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I digitalized Berlin's registration form

nicolasbouliane.com

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Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#271

Post by ComputerGuru »

corbezzoli wrote: post #28

Nit: I’d probably avoid saying “you’re done” when nothing was done, the user still needs to deliver it themselves. Saying “done” makes it look like it took care of it all, to a distracted person. I’d say the opposite: “Warning, you’re not done!”

I was trying to think of how to word what has been accomplished (and finished, as far as the website is concerned) and was having a hard time of it, but your idea to just flip the whole thing on its head and say “warning: you’re not done” is just so elegant in its simplicity. Well done (pun intended)!

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#272

Post by morelisp »

pzduniak wrote: post #252
cromka wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t speak for others, but Polish engineers aren’t and haven’t been cheaper than German for a while now.

Perhaps you're comparing _good_ engineers. That's not who we're talking about here :) There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less) - and you can replace any engineer with a finite amount of these guys.

> There's tens of thousands of fresh IT graduates working 2.5k EUR/mo jobs (or less)

Also in Germany.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#273

Post by ComputerGuru »

PaulHoule wrote: post #258

I spent a year living in Germany and I am pretty certain that if I had overstayed my visa one day somebody would have shown up at my door to check in on me. Contrast that to the US where I had a neighbor who was always bringing people in from Poland who were overstaying their visas and there didn't seem to be any effort to stop this. (e.g. despite all these strange schemes to make sure people get photographed, scanne…

I’ve actually heard a lot of success stories regarding chassis/frame/body straightening on trucks with trees (lots of YouTube videos but here’s a rare blog post [0]). The hilarity ensues when one attempts to straighten the chassis of a unibody vehicle in the same manner (true story, and no, it wasn’t me).

[0]: https://blacksprucehound.com/2018/01/16/redneck-vehicle-fram...

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#274

Post by tim333 »

ido wrote: post #167
moomin wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why are online gov services still so much better in the uk then in Germany?

We have this stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911218

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#275

Post by OliverJones »

There's a book by Jen Pahlka called Recoding America. https://www.worldcat.org/title/Recoding-America-:-why-govern...

Germany seems to have similar sorts of federal / state / municipal government issues and other bureaucratic constraints as the US. And, this article makes it clear it has the same sorts of opportunities for improvement.

Maybe it's time to establish Programmieren für Deutschland as a parallel org to Code for America.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#276

Post by ComputerGuru »

alistairSH wrote: post #260

Do Germans have to repeat the process to update their driver's license or other paperwork upon changing address? Here in the US, we would normally... register the new address with the postal service (online), update the address on our driver's license and car registration (online if same state, in-person if new state), send an email to employer with new address details. So as long as it's a move with a state, it's no…

FWIW, I have never bothered updating the car registration address and never had a problem. The DMV/MVD knows who owns the car (tied to your state id or driver’s license) and the latter has been updated. I don’t see a real need to update the former.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#277

Post by ComputerGuru »

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…

None of this ever happens if you use an RDBMS and put everything in strongly typed columns, regardless of how or where you are generating the forms or UI (backend or front end). They can be stored encrypted with a js/user-only #fragment if you don’t want the server to see the data.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#278

Post by xyzzy4747 »

nicbou wrote: post #262
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #255

Is there an actual purpose for Germany requiring this other than allowing the Gestapo to track you down?

This is in poor taste. It's used for a number of reasons, like planning things relative to the number of people living in an area. It also becomes your official address where the government sends all your important mail. It's also how you get registered for church tax.

How is it poor taste? There’s a lot of history of German police arresting everyone who registered themselves as a certain demographic.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#279

Post by ulnarkressty »

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…

Germany has quite a lush hacker culture (e.g. CCC), I'm wondering why some people with know-how don't just get together and make a bunch of solutions like the one in this submission.

Re: I digitalized Berlin's registration form

#280

Post by croisillon »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #270
croisillon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within Austria there are differences: i used to live in Innsbruck with an address written 4-51 (meaning street number 4, door 51) and then moved to Vienna, street number 2, door number 14. But in Vienna 2-14 means the big building with street numbers 2 through 14. My building was not big, you could physically see it is street number 2. Well, i never got that letter.

So how would street 2, door 14 be correctly written in Vienna?

2/14 is the correct way, but if number 2 has several staircases (typically the case of a 2-14) it would be 2/3/14 (or typically 2-14/3/14) with 3 being the staircase number
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