Very interesting.
Thank you.
They would accept the lower salary that you have in the ministry?
As you said, you keep the architecting, architectural vision in your ministry, that would be then by non-engineer people, or would it be by engineers willing to accept…?
That’s an ongoing problem in Germany.
Because it turned out in Germany that we were never good at hiring engineers, therefore we outsourced a lot of engineering tasks, but didn’t have the skills in the ministries to assess the quality of the work being outsourced. I heard that this is also a problem with money.
You could do that, you have the latitude to do that because you created a new organization for them?
Because you can’t hire good people?
That you solved it by one-year contracts, is that true?
I do understand that. There’s another question that I wanted to ask, and I forgot, I heard that your ministry had problems getting enough staff and that you share a problem with German administration, that the rules for hiring people goes back to very ancient Japanese…
It often doesn’t work. In Singapore, everybody uses WhatsApp. There are so many alternatives, but they just don’t switch. In Germany, lots of people switched from WhatsApp to Signal or to Telegram. You never know. You cannot ask people to…
Interfaces.
That would be wonderful.
Rocket.Chat, I don’t know, all these different ones…
We use that also, in one of the research institutes where I am. We use only open-source stuff there and Matrix is one of them that we use.
Yeah, but Google Meet has no stable bandwidth.
Yeah, but that depends always on the ministry. That would be in the ministry of commerce, but ministry of justice used a different one. They could not communicate with each other for a while.
No, I use Zoom because when I choose…
Yeah. It didn’t work out at all for a while.
We had in German ministries, incompatible streaming services they would not allow to use the other one. During the pandemic, there were some ministries using the Cisco one, and another one…
Our data protection officer came to some agreement with them, so since then we can use it. Because our public service that was an issue there with how we would use.
How would I organize that once I’m back in Berlin? Could I do Zoom meetings with them?
It makes sense rather to talk later?
No. I’m leaving on the 25th of March, but I could also do later. If per face-to-face meeting is not doable in the next couple of days, I could also do a Zoom meeting.
Yeah, that would be wonderful, if I could.
I think that was it.
Do you have any questions?
That is still a bit vague, to say to have than being more in harmony with each other or technical…
I think my last question concerns, actually your indicators of success. How do you measure your own success as a minister?
Only in that field.
Generally, the relationship hasn’t changed. Because I heard that there is also more criticism now, that you face some criticism.
That was my question, has it changed in one way or another, the relationship?
Your relationship to civil society, you come from that world?
Yeah.
You are going to reform it?
Why did they not use it?
Another issue I’d like to mention is the eID project. Could you tell me a bit more about the state of things in this…?
That would be very nice.
Would I be able to talk to someone from this group?
How interesting. I didn’t see much online about that.
I’m just asking. [laughs]
Did the data act proposal, did it inspire you, or were you…?
That’s why you need a law?
I’m not sure if it will ever see light of the day, that’s still unclear, but to make it mandatory also for the private sector to share data it gathered?
This sharing?
Do you also observe that proposal of a data act on the EU level, have you looked at that?
Yeah, It’s doable, but the question is, are these practices, are they mandatory, are they defined somewhere?
We used examples with transport data, that when you count people and when you go to the urban fringe of cities, it’s less and less people who use that. Then there are moments where they intersect personal data and non-personal data.
Yes and no. In the long run, when you deal with big data, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish non-personal and personal data.
