I digitalized Berlin's registration form

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/anmeldung-form-filler

by nicbou • 3 years ago

555 310 3 years ago

nicbou31• 3 years ago

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.

FirmwareBurner3• 3 years ago

The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong, and secondly, digitizing bureaucracy means increased efficiency which means less public servant jobs and they don't want that. What they want is more bureaucracy and more cushy public servant jobs pushing pencils on great benefits. If they wintered to fix bureaucracy they would have don it already.

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.

thaumasiotes2• 3 years ago

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.

VanTodi• 3 years ago

to be fair, it's way easier now to do your taxes (as a private person). We can do it completely online with no paperwork involved and its actually quite alright. so some innovation is happening, even in the public sector.

what happens in the company is another thing. it really depends on the people working there.

snehk• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, but that's just complete nonsense.

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.

mattmanser• 3 years ago

When you're a bit older and have done more consultancy, you'll realize this isn't the case.

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.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

The problem is that the "political will" to change (especially in things like this which is municipal) is mostly due to older people who haven't filled an Anmeldung in 30yrs at least and who probably still pay 500EUR for a 3 bed apartment and thinking it's expensive

fh973• 3 years ago

German administration is already understaffed, and this will get much worse due to increasing retirement and additional complex regulations and laws.

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.

ulfw• 3 years ago

None of that is true.

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...

tmpX7dMeXU• 3 years ago

As someone that haven’t ever been to Germany or interacted with any German government, but works with different governments a lot, it has really become apparent that Germans love telling the rest of the world how bad their bureaucracy is, then go on to describe something that sounds entirely common. It’s like New Yorkers telling you how good and unique bodegas are, and it turns out they either grew up in New York City or some one-traffic-light town and just haven’t had any worldly exposure.

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

The German authorities have no incitive to digitize and fix the broken bureaucracy because for one, in their mind there's nothing wrong with it because Germany is Europe's wealthiest country so it can never be wrong

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.

PurpleRamen2• 3 years ago

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.

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.

lasagna_coder4• 3 years ago

This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de as their applications close end of the month.

Bayart2• 3 years ago

I've been planning to move to Berlin and your site [1] is a life-saver.

[1] https://allaboutberlin.com

Bissness2• 3 years ago

Best of luck finding an apartment

klaustopher3• 3 years ago

The worst thing is that this differs by state. In Hessen the communal IT provider (ekom21) offers the service to fill out the entire form online in a UI that resembles yours, but then you still have to go to the "Meldeamt" to sign it (although you do that digitally on a tablet there) because currently the "schriftform" (means: manually signed) is required. It might be changed in the future to be "textform" (means: must be written down) and then it can happen completely digitally.

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"

nicbou31• 3 years ago

In France, they have the postman come to your house and verify your identity. It's such a brillian way to verify things without wasting anyone's time.

toddmorey• 3 years ago

This is great! Impressed by your work to make arriving in Berlin easier, especially for foreigners.

Angostura2• 3 years ago

Just a quick thank you. I don't live in Germany, so it doesn't affect me. But I'l sure you will make a lot of people's days just a little less miserable - so thank you from then. Nice write-up, too.

raister• 3 years ago

Now they'll think: "it's time to change the form"...

VSerge• 3 years ago

yup, I can imagine some adversarial changes being made to the effect that the document generated by this online form can be refused by the administration in question.

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Such people exist. I have a few acquaintances in city government. They're interested in helping, although some are either busy, tangled in red tape, or unimaginative. They are definitely not hostile through.

tanbog5• 3 years ago

Lol. My berlin friends will live this.

cinntaile• 3 years ago

Nice job. I will upvote anything that reduces the unnecessary bureaucratic load on citizens.

melx4• 3 years ago

Kudos on the nice UX for dropdown with countries. I wish more websites do it. Usually, it's "United States" at the very top, and 194 other countries in a loooooong list.

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

That's... exactly what this is as well? Are you getting a different UI that I'm not?

mkreis• 3 years ago

If you have different browser language settings, then yes, you are getting a different UI.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Oddly enough it doesn't list countries where most people are likely to come from right at the top. That makes it ill designed still.

melx4• 3 years ago

The OP wrote this is based on "navigator.languages" feature in the visitor's browser. So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown.

martin_a• 3 years ago

I think this has been taken care of:

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

I use navigator.languages to guess the user's possible countries. It's not perfect, but the cost of guessing wrong is low. I've used the same technique to show currency conversion tooltips in the content.

TheHappyOddish2• 3 years ago

Even better are the ones where you pick your country and the 'state' dropdown is still US states and 'Other', and you're prompted for a 'zip code'. What does American mail have to do with a zip anyway?

kelnos5• 3 years ago

Not sure if your question is flippant/rhetorical, but in case you're genuinely curious: ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, the initiative that set up the "postal codes" that we call ZIP codes.

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.

helboi42• 3 years ago

Ooo yes there's nothing I hate more than an address form for a business that clearly works internationally being only really compatible with US addresses. My "state"? At least Germany or something has states the UK does not. My "city"? In the UK cities and towns are distinct and I am from a town. I have very occasionally actually then not been able to proceed because someone has not actually configured the "zip code" field to accept postal codes that include letters.

sagarm• 3 years ago

You know you can type the first few letters of the entry you're looking for while the drop-down is open right?

iknownothow• 3 years ago

I hope this starts a trend of digitizing many aspects of the German bureaucracy, official or otherwise.

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.

olabyne• 3 years ago

In France we have a fair amount of bureaucracy too. But a least the government is trying to digitalize a bit now. Taxes are quite easy, healthcare is ok, some documents like car registration too. But we have a long way to go for all the local weird processes (from Region, Departementn and cities)

brnt• 3 years ago

The budget for the digitization ministry was just slashed down to 1%, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.

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?

nicbou31• 3 years ago

That's right. They slashed the budget from 300 million to 3 million.

FearNotDaniel• 3 years ago

German apartments don’t have apartment numbers. If your name is not on your mailbox, postal workers can’t deliver your mail.

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...)

spiderfarmer• 3 years ago

Adding small texts about the importance of the input you provide is missing in so many forms. OP handled it perfect here.

TRiG_Ireland• 3 years ago

Whereas the Irish post office (An Post) seem to pride themselves on solving puzzles to deliver to ambiguous addresses.

jpsouth• 3 years ago

Same for England from what I gather, probably not on the same scale as Ireland though.

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)

Tenoke2• 3 years ago

German apartments don’t have apartment numbers

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.

xioxox• 3 years ago

They don't always. For my flat in a small block, it's "Erdgeschoss rechts" or EGR, in the contract or for the electricity.

henvic• 3 years ago

This reminds me that recently I, here in the Netherlands, had to send a letter and made the mistake of writing it in the wrong format (to/from), but still the address in where it should be 'from' was really small, and 'to' was really big. To make things clear, I decided to just prefix "To: " and "From: " thinking it would be enough.

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)...

croisillon2• 3 years ago

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.

ComputerGuru5• 3 years ago

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

flurdy2• 3 years ago

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 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.

throwaway_no2• 3 years ago

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 their hardest to figure out who the packages should be sent to.

ahoka• 3 years ago

I have a theory that if a postman wants to deliver something, then it will be delivered. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

prennert• 3 years ago

As long as the postcode is complete, there are only few full addresses that the postie needs to check against. If you got a letter the same day to your full address and your name is unique, then it would be fairly quick to find you.

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 ;)

purpleidea• 3 years ago

Are you related to Luc Boulianne from Montreal? (Worked at McGill.)

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Nope. I'm from a different region, although I lived in Montreal too.

corbezzoli• 3 years ago

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!”

ComputerGuru5• 3 years ago

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)!

ogou• 3 years ago

This is cool. The real trick is getting a Bürgeramt appointment to submit this form. The official portal for that is a punishing exercise in bad UX. Basically, there are very few appointments available, so you have to keep refreshing the calendar page and hope that one of the dates is linked. It took me 2 weeks of opening that page multiple times a day and refreshing over and over. It gets hammered by bots as well and if you don't click the link fast enough it will disappear. There are multiple bots available on Github and I think there is also a Chrome extension now. But, they all do the same thing (refresh the page) and will get your IP banned if you run them without long timers. I tried all of it and the only thing that worked was having a Favorite in mobile Safari that I opened whenever I had idle time. I finally got one in a coffee shop and nearly knocked the table over because I was so happy.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

I made a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder

Bissness2• 3 years ago

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 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.

ivan_gammel• 3 years ago

In Berlin you can usually book a same day appointment for some city services including registration in the morning at 8:00-8:05, when they release few more slots. Sometimes you may need to go somewhere like Alt Tegel quickly, but that worked for me several times.

abdusco• 3 years ago

The trick is to look for appointments early in the morning. People who think they won't be able to make it to the appointment that day cancel theirs and there's a bunch of openings every morning.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

This, it requires getting up around 6 AM or so, however there are always several slots made available for the same day, think last tickets sale for a concert.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

This is not true. I tested it before: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/berlin-buergeramt-experimen...

inductive_magic• 3 years ago

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 company, they seem to be fairly useful. I'm not sure if something similar exists for other regions in Germany.

bakuninsbart• 3 years ago

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 putting a major strain on all public services.

PinguTS• 3 years ago

The trick is not to go to the main registration side but to the small local offices in the outer areas. Like in Nuremberg not going into the city center but to Katzwang or Großgründlach.

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.

Vingdoloras• 3 years ago

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 session. Next, keep refreshing and checking the calendars every 30 minutes. Slots free up pretty often, but they're also full again soon after. If you're lucky, you can figure out when canceled appointments are entered into the system for your location (for mine it was 10AM every day). Around that time, there's a good chance you might even get a few slots that are only a week or two into the future. Once you figured out when slots open up, check around that time daily. Book the first slot you can get, then keep doing this for a few days and book any slot that is better than your previous one (but be nice and cancel the old slot).

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.

kioleanu2• 3 years ago

You can automate that with a browser extension that checks the page and plays a sound when it changed

seb1204• 3 years ago

You make great use of modern technology and ingenuity. Congratulations, everyone should do the same. Sarcasm end. As a German living abroad I look in horror at the stories I read. Where I live changing the official registered address is a log into the gov services site, change it and two weeks late I get a letter with ned address stickers for my driver's licence. The driver licence on my phone does not need a sticker obviously.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

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://github.com/nicbou/burgeramt-appointments-websockets

RileyJames• 3 years ago

This, with a little more automation, is exactly how I was able to book a covid quarantine hotel to return to NZ.

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.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai• 3 years ago

Try registering or deregistering a vehicle in a major German city. That once took me three months, because I simply couldn't get an appointment via the web interface set up especially for that purpose. Since Covid, the process is kind of broken, at least in my city.

csunbird• 3 years ago

You might have chosen the worst example for your point, it is super duper easy to register a car online. I registered both of my cars online, the papers arrived in a week but I was able to drive and insure the vehicle without any interruptions. They give you a printout to carry around while the original registration papers arrive, but the police already knows whether the car is registered or not and will not bother you.

Goz3rr• 3 years ago

I ran into something similar as a Dutch person trying to buy a car from Germany. The initial plan was to drive the car back from Germany, but to do this I had to get an export license plate. This can only be done in the municipality where the car was sold, and they told me I was lucky because I could get an appointment quite quick, which was a month and a half from now. I would also have to bring the car to the Straßenverkehrsamt. How I would have gotten the car there was also a mystery to me, as I did not have a license plate and to get a license plate I would have to bring the car there. If I did somehow manage to do that though, I would have to get a physical license plate made and then get temporary insurance. Not a single German insurance company said they could insure the temporary license plate, as I was not already an existing customers of theirs. I ended up just renting a car transporter and bringing it home that way.

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.

nottheengineer2• 3 years ago

There are red license plates for this exact case. Car dealerships generally have them to allow for test drives and bureaucracy drives.

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.

vasco• 3 years ago

To be honest though as a foreigner living in The Netherlands who doesn't speak a word of Dutch past "lekker", your bureaucracy and general services are probably one of the best in the world. Even your weird medical system is amazing when you actually need help - which I did and got top tier care, extremely fast. The Netherlands should just export their whole system to all of Europe, including the way information is documented in English in every official website.

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.

CalRobert4• 3 years ago

That brings to mind the romance of waiting in the immigration queue in Dublin at 4 AM with my wife so we could get registered by the end of the day. https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/20853936/ . Simpler times.

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.

fsniper2• 3 years ago

That appointment system is the worst online registration system ever. In fact I suggest people having trouble to move outside of the Dublin area to avoid it. Then you would only need to call the garda and an immigration officer handles everything. You just visit the station on the appointed date with your documents.

I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.

m_fayer• 3 years ago

I did that in Berlin about a decade ago and I think that only stopped happening here around 2018. I have fond memories of thermoses, multiple layers, a long grumpy queue trying to keep itself warm in pitch darkness. And then when the doors open, everyone rushes in to grab one of the few paper appointment tickets. Didn’t manage? Then try again the next day.

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.

gorbypark• 3 years ago

I am always in a similar situation in Valencia (Spain) when trying to book appointments. Fortunately, there is an integrated appointment system here and it's fairly trivial to automate checking for open appointments using their API. I can usually get one in a few hours by checking once per minute for free slots.

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.

wdb3• 3 years ago

Hah, yeah, renewing ID card or passports needs to be planned well ahead. I think my government advices few months ahead of expiring.

G3rn0ti• 3 years ago

German here and a Berlin "native". In Germany, it is common knowledge that Berlin bureaucracy sucks even more so than on average. Part of it has to do with (Western) Berlin's history of being an island receiving a lot of subsidies. Nowadays, after re-unification, it still receives a lot of federal subsidies but for being the new country's capitol. As a consequence, Berlin's public sector is relatively large but not in the relevant branches and also lacking really competent personnel. So while Berlin spends Billions on paying public servants it cannot even maintain its basic public services, sadly.

I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).

morsch2• 3 years ago

I can get an appointment for a new ID next week. Major city in Germany. Ymmv.

wheybags• 3 years ago

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?

reacharavindh• 3 years ago

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 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.

emj2• 3 years ago

It sounds really nice when you say it like this, I've always felt bad about all the hoops you have to go through as a foreigner in the Nordics. I wish I had time to rate countries on different bureaucracy flows like the ones you list; child care, immigrant, bank account, id theft, police report, filing and paying taxes as a employee, handling sales tax. You get so blind to these small inefficiencies.

Mashimo• 3 years ago

As a German living in Denmark I often wonder why we Germans don't do it a bit like the danes .. it's just a hop over the border and ask them ;_;

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.

fabian2k• 3 years ago

Registration is very useful, e.g. it means that you can easily vote in all elections without any additional steps. You automatically get a notification in your mail and don't have to do anything else to vote.

Tenoke2• 3 years ago

In 2020 I did my Anmeldung by just sending them an email and not going in-person. Too bad they didn't keep the Covid workaround even after setting it up.

matttproud• 3 years ago

Bureaucracy in Germany felt to be equal in magnitude to what I was used to from the United States (which is to say: bad), but the character of the bureaucracy's toil in Germany felt incredibly archaic.

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.

kelnos5• 3 years ago

I'm surprised to hear that. As far as I know, the US doesn't have anything quite as ridiculous as this particular thing, at least not for something routine as moving to a new house.

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Don't forget to ask for a pension payments refund! https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund

emj2• 3 years ago

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 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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

you need to save the form as a PDF or a readable text file

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.

ComputerGuru5• 3 years ago

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.

graup• 3 years ago

This is cool! Note that this problem is fairly specific to Berlin (and probably some other places in Germany). I just moved to Heidelberg, and this city offers registration appointments both via video chat as well as in-person, with slots available next day.

konschubert6• 3 years ago

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.

lasagna_coder4• 3 years ago

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 or cultivate attitudes towards work. Beyond that, in developed democracies like Germany, what gets funded long enough to be pushed to production can depend on election cycles and public opinion. Additionally, the big 4 have a big presence in developed countries and they often get these 100 million <currency> contracts to do stuff like that and... enough said.

konschubert6• 3 years ago

yes, this isn't against Germany specifically.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

This is a major problem. It's hard to attract talent when you have low incomes and an inflexible work culture. The incentives just aren't there.

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...

kebsup• 3 years ago

In Munich, the legal requirement is to register within two weeks, but the waiting time to schedule an appointment is more than two weeks. Luckily, no-one cares. Some of my Erasmus classmates did not register at all.

lasagna_coder4• 3 years ago

I think this is uniform across Germany, and I think the legal requirement might be either be registered or have an appointment to be registered, similar to other legally required appointments, which (from my understanding) causes issues regarding endless-reschedule loopholes.

prasoonds• 3 years ago

It took me over 3 months to register (which is shocking in itself) - perhaps things are not so dire in Munich

pratio• 3 years ago

Amazing! I've always admired your work, allaboutberlin is a fantastic resource.

2716057• 3 years ago

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 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.

senand• 3 years ago

I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but alas, it unfortunately is not.

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

Except it won't be a raspberry pi, because one of the people will have convinced upper management that the load MAY be excessively high so it needs to be a mainframe grade high available cluster that will need to be requisitioned first.

kakwa_• 3 years ago

Given the project will probably take 10 to 15 years to be completed, honestly, they are probably not wrong.

By the time it's ready for production, the latest Raspberry Pi will probably be about as powerful as the fancy cluster.

brap2• 3 years ago

Yet for some reason Europeans feel so strongly against privitization of public services

nisa5• 3 years ago

Most of these shitty online services are already run by private consulting companies that burn your tax money.

jamil7• 3 years ago

Which is a good thing, since it's ultimately a failed concept.

Escapado2• 3 years ago

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 last time I called the tax office the woman on the phone told me she can't answer a specific question I had because she would need to get my printed out file for that from the cabinet down the hall so I will have to call again later. 27 years. This is where we're at.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Elster is still among the best digital products Germany has to offer. Pretty much everything else is worse.

mejutoco2• 3 years ago

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). 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.

jcarrano2• 3 years ago

The part about typing it again by hand and printing it is very real!

nisa5• 3 years ago

It's scary - if you apply for government student assistance you can apply online and it get's printed out - they had to employ people for printing! https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-bafoeg...

nisa5• 3 years ago

Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy: It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is usally works like this:

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Another problem is data protection law

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.

fbn79• 3 years ago

Same for Italy... just add more shit

nforgerit2• 3 years ago

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 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.

jlangenauer• 3 years ago

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.

croes• 3 years ago

Especially because the main criteria is the price.

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.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

My buddy at Volkswagen and deutsche bank would like to have a word

dauertewigkeit• 3 years ago

Both you and the GP are correct. I know of instances of both scenarios.

mawadev• 3 years ago

That is true and in the end the Chief-Executive-Intern-Junior-Fullstack-Developer from hungary/poland/croatia/romania will do it for the german consulting company bc in-house german developers are too expensive.

BurningPenguin• 3 years ago

Maybe in the North, but in Bavaria it's the "good buddy" scenario.

isaacremuant• 3 years ago

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.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

This Youtube describes how that scenario plays out in defense contracting in Germany

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.

ulnarkressty• 3 years ago

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.

Jean-Philipe• 3 years ago

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 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.

nisa5• 3 years ago

Very happy to hear that! Heard similiar stories but usally it's on a lower level where things can go right more often than not. The bigger the projects the bigger the problems.

danjac• 3 years ago

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.

jskherman• 3 years ago

I believe this is just reality for a lot of Governments with procurement biddings. Just replace here the IT solution with other projects like construction (very profitable or so I hear), mining, office supplies like laptops, and etc.

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.

hit8run• 3 years ago

Detailed insider information! One detail missing: you forgot fax support.

askonomm• 3 years ago

Coming from Estonia it is hard to believe how Germany still requires you to show up at government entities. I thought Germany was a very advanced country. I've done everything online for the past 10 or so years, having to only show up to the police to retrieve my new national id card or passport once it's ready, but every other service is entirely online: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/

patrickk2• 3 years ago

A lot of the bureaucracy is a badly disguised jobs program. There would be so many people out of work if there was actual work to reform some of these ossified government services.

odiroot• 3 years ago

You forgot to mention that McKinsey gets involved.

rad_gruchalski• 3 years ago

When the wind stops, the form goes offline because the Pi uses 100% renewables. Last month the form went offline during a windy period because the neighbours complained about the wind noise the micro-sized windmill was producing: nimby.

throw71649• 3 years ago

Actually the whole government digitalization in Germany isn't as backwards as it seems. In some cases it might be even cutting edge solutions. One positive example is for instance Elster, the tax declarations are paperless since years, saving lots of money for tax consultants.

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)

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

I am not sure why you keep calling France "Germany :)

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.

bafe• 3 years ago

The buddy thing (and most of the other aspects) is the same for Switzerland. Additionally, you need to integrate 26 systems built with different technologies, one for each Canton. And some of them won't even have an API but will upload the data using CSV in a FTP folder

hansoolo• 3 years ago

Spot on!

TrackerFF• 3 years ago

Here's how we would do it in Norway

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.

schacon• 3 years ago

We did this as well several years ago, even with an iOS app, a guide to the process and a German cheat sheet: https://amty.io

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Yes! I used to link to it. I'm also a big fan of Chatterbug.

For the appointment, there's this: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder

burren• 3 years ago

What libraries did you use in Vue for the UI components? Interface is so clean.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

It's all made from scratch.

0xCaponte2• 3 years ago

Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't now we needed.

Caoste2• 3 years ago

Love this! Someone should start building a hub for such tools that help you deal with our german bureaucracy.

Caoste2• 3 years ago

This is great! We should have a hub of such tools that help you deal with our german bureaucracy!

0xCaponte2• 3 years ago

Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't know we needed.

fl73052• 3 years ago

"The Bürgeramt also wants to know that you live on the second floor on the right."

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...

kharak• 3 years ago

I've never known these kinds of systems exist. Love it. Like a common interface or index. Something like this should be implemented everywhere.

morsch2• 3 years ago

People leave that out, so they get asked (in German) during their appointment.

Can't say that ever happened to me.

raybb• 3 years ago

Reminds me of last year when I made a small site to help find appointments slots for the municipality in Brussels.

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...

nicbou31• 3 years ago

I did that too: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme...

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.

jcarrano2• 3 years ago

While I laud your effort, having had to do such a chore myself[1] you are missing the point of bureaucracy. The whole point is to make work for bureaucrats, and the easier and more pointless it is, the better. There are also other issues remaining, like the fact that you need to involve your landlord[2].

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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

This is not true. Civil servants hate drudgery as much as anyone else, and there plenty of work to go around. The chief complaint of Ausländerbehörde employees is that the work keeps piling up.

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.

sublimefire• 3 years ago

I used to work in a small company that digitized paper/pdf forms. We used json schema forms in React which allowed us to recreate complicated schemas along with the conditionals to show/hide sections and do complicated calculations. The forms would be rendered on the fly based on the underlying schema.

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.

lzzzam• 3 years ago

Lovely project! Same annoying form in Austria as well. Thanks for it! Does the tool also suggest how to properly fill the form when you have your main residency in another country?

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.

dctoedt• 3 years ago

For some U.S. tales, e.g., the challenges of digitizing California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) sign-up process, see the excellent Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy CTO of the United States and now the founder of the non-profit organization Code For America. [0]

(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...

[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1

kwanbix• 3 years ago

As a foreigner who moved to Berlin 6 years ago, congratulations.

This is brilliantly done.

It is so crazy that the biggest economy in Europe is so non-digitalized.

abujazar• 3 years ago

This is good design. I love when developers are primarily designers.

based-nerd• 3 years ago

LOL. Big Government in action is exhilarating to watch.

I wonder what would be more difficult, getting your owners to adopt your digitization or to abolish the requirement altogether.

Its probably racist anyway.

aforty• 3 years ago

You want people to not register and let the city know that they are residing there?

sib2• 3 years ago

Sure, why not? As long as the country knows that they are in-country...

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.)

gabeidx• 3 years ago

I've used All About Berlin several times during my years in Germany, it's an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to live there.

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!

mo_42• 3 years ago

I appreciate your work much. I think it would really be a pleasant experience completing not only the Anmeldung but other things you provide on allaboutberlin.com.

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?

lippihom• 3 years ago

My German passport expired a few years ago and in Berlin the wait time to get a new one was months. Flew to Boston for work (on my American passport), and had the German embassy there do it... in 48 hours. Berlin is peak-level incompetent.

wdb3• 3 years ago

Wow that's quick! I am impressed you were able to get an appointment at the embassy. Embassy is worse than the local city council back home.

My country they say new ID card or passport within four weeks but never happened.

wdb3• 3 years ago

Doesn't sound much different from Switzerland

stackedinserter• 3 years ago

It's a solution of a problem that shouldn't exist at the first place.

thelastgallon• 3 years ago

These digitization/paper-work/wait problems, 1000x for immigrants.

Added bonus of uncertainty and significant stress, you never know how these delays in processing are going to impact your status.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

Yes, and this is why I spend so much time on those problems. Germans can afford to wait, but immigrants need everything at once and can't afford the delays.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

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.

tnolet• 3 years ago

You should charge $500 a pop for this. People will pay

nicbou31• 3 years ago

I'm sure they would, but this website is free by design.

xyzzy47472• 3 years ago

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

nicbou31• 3 years ago

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.

xyzzy47472• 3 years ago

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

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

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, 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.)

ComputerGuru5• 3 years ago

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...

alistairSH• 3 years ago

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 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.

nicbou31• 3 years ago

They put a sticker with your new address on the licence. The address change is not that bad honestly.

ComputerGuru5• 3 years ago

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.

kinnth• 3 years ago

You genius! This caused me so many headaches each year!

OliverJones• 3 years ago

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.

wwalexander• 3 years ago

Even just turning a PDF form into a properly-configured, digitally fillable and signable form is a massive usability increase, and of the forms I fill, I rarely encounter one with all fields properly editable from the outset. We're in a strange halfway place where everything is digital, printing is obsolete, everyone has asymmetric cryptography and biometrics in their pockets, but we're emailed forms that we must print, wet-sign, scan and email back (unless we're tech-savvy enough to edit PDF forms and the recipient is tech-savvy enough to accept digital signatures).

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.

scotty79• 3 years ago

When you move in Berlin, you must register your address.

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.

silexia• 3 years ago

Why don't people want to shrink the government and allow more personal freedoms and choices rather than deal with the nightmare bureaucracies detailed in so many comments here?

I digitalized Berlin's registration form

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