12 ms·

I digitalized Berlin's registration form

555 points by nicbou 3y ago

based-nerd 3y 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 3y ago
  You want people to not register and let the city know that they are residing there?
  - sib 3y 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.)
nicbou 3y 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y 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.
  - thaumasiotes 3y 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.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      The German state is already incredibly efficient at coming after you with threatening letters for not submitting the right tax paperwork in time on the 50 Euros earned form your online side-hussle. If only the same efficiency would get ported to everything else that benefits the tax-payer.
      - nicbou 3y ago
        They're so efficient that sometimes they'll come at you even when you did nothing wrong. My tax advisor had his accounts frozen and sued them for damages. The same happened to me because of a clerical error on their end. They freeze your account and it's up to you to figure out why.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      > It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness. Well, this turned dark pretty fast huh.
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        Well, it could also mean that the same number of bureaucrats take longer lunches.
    - nicbou 3y ago
      I'm reading Stasiland right now (strong recommendation), and I shudder to think of what the Stasi could do with today's means. 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.
- lasagna_coder 3y 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.
- Bayart 3y ago
  I've been planning to move to Berlin and your site [1] is a life-saver. [1]: https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com
  - Bissness 3y ago
    Best of luck finding an apartment
    - Bayart 3y ago
      Yeah, I know all about that. I've just seen my ex girlfriend go through the process of finding something nice that isn't excessively overpriced, which was exceedingly grueling, even more so considering that she makes 2.5x what I do. In the end the only decent opportunity was taking an appartement in her current building, skipping the entire selection phase as they already know her (which she knows is unfair). 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.
- klaustopher 3y 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 https://onlineantrag.ekom21.de/olav/zuziehen?mbom=6440003 [2]: https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid=3252.893.1 https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid... "Voranmeldung eines Zuzugs"
  - nicbou 3y 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 3y ago
  This is great! Impressed by your work to make arriving in Berlin easier, especially for foreigners.
- Angostura 3y 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 3y ago
Now they'll think: "it's time to change the form"...
- VSerge 3y 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.
  - nicbou 3y 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 3y ago
Lol. My berlin friends will live this.
melx 3y 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.
- gumballindie 3y 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.
  - melx 3y 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.
    - hk__2 3y ago
      > So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown. 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.
      - melx 3y ago
        Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-) 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.
        nicbou 3y ago
        As an official policy, I do not recognise the existence of Belgium. However I am Canadian and I speak French. It will recognise fr-CA as "Canada".
cinntaile 3y ago
Nice job. I will upvote anything that reduces the unnecessary bureaucratic load on citizens.
iknownothow 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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?
  - nicbou 3y ago
    That's right. They slashed the budget from 300 million to 3 million.
corbezzoli 3y 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!”
- ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y ago
  I made a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
Bissness 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - nicbou 3y ago
wheybags 3y 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?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- reacharavindh 3y 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.
  - emj 3y 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.
FearNotDaniel 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Whereas the Irish post office (An Post) seem to pride themselves on solving puzzles to deliver to ambiguous addresses.
  - jpsouth 3y 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)
- Tenoke 3y 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 3y 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.
purpleidea 3y ago
Are you related to Luc Boulianne from Montreal? (Worked at McGill.)
- nicbou 3y ago
  Nope. I'm from a different region, although I lived in Montreal too.
Tenoke 3y 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 3y 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.
- durnygbur 3y ago
  [dead]
- kelnos 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Don't forget to ask for a pension payments refund! https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund
emj 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y 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 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.
- ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y 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.
durnygbur 3y ago
[dead]
konschubert 3y 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_coder 3y 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.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    yes, this isn't against Germany specifically.
  - nicbou 3y 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...
    - tormeh 3y ago
      Not to mention being in favor of homeopathy. The only people who annoy me more than the greens is all the other major parties. Should have moved to the Netherlands...
kebsup 3y 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_coder 3y 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 3y ago
  It took me over 3 months to register (which is shocking in itself) - perhaps things are not so dire in Munich
pratio 3y ago
Amazing! I've always admired your work, allaboutberlin is a fantastic resource.
2716057 3y 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 3y ago
  I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but alas, it unfortunately is not.
- Cthulhu_ 3y 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_ 3y 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
schacon 3y 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 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.
- nicbou 3y 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 https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
burren 3y ago
What libraries did you use in Vue for the UI components? Interface is so clean.
- nicbou 3y ago
  It's all made from scratch.
0xCaponte 3y ago
Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't now we needed.
Caoste 3y ago
Love this! Someone should start building a hub for such tools that help you deal with our german bureaucracy.
Caoste 3y ago
This is great! We should have a hub of such tools that help you deal with our german bureaucracy!
0xCaponte 3y ago
Nicolas, you are the hero we didn't know we needed.
fl7305 3y 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-information-/dwelling-units-register/contents-of-the-register/ https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/real-property/property-inform... https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastighetsinformation/instruktioner_lagenhetsnumrering.pdf https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastigh...
- kharak 3y 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.
- morsch 3y ago
  > People leave that out, so they get asked (in German) during their appointment. Can't say that ever happened to me.
raybb 3y 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-checking https://blog.rayberger.org/automating-ixelles-appointment-ch...
- nicbou 3y ago
  I did that too: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointment 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.
jcarrano 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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-Digital-ebook/dp/B0B8644ZGY https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D... [1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1 https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1
kwanbix 3y 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 3y ago
This is good design. I love when developers are primarily designers.
gabeidx 3y 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!
deleted 3y ago
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mo_42 3y 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?
em1sar 3y ago
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lippihom 3y 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.
- wdb 3y 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.
wdb 3y ago
Doesn't sound much different from Switzerland
stackedinserter 3y ago
It's a solution of a problem that shouldn't exist at the first place.
thelastgallon 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
You should charge $500 a pop for this. People will pay
- nicbou 3y ago
  I'm sure they would, but this website is free by design.
xyzzy4747 3y ago
Is there an actual purpose for Germany requiring this other than allowing the Gestapo to track you down?
- nicbou 3y 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.
  - xyzzy4747 3y ago
    How is it poor taste? There’s a lot of history of German police arresting everyone who registered themselves as a certain demographic.
PaulHoule 3y 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.)
- ComputerGuru 3y 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-frame-straightening/ https://blacksprucehound.com/2018/01/16/redneck-vehicle-fram...
alistairSH 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y ago
  They put a sticker with your new address on the licence. The address change is not that bad honestly.
- ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y ago
You genius! This caused me so many headaches each year!
OliverJones 3y ago
There's a book by Jen Pahlka called Recoding America. https://www.worldcat.org/title/Recoding-America-:-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better/oclc/1338301096 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 3y 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 3y 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.
LIzzyytujghf 3y ago
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silexia 3y 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?

555 points by nicbou 3y 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 3y ago
You want people to not register and let the city know that they are residing there?
- sib 3y 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.)

nicbou 3y 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.

FirmwareBurner 3y 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.
- thaumasiotes 3y 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.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    The German state is already incredibly efficient at coming after you with threatening letters for not submitting the right tax paperwork in time on the 50 Euros earned form your online side-hussle. If only the same efficiency would get ported to everything else that benefits the tax-payer.
    - nicbou 3y ago
      They're so efficient that sometimes they'll come at you even when you did nothing wrong. My tax advisor had his accounts frozen and sued them for damages. The same happened to me because of a clerical error on their end. They freeze your account and it's up to you to figure out why.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    > It can (and usually does) mean that the same number of bureaucrats achieve all-new levels of intrusiveness. Well, this turned dark pretty fast huh.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Well, it could also mean that the same number of bureaucrats take longer lunches.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    I'm reading Stasiland right now (strong recommendation), and I shudder to think of what the Stasi could do with today's means. 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.
lasagna_coder 3y 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.
Bayart 3y ago
I've been planning to move to Berlin and your site [1] is a life-saver. [1]: https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com
- Bissness 3y ago
  Best of luck finding an apartment
  - Bayart 3y ago
    Yeah, I know all about that. I've just seen my ex girlfriend go through the process of finding something nice that isn't excessively overpriced, which was exceedingly grueling, even more so considering that she makes 2.5x what I do. In the end the only decent opportunity was taking an appartement in her current building, skipping the entire selection phase as they already know her (which she knows is unfair). 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.
klaustopher 3y 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 https://onlineantrag.ekom21.de/olav/zuziehen?mbom=6440003 [2]: https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid=3252.893.1 https://www.limburg.de/redirect.phtml?extlink=1&La=1&url_fid... "Voranmeldung eines Zuzugs"
- nicbou 3y 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 3y ago
This is great! Impressed by your work to make arriving in Berlin easier, especially for foreigners.
Angostura 3y 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 3y ago

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

VSerge 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y 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 3y ago

Lol. My berlin friends will live this.

melx 3y 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.

gumballindie 3y 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.
- melx 3y 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.
  - hk__2 3y ago
    > So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown. 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.
    - melx 3y ago
      Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-) 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.
      - nicbou 3y ago
        As an official policy, I do not recognise the existence of Belgium. However I am Canadian and I speak French. It will recognise fr-CA as "Canada".

cinntaile 3y ago

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

iknownothow 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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?
- nicbou 3y ago
  That's right. They slashed the budget from 300 million to 3 million.

corbezzoli 3y 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!”

ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y 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.

nicbou 3y ago
I made a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder

Bissness 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- nicbou 3y ago

wheybags 3y 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?

deleted 3y ago
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reacharavindh 3y 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.
- emj 3y 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.

FearNotDaniel 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Whereas the Irish post office (An Post) seem to pride themselves on solving puzzles to deliver to ambiguous addresses.
- jpsouth 3y 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)
Tenoke 3y 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 3y 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.

purpleidea 3y ago

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

nicbou 3y ago
Nope. I'm from a different region, although I lived in Montreal too.

Tenoke 3y 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 3y 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.

durnygbur 3y ago
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kelnos 3y 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.
nicbou 3y ago
Don't forget to ask for a pension payments refund! https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pension-payments-refund

emj 3y 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.

nicbou 3y 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 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.
ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y 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.

durnygbur 3y ago

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konschubert 3y 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_coder 3y 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.
- konschubert 3y ago
  yes, this isn't against Germany specifically.
- nicbou 3y 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...
  - tormeh 3y ago
    Not to mention being in favor of homeopathy. The only people who annoy me more than the greens is all the other major parties. Should have moved to the Netherlands...

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

pratio 3y ago

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

2716057 3y 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 3y ago
I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but alas, it unfortunately is not.
Cthulhu_ 3y 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_ 3y 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.
- deleted 3y ago

schacon 3y 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 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.

nicbou 3y 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 https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder

burren 3y ago

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

nicbou 3y ago
It's all made from scratch.

0xCaponte 3y ago

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

Caoste 3y ago

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

Caoste 3y ago

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

0xCaponte 3y ago

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

fl7305 3y 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-information-/dwelling-units-register/contents-of-the-register/ https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/real-property/property-inform... https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastighetsinformation/instruktioner_lagenhetsnumrering.pdf https://www.lantmateriet.se/globalassets/fastigheter/fastigh...

kharak 3y 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.
morsch 3y ago
> People leave that out, so they get asked (in German) during their appointment. Can't say that ever happened to me.

raybb 3y 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-checking https://blog.rayberger.org/automating-ixelles-appointment-ch...

nicbou 3y ago
I did that too: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointment 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.

jcarrano 3y 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.

nicbou 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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-Digital-ebook/dp/B0B8644ZGY https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D... [1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1 https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1

kwanbix 3y 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 3y ago

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

gabeidx 3y 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!

deleted 3y ago

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mo_42 3y 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?

em1sar 3y ago

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lippihom 3y 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.

wdb 3y 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.

wdb 3y ago

Doesn't sound much different from Switzerland

stackedinserter 3y ago

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

thelastgallon 3y 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.

nicbou 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

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

nicbou 3y ago
I'm sure they would, but this website is free by design.

xyzzy4747 3y ago

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

nicbou 3y 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.
- xyzzy4747 3y ago
  How is it poor taste? There’s a lot of history of German police arresting everyone who registered themselves as a certain demographic.

PaulHoule 3y 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.)

ComputerGuru 3y 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-frame-straightening/ https://blacksprucehound.com/2018/01/16/redneck-vehicle-fram...

alistairSH 3y 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.

nicbou 3y ago
They put a sticker with your new address on the licence. The address change is not that bad honestly.
ComputerGuru 3y 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 3y ago

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

OliverJones 3y ago

There's a book by Jen Pahlka called Recoding America. https://www.worldcat.org/title/Recoding-America-:-why-government-is-failing-in-the-digital-age-and-how-we-can-do-better/oclc/1338301096 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 3y 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 3y 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.

LIzzyytujghf 3y ago

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silexia 3y 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?