Tech4Germany: Around the World of Government Tech in 70 Days
Like so many people, I regularly complain that I can’t submit BAföG applications online, can’t get an appointment at the Bürgeramt, and can’t find my way around any government websites. In my irritation, I’ve often thought: “With a group of clever young people and just a few weeks time, we could certainly do better!” When I learned about Tech4Germany via LinkedIn, I thought: finally! Finally someone, with the support of the Chancellery, has made it possible for motivated, tech-savvy young people to work on exactly these problems.
While I was studying psychology, I had already gained experience in user experience design and product management through jobs in various startups. After my graduation I had actually planned to return to a Berlin startup. The idea of working in public administration never occurred to me. But this is exactly the goal of Tech4Germany: to create a space in which young people with skills in software development, UX and UI design, and product management can imagine working on (and solving) challenges for the federal government.
The challenges
In collaboration with our partner, ITZBund (the IT service provider of the federal government), two projects were selected for the fellowship in advance. One concerned the redesign of the website zoll-auktion.de, on which authorities sell more than €80 million of goods every year. The second project, which I chose to work on, dealt with the federal user account known as Nutzerkonto Bund, a portal to access all digital administrative services of the federal government within the framework of the OZG implementation. OZG — one of many terms in administrative jargon that I had to first look up — stands for the Onlinezugangsgesetz, or Online Access Act, which requires all administrative services to be digitally available by 2022.
For me, this project was an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the administration’s digital presence. Not only did it have the potential to affect every individual citizen, but it was also an opportunity for us to deliver real added value through a user-centric approach. If we managed to ensure that only a small part of our work is incorporated into the end product, we would have achieved an unbelievable amount through the scope of the project alone.
But that’s not so easy with a project like Nutzerkonto Bund. Since 2014, a number of consultants, developers, and politicians have been working on the implementation of this user account, which has a budget of €500 million. Mega-projects of this nature don’t have the best track record in Germany (see the neue Personalausweis ID card or De-Mail), and it felt like this project had more potential starting points (or potential pitfalls) than we had time to explore.
We started by brainstorming functions that could be available in the ideal user account: a document repository for all important files, status updates for submitted applications, an inbox so that notifications no longer get lost in the mail, and many more. After numerous interviews with citizens, IT representatives of the federal states and municipalities, and the creation of user personas, we had to prioritize. Based on our user research, the biggest problem was clearly the incredibly complex user identification and registration process. Would you use Facebook if you first had to invest €100 in a card reader and the login still took over five minutes each time? This is exactly the kind of login process people have to deal with in many government websites and applications. Our main objective in the coming weeks was to tackle this challenge and convince those responsible for Nutzerkonto Bund that there had to be more user-friendly login alternatives.
In the following week, we delved into researching best practices in other countries (in many places, similar digital access portals have been around for years, e.g. in Estonia or Turkey). Gradually we became experts in various registration and login options, such as the new national identity card (nPA), video identity and two-factor authentication, as well as the relevant regulations of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) — often known as the people who ensure that government IT projects are so secure that they can hardly be used.
After two and a half weeks we had created our first two-factor authentication prototype, which was ready just in time for dinner at the Chancellery with Federal Minister Helge Braun. Helge Braun was incredibly enthusiastic about holding something real, however rudimentary, in his hands — after all, the Nutzerkonto project had been running for four years without building any preliminary prototypes. In the end, Helge Braun devoted over four hours to us instead of the planned hour — something even our ITZBund colleagues had never experienced before. With renewed motivation, in the weeks that followed, we immersed ourselves ever more deeply in the subject, continued to work on our prototypes, and converted our first drafts into code.
In between, we had many interesting conversations about the vision of a digital government with leading politicians such as Dorothee Bär, State Minister for Digitization, and Klaus Vitt, CIO of the Federal Government. Towards the end of the fellowship we went on a trip to Estonia and had conversations with Siim Sikut, CIO of the Estonian government, Kaspar Korjus, founder of the e-Residency program, and Marten Kaevats, digital consultant for Estonia.
In Tallinn, we were able to see for the first time what eGovernment looks like if it is consistently thought through and implemented. Digital identity, e-signatures and taxes that only take three minutes have been part of everyday Estonian life for years. In fact, we were told that three minutes still feels far too long for a tax return and they intended to automate everything in the future.
After our stay in Estonia, we arrived in Germany again feeling like we were back in the digital Stone Age. Since there were only a few weeks left until our final presentation in the Federal Chancellery for Helge Braun and representatives of the ITZBund, the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF), we sought to summarize all our results and recommendations clearly and comprehensively. You can judge for yourself here if we succeeded in doing so.
All in all, everyone involved was more than satisfied with the results of our two teams and it was clear that the fellowship would be repeated in 2019 and Helge Braun would remain patron!
For me, these 10 weeks were unbelievably exciting. As fellows we always had a lot of fun alongside our work, whether at dinner together, during team events, or on our trip to Estonia. In addition, our mentors Rachel Simpson (Senior UX Designer at Google) and Sebastian Meier (Lead Data Scientist at Technologie Stiftung Berlin) and our team’s ITZBund partners Dirk Wegener and Johannes Käfer were the best supporters we could have asked for. All in all, I don’t believe there’s anywhere else I could have gotten such a deep insight into government digitalization in such a short time.
Become part of Tech4Germany!
If you are interested in joining us in 2019, apply here! The first application phase starts on January 27th.
Originally published in German at medium.com on January 16, 2019.
