141–150 of 320 posts
> 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?
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…
The part about typing it again by hand and printing it is very real!
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My sister sent a parcel this week with presents for my daughter's birthday (Happy birthday Ruby!), from Norway to the UK. She filled in all the spoiler customs parts but must have gotten stressed and completely forgot to write our street name and house number. Just my name, post code and country. 3 days later our postie knocked on our door and asked if this parcel was for us! We don't live in a big city but still it…
> I am certain had it been shipped the other way the post office in Norway would have rejected it immediately for not being 100% by-the-book. The postal office in Norway tries hard to deliver to the correct destination. I've heard of similar stories where they only had a name and a city to go on, and it was delivered at the correct location. During Christmas, they even have a team of dedicated "detectives" who tries…
Once, someone I knew in Norway (ok, my sister again...) somehow managed to combine her old and new address when ordering something online. And that parcel back and forth between 2 cities for a long time... :)
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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.
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 special cases) or just implement their own according to the standard.
But unfortunately it doesn't translate because the german state either picks the cheapest contractor (which almost always leads to blown budgets and delays) or they pick by nepotism.
They are also dead set on waterfall projects and don't seem to realize that if they keep blowing budgets anyways, that might not be the best strategy.
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 proble…
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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.
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For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes. Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is, is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12 random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need to file them and simply not show them to me). And la…
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…
The first year I moved to Austria I still had my main residency in Italy, and filling the paper unproperly could have impacted my taxation. Please have a look at DTA if you don´t know what I mean.
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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…
I wrote a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme... It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add other services, and I get ghosted. However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip install` it and run it on any appointment type you want. https…
Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.
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I wrote a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme... It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add other services, and I get ghosted. However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip install` it and run it on any appointment type you want. https…
Maybe this was you as well https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/q7ekx8/1010_is_the_... :-) Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.