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BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

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Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#11

Post by jansan »

Arathorn wrote: post #6
royjacobs wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could provide some initial arguments why they should?

Mattermost is great, but it's not decentralised, it doesn't federate, it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's not based on an open standard, it's vendor-locked to Mattermost, only has one usable client implementation, and is rather aggressively open core (unlike the BundesMessenger distribution which is entirely apache-licensed FOSS). I'm also not sure that whether deployments easily scale up to million+ users like a big…

Ah, that's why they did not invest in mattermost.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#12

Post by pimeys »

mhd wrote: post #8

As mentioned in the article, the German health services already adopted Matrix for their "TI-Messenger", which is supposed to make secure communication between health care professionals easier. Or, well, possible at all. Right now this is a morass of "don't mention anything private" emails, letters and faxes. I'm surprised that ticker tape isn't involved somehow. But don't worry, if German health services doing somet…

And we still have to walk to the doctor's office to get that prescription for the same Asthma medicine you always get every three months. Instead of just getting it electronically to the nearest pharmacy. Now we have to queue up in the doctor's office with sick people, wait for them to print and sign a red piece of paper and then walk to the pharmacy.

Maybe this changes too in the future?

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#13

Post by Traubenfuchs »

Arathorn wrote: post #6
royjacobs wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could provide some initial arguments why they should?

Mattermost is great, but it's not decentralised, it doesn't federate, it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's not based on an open standard, it's vendor-locked to Mattermost, only has one usable client implementation, and is rather aggressively open core (unlike the BundesMessenger distribution which is entirely apache-licensed FOSS). I'm also not sure that whether deployments easily scale up to million+ users like a big…

Thank you, explains everything!

I thought it was completely open source.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#16

Post by kapep »

pimeys wrote: post #12
mhd wrote: post #8

As mentioned in the article, the German health services already adopted Matrix for their "TI-Messenger", which is supposed to make secure communication between health care professionals easier. Or, well, possible at all. Right now this is a morass of "don't mention anything private" emails, letters and faxes. I'm surprised that ticker tape isn't involved somehow. But don't worry, if German health services doing somet…

And we still have to walk to the doctor's office to get that prescription for the same Asthma medicine you always get every three months. Instead of just getting it electronically to the nearest pharmacy. Now we have to queue up in the doctor's office with sick people, wait for them to print and sign a red piece of paper and then walk to the pharmacy. Maybe this changes too in the future?

> Maybe this changes too in the future?

E-Rezept was supposed to launch in 2022 but has been postponed until mid 2023. Some regions already tested it. It didn't work out well, so some regions dropped out of the testing phase. I'm pretty sure it won't work well at launch and we will have to rely on printed prescriptions for quite some time until all pharmacies and doctors use the new system.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#18

Post by gillesjacobs »

MoSattler wrote: post #7

I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.

In this case, the slow digitisation had a good side-effect of allowing a open, decentralized encrypted messaging protocol to be maturely adopted.

Not much consolance for the German people, who still have to deal with a lot of paper administration but a happy accident nonetheless.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#19

Post by AstixAndBelix »

aliqot wrote: post #14

Quoted post unavailable.

why would you want to see the screenshots of an application used by the German military which is basically a fork of another app with plenty of screenshots on its own webpage?

this is just a blog announcement of something cool they're doing behind the scenes and that you will never use in a trillion years, not an Apple product launch

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#20

Post by kioleanu »

MoSattler wrote: post #7

I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.

It hasn’t but it’s on the right track. I am working as a developer in one of the federal agencies and have direct contact with the efforts.

It helps a lot that public agencies can now offer a so called IT Zulage of a few hundred euros to 1000 per months that brings salaries on par with the private sector. In my team, this worked wonders and we managed to get some really good people.

On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.

BWI has the same problem, I’ve been approached multiple times by them for this project, which from my knowledge is being intensely worked since many years.

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