161–170 of 320 posts
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.
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…
Here's what I do when I need to go to a Bürgeramt: For every type of appointment you can make, there should be an official website containing links to each Bürgeramt's calendar page. Bookmark that website, not the individual pages. Find one or a few locations you'd prefer, then open each calendar in a separate browser! Opening multiple in one browser doesn't work, as it remembers your last selection per browser sessi…
It felt pretty unfair that the average user was at an impossible disadvantage because the system had no protection against automation.
It was quite obvious others were already running automation, but I only booked for myself and then turned it off.
I was impressed NZ got a highly functional system up and running extremely quickly, but it became a game of high frequency trading.
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.
> It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness. Well, this turned dark pretty fast huh.
> Or why not skip paper entirely? If we're talking about actual reform, the obvious suggestion is to skip the entire notion of registration, no?
Yes, as a non-European expat moving to Denmark in 2017, my experience was eye-opening. I needed one physical visit to the International affairs section of the citizens service(Borger service), where they took my biometrics, and issued me a CPR number(a national Id equivalent I that of social security number in the US, or Aadhaar ID in India), and another set of codes called Nem-Id which serves as a second factor auth…
Also if you change to a different bank or want a different "main" bank account both your monthly payments and wages get applied to your new bank account without you having to inform anyone.
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.
to be fair, many countries' governments have this same issue, and even when they do something the UX feels like something from 2002. The thing is, its complex, often the job pays way below market rate and government jobs often have rigid salary tiers, hiring might not be done like a normal tech co. as you might also have specific public servants to do it, and then you have culture, which might rule out certain people…
Let's say Berlin wanted to hire me tomorrow to do the same exact work for them. That would mean return to office, fixed schedule, a return to rigid corporate culture, and a significant drop in income.
A friend of mine works in government IT, and the stories are both hilarious and sad. Some people in the Greens are afraid of Wi-Fi waves...
This is brilliantly done.
It is so crazy that the biggest economy in Europe is so non-digitalized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.
Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose central skills is dealing with them from participation, and it also has VIP lanes for routing work to your mates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, from what I hear Berlin does take the cake on this one, but yes: its a country-wide phenomenon. For what its worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the things you can do digitally in Kiel. Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Hamburg and Bremen have "Dataport", a publicly owned company which does a lot of the tech for public institutions in the area. While they are not operating at the efficiency of a normal comp…
For Berlin specifically it is important to note the city-state was super broke until around 10 years ago. Many causes for this including mismanagement by the government, but the main cause is the GDR, how Berlin was divided, and how very little industry settled in or around Berlin. Now this has changed a lot in the last decade or two, but it has been accompanied by avg. yearly net migration of 80k people which is put…
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.