I digitalized Berlin's registration form
nicolasbouliane.com
I digitalized Berlin's registration form
1–10 of 320 posts
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#2This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf.
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.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#3Now they'll think: "it's time to change the form"...
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#4This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf. 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.
The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they would have don it already.
In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#5Lol. My berlin friends will live this.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#6Nice job. I will upvote anything that reduces the unnecessary bureaucratic load on citizens.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#7This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf. 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.
This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de as their applications close end of the month.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#8This is a pretty specific problem to solve, but I thought you might have a laugh at our desperately broken bureaucracy on our behalf. 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.
The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushin…
> secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
Increased efficiency doesn't have to mean fewer bureaucrats. It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#9Now they'll think: "it's time to change the form"...
yup, I can imagine some adversarial changes being made to the effect that the document generated by this online form can be refused by the administration in question.
OR if there are people interested in efficiency in this administration, despite what the current state of things would suggest, they could embrace this development, buy the rights to this and implement it on their website for everyone to enjoy. One can dream.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#10Kudos on the nice UX for dropdown with countries. I wish more websites do it. Usually, it's "United States" at the very top, and 194 other countries in a loooooong list.