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I digitalized Berlin's registration form

nicolasbouliane.com

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Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#151

Post by brnt »

iknownothow wrote: post #12

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 ju…

The budget for the digitization ministry was just slashed down to 1%, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.

It would make sense for EU member states to collaborate more closely on the systems, since they all need to solve the same problems why not share? The Netherlands does a pretty good job at digitisation (it has gone the other way: it's hard to get someone in meat space to look at you issue if the system didn't provision for your situation). Why reinvent the wheel?

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#152

Post by croes »

nforgerit wrote: post #102
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…

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 paperwo…

Especially because the main criteria is the price.

So the cheapest wins, and most of the time the price estimation was a lie and you need lots of additional payments or you need to start all over again.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#153

Post by kharak »

fl7305 wrote: post #98

"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 ha…

I've never known these kinds of systems exist. Love it. Like a common interface or index. Something like this should be implemented everywhere.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#154

Post by nicbou »

csunbird wrote: post #136
ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try registering or deregistering a vehicle in a major German city. That once took me three months, because I simply couldn't get an appointment via the web interface set up especially for that purpose. Since Covid, the process is kind of broken, at least in my city.

You might have chosen the worst example for your point, it is super duper easy to register a car online. I registered both of my cars online, the papers arrived in a week but I was able to drive and insure the vehicle without any interruptions. They give you a printout to carry around while the original registration papers arrive, but the police already knows whether the car is registered or not and will not bother y…

This is a fairly recent development. The wait times for registering a vehicle were downright absurd.

By the way, the Kfz-Zulassungsstelle is allegedly one of the best-organised offices on Berlin. It's all downhill from there.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#155

Post by nicbou »

abdusco wrote: post #53
Bissness wrote: post #34

Bravo! 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 earl…

The trick is to look for appointments early in the morning. People who think they won't be able to make it to the appointment that day cancel theirs and there's a bunch of openings every morning.

This is not true. I tested it before: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/berlin-buergeramt-experimen...

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#156

Post by nicbou »

konschubert wrote: post #64
thunfisch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest reasons why digitization in Germany is so slow moving is that every municipality can (and does) decide on how to digitize individually. There is no mandate for the upper levels of government to dictate which solutions are being used on a local level. Combine that with need for tendering on every single solution and you've got a big mess of small companies underbidding bigger companies that could un…

Building a form like Nicolas did can totally happen on the municipal level. This is two weeks of work for a good developer. Totally affordable.

More like one week, while travelling, and most of it was obsessing over design details.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#157

Post by dctoedt »

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])

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D...

[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#158

Post by southernplaces7 »

calmoo wrote: post #129
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'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.

While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the context of our creeping, already vast, global surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by thousands of actors both private and public, or both and feeding off each other's surveillance carrion...

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#159

Post by konschubert »

nottheengineer wrote: post #144
konschubert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a form like Nicolas did can totally happen on the municipal level. This is two weeks of work for a good developer. Totally affordable.

But two weeks of dev time for every municipality adds up quickly. The issue is that germany is deeply federated, different decisions are made at different levels. This could translate well into software by having the higher levels create interop standards and reference implementations that allow for plugins while the lower levels use the reference implementations (with plugin extensions for the myriad of special of s…

If you make it centralised, it becomes a huge project that costs hundreds of millions.

I agree that this would be ideal, but on a local scale, these projects are easier to manage.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#160

Post by konschubert »

nicbou wrote: post #156
konschubert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a form like Nicolas did can totally happen on the municipal level. This is two weeks of work for a good developer. Totally affordable.

More like one week, while travelling, and most of it was obsessing over design details.

You’re probably faster than the typical “good developer” I had in mind.
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