridiculous as this particular thing, at least not for something routine as moving to a new house.
The last time I had to visit a government office for something routine... well, I actually don't recall when that last was. Most things are done online, with only a small a few requiring me to mail something out as well.
I guess this is also location dependent; a small US town probably has less digitization than a large US city.
While I laud your effort, having had to do such a chore myself[1] you are missing the point of bureaucracy. The whole point is to make work for bureaucrats, and the easier and more pointless it is, the better. There are also other issues remaining, like the fact that you need to involve your landlord[2].
Do you think anyone at the Bürgeramt has any reason to change their easy "just type stuff and press buttons" job to anything resembling real work? Bureaucrats wield political power, at the very least because they vote like anyone else, but they also have more direct influence than average people. Politicians have no incentive to go against them and, as long as they promise that everything will remain the same, they will have the support of the paper-stamper class. The bureaucrats form a distinct social class with their own interests.
If there was any will to solve the problem, it would have been done already, even without technology. Most people think that taxes are levied to pay for services, but it is actually the other way around, bureaucracy is there to justify the taxes.
[1] I had to go to Lichtemberg because it is was the only office with an appointment in a reasonable time frame.
Static PDF or text is a good protection against Murphys law! Having done forms like this I have learned that the hard way. If you want to save state on the server like you mention e.g. QR code, you need to save the form as a PDF or a readable text file and not only as data that is rendered by some frontend framework.
This means you can have multiple people digitally sign or even fill it out, then they can sign the text representation which is easier than a digitally signed PDF or json. You need this because when you update the backend and frontend between logins and there is always somekind of mismatch that will happen. This is especially hard when you have non linear form entries or optional parts like the C/O part in this form, there is always something that slips through the crack in regression testing.
Last time it happend to us someone had upgraded the front end calendar month chooser. It was well tested, but that ment another optional date picker was updated and testing did not happen there. Then organizational and technical Murphys law struck meaning complete data loss for people affected by that.
This is cool. The real trick is getting a Bürgeramt appointment to submit this form. The official portal for that is a punishing exercise in bad UX. Basically, there are very few appointments available, so you have to keep refreshing the calendar page and hope that one of the dates is linked. It took me 2 weeks of opening that page multiple times a day and refreshing over and over. It gets hammered by bots as well and if you don't click the link fast enough it will disappear. There are multiple bots available on Github and I think there is also a Chrome extension now. But, they all do the same thing (refresh the page) and will get your IP banned if you run them without long timers. I tried all of it and the only thing that worked was having a Favorite in mobile Safari that I opened whenever I had idle time. I finally got one in a coffee shop and nearly knocked the table over because I was so happy.
Germany seems to have similar sorts of federal / state / municipal government issues and other bureaucratic constraints as the US. And, this article makes it clear it has the same sorts of opportunities for improvement.
Maybe it's time to establish Programmieren für Deutschland as a parallel org to Code for America.
It shows the absolute inaptitude of our Government if for all the hundreds of millions that they spend on the "digital transformation of the Government" every year, they cannot hire one guy who does exactly what Nicolas did here.
I used to work in a small company that digitized paper/pdf forms. We used json schema forms in React which allowed us to recreate complicated schemas along with the conditionals to show/hide sections and do complicated calculations. The forms would be rendered on the fly based on the underlying schema.
The main customers were from the local government who wanted to digitize and increase the efficiency of dealing with some forms. I mean we are talking about forms that are 5-50 pages long with just a few people who know how everything is supposed to work. In some cases a processing of a form would be extremely expensive. The product saved a lot of public money.
But it is extremely hard to sell to such orgs, requires tight collaboration to understand all of the edge cases. Not only that but it is necessary to interact with gov before they even start a procurement process, not just because you want to increase the chances of winning but because they just do not know what is possible to begin with and how to ask for it. Also, there is some competition to outbid the others which sounds like a good thing but it also reduces the chances that a solution will be transformative as it is quite hard to spell it out what you want so that it is of good quality.
The next time you complain about poor digital services remember that it is hard to compete in that field and the cheapest almost always wins. This does not mean the best though. Also, I encourage you to try and bid on some local projects to improve our shitty old systems.
[+] [-] 2716057|2 years ago|reply
Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way:
A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the project to some sweatshop. The project will exceed its initially planned costs and timeline by a factor of two or more. Once completed, the final product will consist of a clunky frontend allowing the user to fill a form. After the user has completed the form, it will be distributed via e-mail to the low-level clerks. They will print it out and process it by typing the very same information into another software running on their work computers. Print again. Then the user has to schedule an appointment at the local administrative office to get the form signed and stamped in person. Upon completion, the finalized form will be faxed to the next administrative authority in the chain.
The frontend runs on a Raspberry Pi located somewhere in the administrative building. That server will of course be turned off when all administrators have left the building (save energy!), meaning the frontend will only be available during weekdays from 8 am to 1 pm.
[+] [-] nforgerit|2 years ago|reply
As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwork. For some projects you'll be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even worse. Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g. "cheapest wins".
So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and nothing that remotely works end-to-end.
[+] [-] Jean-Philipe|2 years ago|reply
I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.
[+] [-] nisa|2 years ago|reply
A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together.
Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court.
The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures.
Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company.
To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out.
It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken.
Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress.
For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.
[+] [-] Escapado|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw71649|2 years ago|reply
But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse. Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also positive example like the Corona app where the design was changed after criticism.
That said, I don't think a municipal government has many degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|2 years ago|reply
The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the ministry of health and education.
For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start.
Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files. Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used it.
After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same.
I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I have a raspberry pi I do not use.
Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an unrelated application with the actual information from school. It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application every year. The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but blocking everything else.
Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the deadline.
Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10 years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is explitely stated that the app will not be used for identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be used for?
I am angry because despite my utter love for my country, anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots who have no idea about what a computer is.
I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so that my patriotism can revive.
[+] [-] jskherman|2 years ago|reply
It's such a cliché that I'm already tired at this point. I'm completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil candidates).
At least in Germany, it's a lot less blatant.
[+] [-] askonomm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|2 years ago|reply
1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that fixed"
2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK ≈ $0.093 / €0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N different options, with the most obvious being number one - "Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up"
3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting firms.
4. The consultants start to work with the department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the department/directorate is located.
5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months.
6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT department of the directorate.
7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years, until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting firm wins the new bid.
8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to consolidate products.
In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the single-page form.
[+] [-] jcarrano|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brap|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bafe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rad_gruchalski|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hit8run|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bissness|2 years ago|reply
Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the early morning, yet here is what I encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Bürgeramt: THIRTY people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened: 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't possible).
There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there need to be metrics against that which have consequences.
[+] [-] FearNotDaniel|2 years ago|reply
This can also cause delivery failures the other way around - a friend in Germany once sent me a package but didn't bother writing the apartment number on it because she assumed the postman would use my name to find the right box. Instead it got sent right back to Germany. (Austrian bureaucracy is just as unforgiving as German, they just have different rules to follow...)
[+] [-] flurdy|2 years ago|reply
3 days later our postie knocked on our door and asked if this parcel was for us!
We don't live in a big city but still it is a town of 20,000 so not that rural where everyone knows you, so I was impressed that they cared enough to try to figure out the address. Granted the post code narrows the search down.
I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post office in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not being 100% by-the-book.
[+] [-] croisillon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tenoke|2 years ago|reply
They do (at least sometimes?). They are just not listed anywhere and barely used. I have my number in my contract, and e.g. Vatenfall have it to connect the meter number to the flat number.
[+] [-] TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henvic|2 years ago|reply
Surely enough, 2 days later I received the mail back at my mailbox. Wasted 2 euros ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just needed a single stamp, but they stamped on both so I couldn't even try to reuse it. And I also posted on the mailbox for "other zip code" rather than "close by zip codes".
I don't know if OCR or a person messed up. Well, definitely a person (me)...
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|2 years ago|reply
I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer and easier to fill.
[+] [-] fl7305|2 years ago|reply
Meanwhile in Sweden, the government instituted a nationwide "Dwelling Units Register", where each apartment etc is uniquely numbered.
There is a precise way to number apartments based on the floor number, order of front doors on each floor etc.
Do you live on a steep hill, and have to go down two floors to reach your apartment which has windows facing out the other side of the building? No problem, the numbering system handles that.
https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/real-property/property-inform...
https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastigh...
[+] [-] kharak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|2 years ago|reply
Can't say that ever happened to me.
[+] [-] corbezzoli|2 years ago|reply
I’d say the opposite: “Warning, you’re not done!”
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iknownothow|2 years ago|reply
I've sitting on my hands for the last three months to fill out some paperwork. Additionally, I have to apply for this specific appointment via email a few months in advance and it takes weeks for them to reply and if there's any back and forth, that's a few more weeks.
I love Germany, love the bureaucracy too, I just hate the lack of digitization.
[+] [-] lippihom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dctoedt|2 years ago|reply
(Memorable passage: A civil servant described a complex government policy as having been "vomited" onto an impenetrable sign-up form — for my contract-drafting course, I stole that as the label "barf clause" to describe long, wall-of-words provisions such as the 357-word "Fragment 1" in an example I had students rewrite in class last week. [1])
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D...
[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1
[+] [-] schacon|2 years ago|reply
Every new Berliner feels this pain, but the worse part is getting an appointment. Not just for your Anmeldung, but for anything you need to do here.
[+] [-] nicbou|2 years ago|reply
For the appointment, there's this: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
[+] [-] gabeidx|2 years ago|reply
The other day when I needed this exact form, I realized how much time it was saving me and donated some to show appreciation.
Thanks for your great work @nicbou!
[+] [-] matttproud|2 years ago|reply
I hate to give the author of this tool any despair: if you think managing your Wohnsitzanmeldung is hard, wait until you decide to move away from Germany (to another country) and attempt to sever/cancel your contracts. The cancellation process is nightmare mode.
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
The last time I had to visit a government office for something routine... well, I actually don't recall when that last was. Most things are done online, with only a small a few requiring me to mail something out as well.
I guess this is also location dependent; a small US town probably has less digitization than a large US city.
[+] [-] nicbou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durnygbur|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jcarrano|2 years ago|reply
Do you think anyone at the Bürgeramt has any reason to change their easy "just type stuff and press buttons" job to anything resembling real work? Bureaucrats wield political power, at the very least because they vote like anyone else, but they also have more direct influence than average people. Politicians have no incentive to go against them and, as long as they promise that everything will remain the same, they will have the support of the paper-stamper class. The bureaucrats form a distinct social class with their own interests.
If there was any will to solve the problem, it would have been done already, even without technology. Most people think that taxes are levied to pay for services, but it is actually the other way around, bureaucracy is there to justify the taxes.
[1] I had to go to Lichtemberg because it is was the only office with an appointment in a reasonable time frame.
[2] There are people selling registrations now.
[+] [-] raister|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emj|2 years ago|reply
This means you can have multiple people digitally sign or even fill it out, then they can sign the text representation which is easier than a digitally signed PDF or json. You need this because when you update the backend and frontend between logins and there is always somekind of mismatch that will happen. This is especially hard when you have non linear form entries or optional parts like the C/O part in this form, there is always something that slips through the crack in regression testing.
Last time it happend to us someone had upgraded the front end calendar month chooser. It was well tested, but that ment another optional date picker was updated and testing did not happen there. Then organizational and technical Murphys law struck meaning complete data loss for people affected by that.
[+] [-] ogou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OliverJones|2 years ago|reply
Germany seems to have similar sorts of federal / state / municipal government issues and other bureaucratic constraints as the US. And, this article makes it clear it has the same sorts of opportunities for improvement.
Maybe it's time to establish Programmieren für Deutschland as a parallel org to Code for America.
[+] [-] konschubert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheybags|2 years ago|reply
If we're talking about actual reform, the obvious suggestion is to skip the entire notion of registration, no?
[+] [-] sublimefire|2 years ago|reply
The main customers were from the local government who wanted to digitize and increase the efficiency of dealing with some forms. I mean we are talking about forms that are 5-50 pages long with just a few people who know how everything is supposed to work. In some cases a processing of a form would be extremely expensive. The product saved a lot of public money.
But it is extremely hard to sell to such orgs, requires tight collaboration to understand all of the edge cases. Not only that but it is necessary to interact with gov before they even start a procurement process, not just because you want to increase the chances of winning but because they just do not know what is possible to begin with and how to ask for it. Also, there is some competition to outbid the others which sounds like a good thing but it also reduces the chances that a solution will be transformative as it is quite hard to spell it out what you want so that it is of good quality.
The next time you complain about poor digital services remember that it is hard to compete in that field and the cheapest almost always wins. This does not mean the best though. Also, I encourage you to try and bid on some local projects to improve our shitty old systems.