Dealing with the official bureaucracy in germany is in general quite cumbersome. The IT solutions provided by the government mostly reimplement the offline proc

Dealing with the official bureaucracy in germany is in general quite cumbersome. The IT solutions provided by the government mostly reimplement the offline processes in the online world. I fully agree that this seems ridiculously complex and time-consuming compared to the sleak UX we're accustomed to on the net. However due to the federal structure of germany your experience can vary wildly depending on in which state and city you live. I live in Munich and was recently pleasantly surprised how easy it was to request my postal voting documents for the upcoming elections. Took me only 30 seconds or so :) I think the city council of munich does quite a good job at innovating their IT infrastructure. Most notably the limux project [1] but in other areas like open data and open government as well [2]. Though there is of course still a lot of space for further improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de (german)