It's funny, I used to work in the US for a germany company that had a similar process for many things, IT forms were pdfs that needed to be printed and hand signed, if you used an older version the form was rejected and you needed to fill out a new one. It appears to be a cultural thing.
I digitalized Berlin's registration form
231–240 of 320 posts
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, so that's why Germany and Japan have such an easy trading relationship.
Yes, finally someone else with whom to fax.
Anyone here who has written a fax gateway (receive TIFF of fax, do OCR, save somewhere and convert to PDF)?
raises hand
(fax is alive and well in Switzerland)
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#233No, 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…
As someone who has lived in the UK and other European countries, you don't know how refreshing is to hear honest and critical takes on burocracy and/or corruption in European countries.
Too often, given the heavier US demographics of sites like HN, we get black or white pictures where it's either the best or the worst and always as some sort of political point related to the US.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown. If it’s French from France , yes. This is the second part of the language code: fr_FR is French from France, fr_BE from Belgium, fr_BF from Burkina Faso and so on.
Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-) Also, you missed other language codes for French: fr_BI, fr_BJ, fr_BL, fr_CA, fr_CD, fr_CF, fr_CG, fr_CH, fr_CI, fr_CM, fr_DJ, fr_DZ, fr_GA, fr_GF, fr_GN, fr_GP, fr_GQ, fr_HT, fr_KM, fr_LU, fr_MA, fr_MC, fr_MF, fr_MG, fr_ML, fr_MQ, fr_MR, fr_MU, fr_…
> But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-)
This is accessory; the goal is to suggest relevant options for someone based on the language they configured their browser with.
> Also, you missed other language codes for French: […]
These are combinations of a language code (fr) and a region code; the list is not standardized and could theorically be extended to all the regions with an ISO code. What’s interesting here is the region code, not the language.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#235No, 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…
Yet for some reason Europeans feel so strongly against privitization of public services
Which is a good thing, since it's ultimately a failed concept.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not disagree that sometimes German bureaucracy is not the most efficient. But. I have used Elster and, while it is true it looks old and overly complicated, it actually works great. You get _a lot_ of very useful warnings about fields that cannot be 0 or must at least be x, based on some other distant field. You can save previous forms and start from them (for recurrent things like VAT quarterly declaration). Yo…
Have you ever done taxes in another country? US taxes are not known to be super easy but the sheer ease of filing them compared to filing German taxes completely blew my mind.
Or Finnish taxes. You don't need to file anything, it's automatically done for you. If you need some money back e.g. driving for work, you fill a quick form digitally and that's it.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#237You should charge $500 a pop for this. People will pay
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#238No, 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…
You forgot to mention that McKinsey gets involved.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether and create a government digital agency (whether at local or national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov project seems to point the way.
They have one already, but it's probably not as big: https://digitalservice.bund.de/
I have worked with some of those people, and I can say that the agency is in really good hands.
Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether and create a government digital agency (whether at local or national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov project seems to point the way.
This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.
I don't think that's true - the pay is still good for eastern germany and outside of bigger cities and if there would be an honest effort I'm sure they'll find qualified personell. Additionally it's possible to have a non-profit company or a corporative.
And maybe that keeps the enterprise java and cloud architects away so projects could actually succeed without complexity or cost explosion :)
I guess it's because the state is forbidden to compete with the private sector by law/regulation (thank you neoliberals / capitalists...) so it just can't start something like this and the other big problem is due to the federated nature of german governance everony like to be the king in their area of control and collaborative projects tend to fail due to that. That was a huge problem during covid when every health department did their own thing regarding managing the data...
Additionally lot's of the personell that would be in charge for that is unfortunatly either delusional or incompetent from my limited experience so this could also backfire and turn into a subsidy for the buddys of the person.
But it's even basic things that are broken. Why has every city / municipality reinvent the wheel and organize their it stuff on their own... a non-profit or coop on the state level could just support them, do procurement and initial setup - this would result in more security and stability and less costs. There now some talks in that direction - it's 2023