| author | title | date | sitemap |
|---|---|---|---|
Lukas Rambold |
Public Sector IT: The Good Parts |
02-01-2021 |
false |
By founding a startup in public sector IT I wanted to contribute my software engineering skills where there is a lot left to do and where one can directly contribute to society. After working through that and witnessing the deep systemic issues in the public sector usually are not engineering issues, it is hard not to get discouraged and doubting the long-term survival of democratic governments. Here, I want to hightlight projects (free of criticism and hopefully independent of how much marketing each project did for itself) and system that work well, give hope and should inspire imitation:
- Stadt Bühl offer Jitsi Service to schools and other institutions with self-hosted infrastructure for free. No cloud or Microsoft required. Link
- The Citizen Registry Protocol XMeld is an example of a distributed citizen registry system with no single point of failure. It works relibaly such that if you register with a new municipality as your point of residence the old municipality and a dozen of other public institutions get notified.
- The reason why Google Maps and OpenStreetMap has nice data is because of the "Amt für Geodäsie". It has very reliable map data and offers this as open data to services and Open Source Project to cater to end customers. That could be a model of how good digital services can be developed in the future.
- Elster Login provides a secure and federatable Account that guarantuees a high truslevel (wrt. OZG) and is obtainable without additional hardware.
- NetzDG (even though controversial in content) provides an effective example of how the rule of law can be extended effectivley to the internet.
- CoronaWarnApp: Developed in a short amount of time, is one of the few examples when a government-led digital product development and was rolled out to >20 million citizens in a few weeks. Especially the fact that there was a public discussion about how the software should work in detail, gives a taste of how bigger public software projects in the future could be conducted. Especially striking complex trade-offs of decentralization vs. centrilization and their implications for functionality, cost and privacy will be issues that won't go away.
- OZG-Readiness-Levels: There is a quite helpful an concrete categorization of how 'digital' a public service is. (0) no information online, (1) information online (2) can be started with online interaction (3) human interactions are only nessecary in exceptiopns (5) fully online + there is no data entry nessecary for information the govt already has ("once only"). Until 2022 >400 services need to be available at level 3 (which is delusional). But thanks to this categorization nobody can talk themselves into lowering the definition of what an online service is and simply declaring that public sector has arrived in the digital era.
- JoinUp is a platform that aims to document public service standards in a common language to interoperability. While not remotley achiving this goal, it is generally underestimated how effective cross-country public service APIs with free reference implementations would be in lowering costs and progressing European integration.
- FITKO FIM Portal: FITKO for fostering collaboration in IT topics across federal levels. It has a Portal that presents a standard catalog of public services that is publicly accessible (+1) , offers standard documentation for other institution to start from (+1) and offers the possibility to download BPMN models for most services. In general modelling public services with BPMN is a horrrendously underrated strategy. With the right tools it could empower non-technical domain experts to model and adjust their services without having a new tender to a software provider, dramatrically shortening feedback loops.
I want this list to be an exhaustive overview of projects that point into so if you can make a good case why a project you know should be included write to me at lukas@rambold.de and I'll add it.
I'm hate analogies like "We are lagging behind" or "we have been sleeping". The good thing is that they acknoledge a deficency across some dimension to some other entity. The problem is that they imply the wrong reaction: "catching up". But if just "working harder" would have worked, one would have never fallen behind in the first place. The reaction should be to aim at even one or two more steps ahead. "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented"
I love your final statement wrt. to "catching up".