I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.
It helps a lot that public agencies can now offer a so called IT Zulage of a few hundred euros to 1000 per months that brings salaries on par with the private sector. In my team, this worked wonders and we managed to get some really good people.
On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.
BWI has the same problem, I’ve been approached multiple times by them for this project, which from my knowledge is being intensely worked since many years.
Meanwhile, other countries have offered a web portal for years with a digital version of the Patsientenakte and all prescriptions in one place. Works. Not in Germany though.
> On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.
I rest my case.
Are you looking for more people?
Also, how fluent in German must one be?
(You can find the rate tables by doing a web search for the code listed next to “Entgelt/Besoldung.”)
I got a kick out of the fact that Street Cleaner came up in my search for “IT and Telecommunication:”
The jank was incredible and just using them you could feel the spaghetti code, incompetence and age. My advice would be to stay away as far as possible. As a user and as a developer.
Yes, I’ve seen some creepy stuff like 100kb of information on one line and a definition file saying from which column to each column one can find information, but we don’t do that.
Like I said, it’s getting better.
And now every project seems to maximum demands, minimum budgets and zero flexibility. To make matters even more absurd, we have a ridiculous amount of federal levels, each with their own responsibilities and "approaches" to digitalization (and responsibility to save money).
For example, my mom is an office worker on a city level. The neighboring city developed a software for some process related to state law and offered it to our city. Our city, being the genius it is, does approach this state mandated process a little bit different. Instead of using the software the neighboring city developed and adjusting to their (almost identical) process, they choose to make their own software. But because they have basically zero development experience and engineering resources, they are looking to outsource. But because they don't have the budgets, they are looking for government support programs (that apparently even exist).
So yeah, even easy things are over complicated here
I'd also guess that these projects are not very isolated but very integrated with a lot of other processes and internal projects, so it's not just about converting some specs into code in a vacuum and then leaving again.
The teams are often led by government officials who will do everything to keep things as they are to protect their position, of course with little to no repercussions.
I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.
So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.
Nobody forgot that, just that past successes are in no way indication of future successes.
Otherwise SV would have been in Germany/UK instead of California. But that hasn't happened.
Same how in the late '80s to early '90s everyone was saying that Japan's tech sector and economy would completely overtake the US's and yet that hasn't happened but the reverse happened. From then on US tech sector steamrolled everything. Will that last? Maybe, maybe not.
Not much consolance for the German people, who still have to deal with a lot of paper administration but a happy accident nonetheless.
All German productivity will end and even German language itself will be replaced by grunts and shrugs.
In the end, I got rid of my DMG Mori machine with its Siemens control and replaced it with a Taiwanese machine that functions reliably.
I think that's exactly why Matrix might be a good fit, as the technical federation aligns well with the pre-existing social federation. I'm really optimistic for that project!