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.
In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
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.
OR if there are people interested in efficiency in this administration, despite what the current state of things would suggest, they could embrace this development, buy the rights to this and implement it on their website for everyone to enjoy. One can dream.
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 just hate the lack of digitization.
Well, this turned dark pretty fast huh.
what happens in the company is another thing. it really depends on the people working there.
> in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong
There's literally not a single political party that doesn't admit that Germany is being too slow here or that doesn't admit that it's embarassing. On a national and on a local level. You can Google that if you don't believe me.
> digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that
Also wrong. There's plenty of unfillable public servant jobs in every city. Public servant jobs are not what they were in the 70s.
> In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset.
Also wrong. Germany just upgraded too early, then let everything run and stopped upgrading because the current system works. That's all there is to it. It's also the reason why Romania has faster internet than Germany, for example.
> work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts
You're in for a wild ride when you find out what kind of IT infrastructure the world uses.
Your whole post is anecdotal and when you try to get to your own interpretation of German culture or why problems exist, you're wrong.
Don't get me wrong: Germany's digital infrastructure _is_ horrible. Just not at all for the reasons you mentioned.
It's just that most people are quite conservative, the middle manager your gf approached was the wrong person, the manager didn't want the headache of the discussion that happens with their superiors (who wrote it, what happens if it goes wrong, where's it sending the data, how much money does he want, etc.) and also simply don't trust some random like you.
If she'd been an external consultant talking to the upper echelons, they'd definitely want this, but not as some random python script. Probably as a nice easy to install Excel plugin.
So you were talking to the wrong person.
What she should have done is use the script to work less and get accolades for being a fast and efficient worker, and never shown it to her boss.
By the way, that's exactly what I did for a g/f myself 4 or 5 years ago, and I specifically warned her not to tell her boss about it as it'd be seen as a problem, not a boon. She loved it, turned a week's worth of work into 1/2 an hour, letting her get on with the bits of the job she actually enjoyed.
This can also cause delivery failures the other way around - a friend in Germany once sent me a package but didn't bother writing the apartment number on it because she assumed the postman would use my name to find the right box. Instead it got sent right back to Germany. (Austrian bureaucracy is just as unforgiving as German, they just have different rules to follow...)
Upgraded too early to what? Letters and fax machines?
I’d say the opposite: “Warning, you’re not done!”
> I use navigator.languages to get a list of supported languages. For example, en-CA, fr-CA, de-DE. This gives me a list of countries the user might have lived in. I suggest those countries at the top of the country list.
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 early morning, yet here is what I encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Bürgeramt: THIRTY people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened: 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't possible).
There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there need to be metrics against that which have consequences.
If we're talking about actual reform, the obvious suggestion is to skip the entire notion of registration, no?
They only chance is simplifying processes and make them more efficient (which includes "digitization"). But apart from staff, this needs strong leadership and expertise, and is made complex by the federal structure.
They do (at least sometimes?). They are just not listed anywhere and barely used. I have my number in my contract, and e.g. Vatenfall have it to connect the meter number to the flat number.
I hate to give the author of this tool any despair: if you think managing your Wohnsitzanmeldung is hard, wait until you decide to move away from Germany (to another country) and attempt to sever/cancel your contracts. The cancellation process is nightmare mode.
This means you can have multiple people digitally sign or even fill it out, then they can sign the text representation which is easier than a digitally signed PDF or json. You need this because when you update the backend and frontend between logins and there is always somekind of mismatch that will happen. This is especially hard when you have non linear form entries or optional parts like the C/O part in this form, there is always something that slips through the crack in regression testing.
Last time it happend to us someone had upgraded the front end calendar month chooser. It was well tested, but that ment another optional date picker was updated and testing did not happen there. Then organizational and technical Murphys law struck meaning complete data loss for people affected by that.
Unfortunately, from the bigger cities I checked (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Kassel, Gießen, Marburg, Wiesbaden), none of them used that service, only some smaller districts like Bad Vilbel[1] or Limburg[2] offer the service.
[1]: https://onlineantrag.ekom21.de/olav/zuziehen?mbom=6440003 [2]: https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid... "Voranmeldung eines Zuzugs"
Surely enough, 2 days later I received the mail back at my mailbox. Wasted 2 euros ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just needed a single stamp, but they stamped on both so I couldn't even try to reuse it. And I also posted on the mailbox for "other zip code" rather than "close by zip codes".
I don't know if OCR or a person messed up. Well, definitely a person (me)...
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 unify the software landscape and instead build a cheaper, small solution that has zero interoperability with the neighboring municipality.
The need for fax et.al. is not because people don't know how to use computers, but because there's thousands of applications fulfilling the same exact job, but are incapable of talking to each other. Paper is currently the only compatibility layer that works everywhere.
There are ongoing efforts to provide a common data exchange format (technical working group) as well as redesigning how the software for government is being build (tendering processes, public money - public code movement, et. al.)
German government is currently incapable of doing its job in a way that is legally required, missing deadlines and not providing citizens with the services that they are entitled to because they are unable to manage the workload due to the paperbound processes. There is zero fear of humans being replaced by machines. It's rather that more and more humans are leaving government due to burnout.
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.
They'd love to "digitise" but their problem is that there is ZERO Software culture in Germany. Likely they'd have some shitty accounting or consulting firm with their 24 yr old associate who can do some Java code something for 10 Billion EUR. It'll take 10 years and obviously won't scale or work properly.
That's why it still hasn't happened. There is no one who can write a requirements doc with much useful content in it besides "make it digital" either.
When they wanted a mobile app to warn of Covid risks nearby they found no one who could write mobile apps besides SAP (not a mobile nor end-user company) and Deutsche Telekom (a Telco, used to be state-owned back in the day). That'll tell you how this will go.
https://news.sap.com/2020/06/corona-warn-app-deutsche-teleko...
Your personal anecdote as another commenter pointed out says much more about your lack of consulting and general workplace experience than it does about German bureaucracy. It all sounds very typical and again what I’d expect as someone that can count on one hand the number of people in Germany I’ve talked to professionally.
In east Germany, after reunification in the 1990s, Deutsche Telekom started to introduce a fiber into every home (OPAL - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optische_Anschlussleitung) but then they shifted their focus to DSL and reusing the old copper wires for telephone lines and abandoned this. No, not only abandoned. They opened up the streets again to lay new copper wire.
Now, fiber to the home is back on the table.
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 authentication for all things online. That’s it.
I could go online, login with my CPR number, and use the Nem-ID as the second factor auth, and register my address, bank account, immigration details, driving license etc.
Need a bank account? Open one by using the CPR number and second factor auth using Nem-ID.
Same goes for phone connection, internet at home, whatever else.
Need holidays? Paid for by the government, and I login using my CPR number ti check my state of holidays. Independent of my employer.
Childcare benefit? Apply using the CPR number online.
Need to find a daycare(Vuggestue) for your kid? No need, login with the kid’s cpr number and apply, and you get assigned to one of the neighborhood ones.
I move to a different address within Denmark? Change the address in that borgerservice portal, and that’s it. Even my internet provider sends a bill to the new address automatically.
End of the year, I get a tax report from SKAT(tax authorities) because they already know all my details as they are linked with my CPR number. All I need to do is report any corrections. If not my tax reporting is done by default.
When my kid was born in Denmark, the nurse came with a bag with a stork doll, and an envelope with….. CPR number :-)
It was a pleasure how things were digitized in Denmark.
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 company, they seem to be fairly useful. I'm not sure if something similar exists for other regions in Germany.
Sometimes you can got there without appointment and you can go in, because they have nothing to do and they are waiting happily for you and they are very friendly.
It's a lot of work, and it shouldn't be necessary, but I'd never go into a Bürgeramt without an appointment and this method has worked for me every time so far.
I've already accepted I'll have to overpay short-term rentals for months and bot the shit of out Immoscout to have a chance.
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 is a town of 20,000 so not that rural where everyone knows you, so I was impressed that they cared enough to try to figure out the address. Granted the post code narrows the search down.
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.
I wonder if some of the countries referenced in the thread have different laws regarding opening post - in England it’s illegal to open post that isn’t addressed to you, so if the postie did make a mistake it’s not the end of the world as the receiver would just pop it back in the letter box (in an ideal world)
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 project to some sweatshop. The project will exceed its initially planned costs and timeline by a factor of two or more. Once completed, the final product will consist of a clunky frontend allowing the user to fill a form. After the user has completed the form, it will be distributed via e-mail to the low-level clerks. They will print it out and process it by typing the very same information into another software running on their work computers. Print again. Then the user has to schedule an appointment at the local administrative office to get the form signed and stamped in person. Upon completion, the finalized form will be faxed to the next administrative authority in the chain.
The frontend runs on a Raspberry Pi located somewhere in the administrative building. That server will of course be turned off when all administrators have left the building (save energy!), meaning the frontend will only be available during weekdays from 8 am to 1 pm.
Every new Berliner feels this pain, but the worse part is getting an appointment. Not just for your Anmeldung, but for anything you need to do here.
The process of getting a license plate once home was actually a breeze. I used the website of the Dutch Vehicle Authority to make an appointment (for the following day at 2pm) and they gave me a temporary license plate. I simply had to write this on a piece of cardboard and put it where the license plate would go. Called the cheapest insurance company to get temporary insurance, which was no problem, and simply drove the car to get it inspected.
And while it might be common around the world, Germany is playing in a lower league than for instance the Scandinavian countries.
In Germany, you need to make appointments and do things in person.
In Sweden, you can change vehicle ownership or register your move to a new address online in minutes.
If anything the opposite of what you're saying is true. Everyone abroad thinks Germany is so efficient and Germany has this amazing reputation, but the reputation is a lie.
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 their hardest to figure out who the packages should be sent to.
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_NC, fr_NE, fr_PF, fr_PM, fr_RE, fr_RW, fr_SC, fr_SN, fr_SY, fr_TD, fr_TG, fr_TN, fr_VU, fr_WF, fr_YT.
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 has windows facing out the other side of the building? No problem, the numbering system handles that.
https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/real-property/property-inform...
https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastigh...
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 putting a major strain on all public services.
If you buy a car (which is currently unregistered) from a private person that doesn't have those, you just did something that the bureaucracy didn't foresee and at that point, the best course of action is to avoid as much of it as possible.
At this point I have no hope that any of this will getter unless the german state collapses completely.
A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together.
Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court.
The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures.
Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company.
To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out.
It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken.
Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress.
For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.
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 paperwork. For some projects you'll be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even worse. Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g. "cheapest wins".
So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and nothing that remotely works end-to-end.
That’s why Digi exploded and Telekom (Romtelecom) needed years to take off. The Greek CEO of Romtelecom would hold meetings in 2008 with upper management where he would dictate loudly that Romanians only want stable internet with great customer care and that’s the direction he is leading the company. That proved not to actually be the case and he unceremoniously left the company afterwards.
Source: I lived all this and was close with the domain
BTW in Scotland at least, during the Christmas period, it is customary to leave a Christmas card for the postie outside with a small bank note in it. An easy way to say thank you for their efforts and to ensure that the postie will remember your name even better next time ;)
I want to emphasise this for non-German readers. "Datenschutz!" has become a sort of one-word meme to explain why everything still runs on fax.
By the time it's ready for production, the latest Raspberry Pi will probably be about as powerful as the fancy cluster.
I find myself chuckling a little at this, because this is a common excuse for things being slow moving (or just wildly inconsistent from place to place) in the US. It's somehow comforting to know that countries of all size and population that are organized like this will still have the same problems.
To be fair, though, the US and many decent-sized municipalities do actually have a pretty good digitization story. I'm actually having trouble thinking of routine government-related things that have to be done in person... or even by mail. I guess you have to send mail to apply for or renew your passport (though the State Department already has an online form that fills out a printable application for you). And you have to go in person to get a marriage license (but I think that's a feature, not a bug; and hopefully that's not a routine activity, anyway). I had to do an interview to get my Global Entry (eliminates most of the wait at immigration when re-entering the US) thing approved, but the application process was all online, and my recent renewal was completed from my couch.
Otherwise...? I've set foot in a DMV perhaps 3 times since I moved to California 19 years ago (once when I first moved, to take the written driving test; once when I lost my driver's license and had to prove who I was to get a new one; and once when I had to apply for the ridiculous new "REAL ID"). I file my income taxes online, and whatever money I'm due or owed gets electronically transferred. I pay my property taxes online. I activated the electric and gas utility service (not quite government, but adjacent) online when I last moved. Mail forwarding when your address changes is done at the Postal Service's website. I even signed all the paperwork to buy a new home online (if you have a mortgage lender, they'll want some things signed in person, but they can someone to your house for that, and at any rate the government-related paperwork is all handled by a title company for you, at least where I live). You can even pay parking ticket and driving infraction fines online, if you don't want to contest them.
The online systems to take care of this stuff do all vary in clunkiness to some degree, but some of them are quite modern-looking and have decent or even good UX. The federal government even has 'login.gov' now, which they're slowly (very slowly) getting various agencies to adopt so you have a single sign-in. I don't think states and municipalities are allowed to use it, though.
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). You can save progress and log in using certificates, change to be notified electronically instead of per physical mail.
IMO Elster would be even better if they would _never_ change the number of the fields. If you buy a book about German taxes (I know, fun) they can say fill in field 47, and it it prob now 49 because the fields changed.
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.
Website was taking so much effort to see the appointments and people said throughout they day they randomly opened so many of my classmates were checking all the time. So I made this to see appointments on one page instead of clicking many boxes.
https://blog.rayberger.org/automating-ixelles-appointment-ch...
Do you think anyone at the Bürgeramt has any reason to change their easy "just type stuff and press buttons" job to anything resembling real work? Bureaucrats wield political power, at the very least because they vote like anyone else, but they also have more direct influence than average people. Politicians have no incentive to go against them and, as long as they promise that everything will remain the same, they will have the support of the paper-stamper class. The bureaucrats form a distinct social class with their own interests.
If there was any will to solve the problem, it would have been done already, even without technology. Most people think that taxes are levied to pay for services, but it is actually the other way around, bureaucracy is there to justify the taxes.
[1] I had to go to Lichtemberg because it is was the only office with an appointment in a reasonable time frame.
[2] There are people selling registrations now.
And I say this as an American who was under the impression that some significant bits of the US government bureaucracy are pretty wild. This German thing takes the cake.
Regardless, it's a little weird that you accuse GP of expressing an uninformed opinion about German bureaucracy when you admit that you only have limited secondhand experience with it yourself.
On top you got a culture of being on time, which is prevalent everywhere, and you wait for stuff very seldomly, and only for a few minutes. Waiting for anything was one of my biggest irks in my home country, the fact that I can make an appointment, be there 5mins early, and get the service, blows my mind.
You must involve your landlord because you need some proof that you live where you are registering.
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely: that the system is a disorganised mess, and that those most affected by it (including bureaucrats) are incapable of fixing it.
Yes, there are also people selling immigration office appointments. If there is desperation, there is a business.
This is not true. The head of the Berlin Ausländerbehörde is well aware of the issue and frequently says that we need to digitalize in front of the cameras.
According to contacts on the inside, they are operating at full capacity with a personel shortage and have zero slack to stop and fix things.
They have every incentive to fix things, not just out of sheer embarrassment, but because more and more people are suing the state for failure to act (Untätigkeit). I wanted to make this lawsuit process as seamless as possible, but it would not help anyone.
I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.
I think in most places the buyer of a vehicle still has to mail in a paper form (though if you buy from a car dealership, they'll take care of it), but at least in California, the seller can do their part of the transaction online (which is mainly to inform the DMV that someone else has the vehicle, so you won't be held responsible if something bad happens involving it).
And we don't have to register our moves at all; the government mostly doesn't care if we tell it where we live. Some agencies like the DMV do want to know our address so they can mail us a new driver's license or ID card when the old one expires (but these address changes and license renewals we can do online). The Postal Service will forward our mail to our new address for 3 months if we ask them to, but we don't have to if we don't care.
Obviously the government can and will eventually find out where you live if they need and want to, but there's generally no registration requirement.
However, in this case, it would mean that machines handle CRUD while humans can tackle the edge cases. Bureaucrat time should not be wasted on typing a printed form back into a computer.
It took me a few months to get it sanctioned by Berlin's IT department, and I could not replicate that success with other services. However it's a start.
I don't quite recall, but I think ZIP may actually be a backronym; in US English, "zip" is a word that also means "to move quickly", and they wanted to evoke a feeling that postal mail gets delivered faster when you include the ZIP code, which makes sorting mail more efficient.
It's such a cliché that I'm already tired at this point. I'm completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil candidates).
At least in Germany, it's a lot less blatant.
Why?
In this case, the data will live for a few weeks at most. The goal would be a QR code that contains the data as a hash: https://forms.berlin/#[form data]. This is to avoid storing or seeing any user data.
I was also considering a P2P solution with WebRTC. This would let you transmit your form without the server seeing the data. You'd just need to both visit a URL at the same time.
The idea is that I can't store private information, and the Bürgeramt can't install any new software.
For the appointment, there's this: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
The main customers were from the local government who wanted to digitize and increase the efficiency of dealing with some forms. I mean we are talking about forms that are 5-50 pages long with just a few people who know how everything is supposed to work. In some cases a processing of a form would be extremely expensive. The product saved a lot of public money.
But it is extremely hard to sell to such orgs, requires tight collaboration to understand all of the edge cases. Not only that but it is necessary to interact with gov before they even start a procurement process, not just because you want to increase the chances of winning but because they just do not know what is possible to begin with and how to ask for it. Also, there is some competition to outbid the others which sounds like a good thing but it also reduces the chances that a solution will be transformative as it is quite hard to spell it out what you want so that it is of good quality.
The next time you complain about poor digital services remember that it is hard to compete in that field and the cheapest almost always wins. This does not mean the best though. Also, I encourage you to try and bid on some local projects to improve our shitty old systems.
However I am Canadian and I speak French. It will recognise fr-CA as "Canada".
The last time I had to visit a government office for something routine... well, I actually don't recall when that last was. Most things are done online, with only a small a few requiring me to mail something out as well.
I guess this is also location dependent; a small US town probably has less digitization than a large US city.
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... :)
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.
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.
Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.
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?
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.
By the way, the Kfz-Zulassungsstelle is allegedly one of the best-organised offices on Berlin. It's all downhill from there.
(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...
I agree that this would be ideal, but on a local scale, these projects are easier to manage.
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.
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.
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.
If you are in possession of the title of the car, yes.
However if you lease a car, the leasing company will just post the lease to the Zulassungsstelle so that you will not be in possession of the title at any time. So it will require you to go there in person.
In terms of implementation, the government employs a small number of competent people directly - the "Government Digital Service" - who accomplish some projects.
Other IT projects are done by organisations like Accenture, CSC, Atos Origin, Fujitsu and BT. They are generally paid more if the project is late or buggy, with predictable results. But they'll often produce something eventually, if enough money is thrown at them.
The "VIP lanes for routing work to your mates" are more for things like buying overpriced PPE during the pandemic.
I wonder what would be more difficult, getting your owners to adopt your digitization or to abolish the requirement altogether.
Its probably racist anyway.
The other day when I needed this exact form, I realized how much time it was saving me and donated some to show appreciation.
Thanks for your great work @nicbou!
This seems like a very justified reaction and could happen in any sane company in the world. If that company is using excel and VBA, then because this is what they know and where they have experience. Python is a foreign technology, and likely nobody in that company knows how to handle it. Also, the existing solution is battle tested over a long time, it's working, people know how to handle it, it's a well moving gear. Changing it for some unknown gear, from some unknown person, is insane, no good company would do that, this is too much of a risk.
It seems, you just don't understand the bigger picture of legacy systems, and the risks and costs of changes.
In Germany, you can sometimes write an email but they will ask you to sign a paper where you recognise that email is not a trustworthy medium compared to a random email delivered by the postperson in your mailbox (or not) without a receipt whatsoever. Oh, and fax machine is still a thing in Germany.
We're talking about people, not parties, and I've definitely met people who have this view. To them, the German way is the proper way, and any way that's easier must be cheating or skipping something.
Of course they want digitalization, but they want a German digitalization. A good and proper German one, and not a flimsy foreign one.
Of course this is nationalistic cope, but it's pretty common.
> Usually [you get] 194 other countries in a loooooong list
(cue this website having precisely that list)
Not sure if this is true but it sounds like it absolutely could be.
Berlin isn't centralized, but the districts (Bezirke) have quite some freedom to structure their work (similar to "kommunale Selbstverwaltung" in other states) and how they run the administration offices (Bürgerämter etc.) which then leads to city administration passing a law for something and each district implementing it differently and city administration having no authority to override district decisions, while taking the blame.
Fixing this requires a change to the constitution, but that requires a 2/3 majority in the city assembly (Abgeordnetenhaus) or a referendum. Getting the majority is hard as there are varying differences (from parties being happy about number of posts to full, like district mayors etc.) and "dislike" between districts (East/West, center/outer, ..)
As a non-eu person living in Germany. It was easier to go to Denmark to marry because of the unreasonable paperwork in Germany. Like "Get a certificate you haven't been married in any country you have lived". Many countries don't issue those certificates.
Every scandinavian person knows how a good digitalized country looks like, Germans just can't even accept they are inefficient.
Of course, the Irish government did eventually put in place an appointment booking system that was so comically bad bots would take all of the appointments immediately for resale on Facebook marketplace. It never crossed their mind to use a CAPTCHA. I only got my own appointment by writing a scraper for it.
From a pragmatic perspective this is the right thing to do. But I think people of Berlin should strive to abandon such bureaucracy completely. In other countries, there's no such thing as an Anmeldung and it doesn't look like such countries are falling apart (because of this). Why not simply get rid of this and let the people do meaningful work?
I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.
In this scenario you described, the government has a monopoly and you as a citizen don’t get to opt-out or switch to the competition. You will pay for whatever garbage service they provide you with, unless you want to go to jail.
There are no consequences to wasting your tax money. These private consulting companies are just the means to waste it.
Digging even a little into German history reveals why the whole digitalisation and bureaucracy situation is the way it is. In fact, it also shows a side that if one doesn't believe that our tech-centric disruption culture is a corruption of society and people, then one might actually be the one who is delusional. Remember, there's a whole class of people out there who depend heavily on things working the way they do - no so much for gain, but for the benefit that any 'digital' alternative may cripple them (e.g. many elderly, disabled, and poor members of society). To some, providing a secondary tool isn't simply an alternative, it's the first step towards a complete replacement of the thing they find more useful (a good example of this is 'cashless societies').
I also wrote something similar for getting a NIE appointment (foreigner's ID card) by using puppeteer (headless Chrome for node) to actually fill out the website for me, about once per 3 minutes (max without getting rate-limited).
I'm fortunate to have the skills to do so but I feel bad for the rest of the people who have to check websites for weeks at a time to get appointments.
The UK tax return (AKA Self-Assessment) follows this pattern and it definitely makes it better. It still lacks clear explanations of every field though.
My country they say new ID card or passport within four weeks but never happened.
Added bonus of uncertainty and significant stress, you never know how these delays in processing are going to impact your status.
raises hand
(fax is alive and well in Switzerland)
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.
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.
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
I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post.
What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.
It is in my opinion a little bit more complicated. The central issue is: many ideas for digitization that other countries or private companies do or have done are very privacy-invading.
Germany had two surveillance states on its soil in the 20th century (of which one ended only a little bit more than 30 years ago). Additionally, lots of German citizens remember the aftermath of the dragnet investigation to fight the RAF in the 80s. So privacy and the possibilities of surveillance are very sensitive topics in the German population.
Additionally, basically every German citizen knows that when data accumulates, politicians will find a reason to use this data to spy on the citizens (prosecution of criminals ... blah blah). Thus there is an insane distrust in the German population in the politicians. Just to give a more recent examples: when the TollCollect system for truck toll was introduced, there were from beginning on concerns that the billing data will become abused. The politicians appeased the citizens that this will never happen. Of course it did happen:
> https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/verbrechensvorbeu...
"Rasterfahndung, heimliche Online-Durchsuchung, Datenauswertung der Lkw-Maut - Bundesinnenminister Wolfgang Schäuble und die Unionsfraktion drängen auf zahlreiche Verschärfungen der Sicherheitsgesetze. Die SPD will mitziehen - aber nicht beim Datensammeln zur Verbrechensvorbeugung.
Entsprechende Pläne präsentierten Unionspolitiker nach Informationen des SPIEGEL in einer Koalitionsrunde am vergangenen Donnerstag. Unter anderem sollen dem Bundeskriminalamt die Rasterfahndung und die heimliche Online-Durchsuchung von Privatcomputern erlaubt werden. Außerdem sollen die Daten der Lkw-Maut dabei helfen, Verbrechen aufzuklären."
DeepL translation: "Grid searches, secret online searches, data analysis of truck tolls - Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU/CSU parliamentary group are pushing for numerous tightening of security laws. The SPD wants to go along - but not with data collection for crime prevention.
According to SPIEGEL, Union politicians presented plans to this effect at a coalition meeting last Thursday. Among other things, the Federal Criminal Police Office is to be allowed to conduct dragnet searches and secret online searches of private computers. In addition, the data from the truck toll is to help solve crimes."
> https://www.zeit.de/online/2007/37/kommentar-online-durchsuc...
"Das Computer-Ausspähen wird also kommen. Wieder einmal wird der Gesetzgeber das Grundgesetz einschränken. Es mag nachvollziehbare Gründe dafür geben, wenn es darum geht, Terroristen davon abzuhalten, Hunderte von Menschen zu töten. Aber es braucht wenig prophetische Fähigkeiten, um vorauszusagen, dass es so kommen wird, wie es in der Vergangenheit immer gekommen ist: Erst versprechen die Innenpolitiker und die Sicherheitsbehörden hoch und heilig, das neue scharfe Schwert nur bei den ganz gefährlichen Straftaten und Verbrechern zu benutzen. Doch dann kommen die Drogenhändler, die Kinderschänder, die Betrüger und schließlich die Steuerhinterzieher. Und plötzlich sind auch Onlinedurchsuchungen ein ganz normales Instrument polizeilicher Ermittlungen.
Das war so bei der Kronzeugenregelung, bei der Datenspeicherung zur LKW-Maut und bei der Telefonüberwachung. Die gehört längst zum polizeilichen Alltag und wird von Richtern routinemäßig genehmigt. Auch beim Großen Lauschangriff drängt die Union seit Langem auf eine Ausweitung. Ihr passt es überhaupt nicht, dass die Polizei die Mikrofone ausschalten muss, wenn die belauschten Gespräche privat werden."
DeepL translation:
"So computer spying is coming. Once again, the legislature will restrict the Basic Law. There may be understandable reasons for this if the goal is to prevent terrorists from killing hundreds of people. But it takes little prophetic ability to predict that things will turn out the way they always have in the past: first, domestic politicians and the security authorities promise on high and holy to use the new sharp sword only on the very dangerous crimes and criminals. But then come the drug dealers, the child molesters, the fraudsters and finally the tax evaders. And suddenly online searches are also a normal instrument of police investigations.
This was the case with the leniency program, data storage for truck tolls and telephone surveillance. This has long been part of everyday police life and is routinely approved by judges. The CDU/CSU has also long been pushing for an expansion of the large-scale eavesdropping program. It does not like the fact that the police have to switch off the microphones when the conversations they listen in on become private."
Thus: never trust a politicians: politicians are nearly all fraudsters who belong into a high-security jail instead of a parliament.
Be the change that you want to happen. Where possible implement it in software with your friends and publish it on the internet. Thus: I am not bored by the lack of progress, instead I am rather overworked by implementing parts of this in my free time after work.
Fax to TIFF to OCR to PDF to internet transfer to TIFF to fax
But anyone still requiring fax would probably just be happy "it came out of a fax machine / software."
Also, while I agree with you that in this case (having a full postcode as well as name) it would have likely been an easy task for the local postie, Royal Mail do actually have a small team* of people who work in figuring out more tricky ones, so if a local person can't work it out for being on their beat it can be sent to the "address detectives" (great title!) to try to solve.
This is a great example of that from a year or two ago, including a few other similar stories at the end: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/07/lives-across...
* My knowledge is both 20 years out of date and fuzzy in my memory, so I've no clue how big a team it is nor if there's enough confusingly-addressed items to need anyone working on it full time, or if it's just one aspect in a wider set of responsibilities that a team does when needed.
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.
It's even better than that. Unless you are incredibly rural or the street is tiny, most streets have at least two postcodes - one for the odd side and one for the even side. In most cases, there's only about 15-30 houses in a postcode, any more on a road and it's split up into smaller chunks.
With your logic, Germany has justified maintaining fax machines and printing online forms. Embracing change is an uncomfortable process, but not doing that is even worse.
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, scanned, probed, etc. when they leave.)
(There was that time one of his "guests" was out in the road with an associate and revving the engine of a pickup truck while it was up against a thick wood beam that was braced against a tree. I asked him what he was doing and he said "I'm trying to make straight the bumper", and in that case broken English was the least of his problems.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jDUVtUA7rg
"Perun" used to be a video game streamer but thanks to the Russia-Ukraine war he now one of the best warbloggers and even does appearances together with top generals and pros like Anders Puck Nielsen.
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 not too bad. Name changes (marriage, etc), gender changes, out of state moves, and other "edge" cases can be quite a bit more painful.
And of course, updating addresses with utilities/ISP and other non-governmental entities varies quite a bit.
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.
But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse. Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also positive example like the Corona app where the design was changed after criticism.
That said, I don't think a municipal government has many degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)
It's not about protecting privacy. Germany saves more data than ever and it's openly spying on it's citizens.
I think it's a mixture of inability and indifference in the government
If I move to a different place in the US, I don't have to register with the city or state.
(Of course, if I have a driver license, I do have to update that address within some period of time, and, if moving to a different state, I'd have to get a new one.)
And that was actually a much-missed office hours system. If you had to see someone without waiting months, you waited from the middle of the night. Now you’re just screwed.
The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the ministry of health and education.
For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start.
Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files. Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used it.
After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same.
I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I have a raspberry pi I do not use.
Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an unrelated application with the actual information from school. It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application every year. The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but blocking everything else.
Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the deadline.
Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10 years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is explitely stated that the app will not be used for identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be used for?
I am angry because despite my utter love for my country, anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots who have no idea about what a computer is.
I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so that my patriotism can revive.
Also in Germany.
[0]: https://blacksprucehound.com/2018/01/16/redneck-vehicle-fram...
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.
In addition, e.g. CCC is one of those groups with well-educated tech talent but they have kind of a history getting criminalized by the German governments (starting from the 80s). As a result, they (to me) seem to be rather anti-government and focus on very valuable tech workshops and tech education for interested civilians.
What exactly would you privatise? (read: hand over obscene profits to a rent-seeking private entity).
And thank god for that, because there’s also an ungodly number of consultants milking the Australian taxpayers for all we’re worth.
That's a senior developer salary in Portugal (in Farfetch, no less).
I did them in Spain. Honestly German taxes were a bit more intimidating (so many fields, tk is different) but in the end you only need a few. As a salaried employee you can use taxfix and get it done in 20 min.
In Spain they were easier, but also I could not expense many things as a contractor. In Spain they would send you a draft, and you can request a meeting to help you do them (few people do this). This was smooth. You show at your timeslot and a friendly person is there for any questions. Before you leave, the definitive version is done.
I ended up reworking the entirety of my many-paged lease agreement at my last apartment so that I and my roommates could more easily fill it out and revise mistakes. I recently had to fill out a new patient questionnaire, and while someone had clearly tried to digitize the form, it was rife with issues that made the inputs unusable that I had to fix (such as radio buttons being mis-grouped).
Making a functional PDF form is not only nice for those filling them out, but also allows for easier automation when ingesting the forms. I wish that those whose entire jobs revolve around the processing of forms would put in a modicum of effort when creating them. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of these things for the layman who hasn't touched digital UI stuff.
What happens if you don't? I'm from EU, I should be able to move and live within it wherever I please.
EDIT
Apparently you can't open bank account or enter any legal agreement without anmeldung.
Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party doesn't need to care.
I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).
Another function of government is, like it or not, in somehow providing legal tender and in the process regulating it. Efficient free markets need fiat medium of exchange, however counterintuitive that might seen. Because otherwise the trading parties would not have any common value reference, and sooner or later the market itself will create something akin to a government and state. Which is well, probably how the idea of governments and states started some thousands of years ago.
While some countries provide a non-binding translation for many things, someone could set the precedent in court that the English translation if relied on by enough people is somewhat binding or similar - Result would be two slightly different (mis-)understandings about the law, due process and bureaucracy from official sources. That could be have unforseen consequences.
Just because many people happen to speak English doesn't mean everyone has to.
Can't say that ever happened to me.
Like the rest of the world.. I mean, we have companies like Microsoft, who basically live from staying compatible back till the beginning of time. Cooperate-world is strongly focused on stability and the ability to control your turf, everywhere.
> But it misses an additional layer of thinking, which is that not changing is even more costly sometimes.
Interesting how you completely missed the point. I was not talking about the change, but the way it happened, and the reasoning for it.
> it is that the process was clunky and required expensive humans in the middle.
Actually, we don't know that. We know nothing about the reasoning for the process, or the details, or the company.. We only know the story of a 3rd party, who stumbled over their own ignorance.
> If it could be easily automated in Python, it could also have been easily automated somehow else
Yes, unless the company has some inhouse-knowledge of using python, it should have been automated with something else, like VBA, which they already are using. And it should have been done by someone from the company, not some strange from outside. As a long-running company, it's nonsense to use technology for inhouse-task, where you have no expertise at hand. This is just harmful and an additional burden longterm.
Amagergade 5, 1. th.
1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that fixed"
2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK ≈ $0.093 / €0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N different options, with the most obvious being number one - "Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up"
3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting firms.
4. The consultants start to work with the department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the department/directorate is located.
5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months.
6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT department of the directorate.
7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years, until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting firm wins the new bid.
8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to consolidate products.
In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the single-page form.