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I built a script that finds appointments at the citizens' office in Berlin. At first, it just collected stats. That was to test a theory that you have to check
by nicbou 4y ago
I built a script that finds appointments at the citizens' office in Berlin. At first, it just collected stats. That was to test a theory that you have to check early in the morning (turn out it's false).
Finding an appointment is notoriously difficult, and people often depend on the results of those appointments to start their life here. So I built a UI for the script and put it online. Not just code on GitHub but a live website everyone can use. It uses websockets to wait for appointments from the script running on a server.
It's been live for almost a year now. Thousands of people got an appointment that way. I got the city's blessing to keep it online, albeit with a restrictive poll rate.
It's really cool to see people recommend the tool to each other, and to work directly with the city.
When I return from vacation, I want to ask the city to extend the tool, and also translate it to other languages.
- culturestate 4y agoThanks so much for this tool; it saved me from untold frustration when I moved to Germany. I’m happy to see that the city blessed it.
- nicbou 4y agoThank you for the kind words! We met once, and it was interesting to hear why appointments are so broken. I left them with a deep sympathy for their situation. A good example is that people book multiple appointments and don't show up. Over 15% of appointments are no-show. However they can't ban people or set up any barriers that would disadvantage citizens. That being said, they're hard to work with, simply due to being too busy to respond. It's frustrating. But there are some encouraging developments happening. The creator of the booking system was put in a position to change things. We're supposed to meet soon, and I'm excited to see what will come out of it.