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I digitalized Berlin's registration form

nicolasbouliane.com

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Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#121

Post by Jean-Philipe »

2716057 wrote: post #70

No, no, it's all wrong. 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…

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.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#122

Post by kelnos »

fl7305 wrote: post #82
tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that haven’t ever been to Germany or interacted with any German government, but works with different governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely common. It’s like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York Cit…

It might be common, but the German bureaucracy is a lot worse than what Germany's reputation of structure and order would lead foreigners to believe. And while it might be common around the world, Germany is playing in a lower league than for instance the Scandinavian countries. In Germany, you need to make appointments and do things in person. In Sweden, you can change vehicle ownership or register your move to a ne…

It's nice to know that here in the US we're closer to Sweden than Germany.

I think in most places the buyer of a vehicle still has to mail in a paper form (though if you buy from a car dealership, they'll take care of it), but at least in California, the seller can do their part of the transaction online (which is mainly to inform the DMV that someone else has the vehicle, so you won't be held responsible if something bad happens involving it).

And we don't have to register our moves at all; the government mostly doesn't care if we tell it where we live. Some agencies like the DMV do want to know our address so they can mail us a new driver's license or ID card when the old one expires (but these address changes and license renewals we can do online). The Postal Service will forward our mail to our new address for 3 months if we ask them to, but we don't have to if we don't care.

Obviously the government can and will eventually find out where you live if they need and want to, but there's generally no registration requirement.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#123

Post by nicbou »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #8
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm reading Stasiland right now (strong recommendation), and I shudder to think of what the Stasi could do with today's means.

However, in this case, it would mean that machines handle CRUD while humans can tackle the edge cases. Bureaucrat time should not be wasted on typing a printed form back into a computer.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#124

Post by nicbou »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #11
thaumasiotes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The German state is already incredibly efficient at coming after you with threatening letters for not submitting the right tax paperwork in time on the 50 Euros earned form your online side-hussle. If only the same efficiency would get ported to everything else that benefits the tax-payer.

They're so efficient that sometimes they'll come at you even when you did nothing wrong. My tax advisor had his accounts frozen and sued them for damages. The same happened to me because of a clerical error on their end. They freeze your account and it's up to you to figure out why.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#125

Post by nicbou »

klaustopher wrote: post #42
nicbou wrote: post #2

This 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 worst thing is that this differs by state. In Hessen the communal IT provider (ekom21) offers the service to fill out the entire form online in a UI that resembles yours, but then you still have to go to the "Meldeamt" to sign it (although you do that digitally on a tablet there) because currently the "schriftform" (means: manually signed) is required. It might be changed in the future to be "textform" (means: mu…

In France, they have the postman come to your house and verify your identity. It's such a brillian way to verify things without wasting anyone's time.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#126

Post by nicbou »

raybb wrote: post #111

Reminds me of last year when I made a small site to help find appointments slots for the municipality in Brussels. Website was taking so much effort to see the appointments and people said throughout they day they randomly opened so many of my classmates were checking all the time. So I made this to see appointments on one page instead of clicking many boxes. https://blog.rayberger.org/automating-ixelles-appointment-…

I did that too: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme...

It took me a few months to get it sanctioned by Berlin's IT department, and I could not replicate that success with other services. However it's a start.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#127

Post by kelnos »

TheHappyOddish wrote: post #72
melx wrote: post #10

Kudos 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.

Even better are the ones where you pick your country and the 'state' dropdown is still US states and 'Other', and you're prompted for a 'zip code'. What does American mail have to do with a zip anyway?

Not sure if your question is flippant/rhetorical, but in case you're genuinely curious: ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, the initiative that set up the "postal codes" that we call ZIP codes.

I don't quite recall, but I think ZIP may actually be a backronym; in US English, "zip" is a word that also means "to move quickly", and they wanted to evoke a feeling that postal mail gets delivered faster when you include the ZIP code, which makes sorting mail more efficient.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#128

Post by jskherman »

2716057 wrote: post #70

No, no, it's all wrong. 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…

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).

At least in Germany, it's a lot less blatant.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#129

Post by calmoo »

tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #52
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone that haven’t ever been to Germany or interacted with any German government, but works with different governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely common. It’s like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York Cit…

It's much worse than you think here. Germany is in the stone age when it comes to digitalization. As an example, most immigrants will be waiting months to hear back from the Auslanderbehorde - and the only way to get them to reply to you within 2 weeks is to send them a fax.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#130

Post by nicbou »

emj wrote: post #41

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 te…

> you need to save the form as a PDF or a readable text file

Why?

In this case, the data will live for a few weeks at most. The goal would be a QR code that contains the data as a hash: https://forms.berlin/#[form data]. This is to avoid storing or seeing any user data.

I was also considering a P2P solution with WebRTC. This would let you transmit your form without the server seeing the data. You'd just need to both visit a URL at the same time.

The idea is that I can't store private information, and the Bürgeramt can't install any new software.

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