Meetup: Filling the gaps

On 5 November, we ran the 7th meetup of our ongoing ‘Öffentliches Gestalten’ series.

This time, we invited 2 speakers to share how they fill gaps that the public sector left open. Our event invite said the following:

Public sector organisations don’t always manage to do what people expect them to. Sometimes, engaged members of civic society step in to fill the gaps. They develop offerings federal, state, or municipality governments could have created instead. Individuals or small teams then run and operate public services—in their personal time, without funding, and sometimes against the resistance of public bodies.”

As the first speaker, Lilith Wittmann introduced her work on Bund.dev, an API portal containing documentation on programming interfaces for administrative services and federal information. Lilith described how she and a small team got started, what value they have created and what obstacles they continue to face. She reflected on how they help the German government meet an EU open data directive.

The task as recorded.

As second speaker, Nic introduced his ongoing work on allaboutberlin.com, a website that explains Berlin’s bureaucracy for English-speaking immigrants in a straightforward and plain language.

Nic has been working on the website since 2017. During the talk, he explained how to create good content, walking through his 6-step process:

1. Get inspired
2. Think about it super hard
3. Research
4. Writing and editing
5. Release
6. Maintenance

Following their talks, Lilith and Nic joined a short discussion.

We asked: How do we fill other existing gaps? What may it take for government to take ownership of some of the identified gaps?

Both shared their view on the longlastingness of their efforts and how to create sustainable structures.

Some 60 people joined the event.

On Meetup.com, people gave the evening a 4.5 out of 5 rating.