{"id":5388,"date":"2025-10-19T21:24:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T19:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/?p=5388"},"modified":"2025-11-17T19:27:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T18:27:35","slug":"week-181-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-13-17-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/2025\/10\/19\/week-181-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-13-17-october\/","title":{"rendered":"Week #181 at the Digital Service: Notes for 13\u201317 October\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week was an intense one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It included reviewing new projects, sketching staffing options, helping existing projects prepare for ministerial check-ins and presentations, and a few other tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thursday was the busiest day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joining the Digital Council\u2019s 12th meeting in Dessau<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Heading down to the city of Dessau \u2013 of Bauhaus fame \u2013 in the early morning, I showed up for the 12th meeting of the Digital Council of Saxony Anhalt at 10 am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were welcomed by the city\u2019s mayor in the Council Chamber of the town hall building. He shared how the mural in the space had been covered for decades and was only recently laid open. For some previous administrations, it was considered politically too sensitive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mayor\u2019s deputy for digital provided us with a somewhat dense overview of their efforts and challenges<\/a>. He shared with us some of the difficulties he and colleagues are facing with some 200 locked-in caseworking systems. None of them interconnected across services or life events. Only a portion of them can speak to outside APIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Change requests are often denied or put on a request board for years in the future. Many caseworking system vendors have a monopoly, or there is an oligopoly. Cities, even when teaming up, have little power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo: Sandra Pieper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As I learnt in a follow-up conversation later that day, my colleagues from our interoperability team had already interviewed the City of Dessau\u2019s digital lead. They picked up many of the same points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city and state are now exploring the option of bundling services. They conducted an investigation to determine how to merge operations and consolidate caseworkers\u2019 decision-making points into a single location. I asked to learn more about this. With a dozen municipalities merging their digital offerings and related operational capabilities, an applicant might technically receive an answer from Municipality 12 while applying in Municipality 1. Of course, that can all be shielded, but in effect, it would work in that manner. I asked how appeals would be handled and learnt that quite a lot still needs to be figured out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the London boroughs of Islington, Camden, and Haringey, digital operations ran in a merged fashion for about two years \u2013 from 2016 to 2018. But then, they were un-merged. I wonder what the main barriers were, and I am curious to hear more about the investigation in one of the future Digital Council meetings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When touching the topic of AI in local government, a member of the council shared one of the wildest stories I had heard yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wild #AI in gov\u2019t story ahead:A citizen received a letter from the revenue office about paying property tax on a plot of land in Bavaria.The problem was that she didn\u2019t own a property in Bavaria, and neither did anyone in her family.She refused. The revenue office insisted.1\/3<\/p>— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com)<\/a> 2025-10-16T11:28:38.628Z<\/a><\/blockquote>