SPRIND launches citizen hackathon to end Germany’s painful bureaucracy

Germany has announced a new “citizen hackathon” aimed at replacing the country’s notorious bureaucracy with a more efficient digital public administration. The project is led by SPRIND, the federal agency developing the German national digital ID wallet and its ecosystem, and is inspired by Taiwan’s Presidential Hackathons.

The initiative, titled “Germany, what sucks, Germany, what’s up?” (Deutschland, was nervt? Deutschland, was geht?), invites citizens to submit issues and vote on projects and proposals that should be implemented.

The 30 most important topics will move on to the next round, during which innovators and tech developers gathered in SPRIND’s Civic Tech Teams will create concrete solutions. Citizens will then select 15 projects with the best potential with the help of a panel of experts. These projects will receive funding and support for further development over the next three months.

Finally, five teams will be chosen to implement their open-source software.

The project is due to kick off in April and will be led by SPRIND.SOCIETY, which focuses on social innovation. The ideas and software will be used to support digital citizen participation, education, social services, administration, health, environmental protection and more, according to Zahra Bruhn from SPRIND.

With these innovations, the agency wants to “relieve the budget and effectively strengthen the cohesion of our country,” Bruhn said at a recent conference, according to Heise.

Germany is taking a page from Taiwan’s playbook. The model for the new initiative is the “Presidential Hackathons” developed by the island nation’s first digital minister, Audrey Tang. The model, which brought civic innovation into the public sector, is now being implemented in other countries, including California.

SPRIND, fully known as the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, has been applying similar methods to Germany’s digital ID project.

Last year, the agency selected eleven companies to participate in its 3-month prototype competition in designing EUDI Wallet prototypes for German users. The four winning teams were declared in October, while SPRIND recently launched a sandbox for selected relying parties this week to test their ecosystem and implementation against the government wallet.

Article Topics

digital government  |  digital ID  |  Germany  |  government services  |  SPRIND