Digital dabei? – A Project Update

For several months now, we have been conducting research together with Berlin residents on the following question: How do people with limited digital access experience public administration, and what barriers do they encounter in this context?

The project "Digital dabei? - Digitale Inklusion in der öffentlichen Daseinsvorsorge gemeinsam gestalten" is a Citizen Science project. This means that residents of Berlin interview people, analyse the interviews together, and extract barriers from the collected experiences. Our Citizen Scientists have themselves experienced obstacles when trying to use digital administrative services, and they are interviewing further people from their networks and communities on this topic.

In December 2025, we introduced our Citizen Scientists to basic methods of qualitative social research in an introductory workshop. Since then, they have conducted interviews, documented conversations, and recorded their own experiences. The guiding question throughout has been: When and how do people reach their limits when trying to use digital administrative services?

The result is a body of data that has repeatedly surprised us – in its richness, the human stories it reflects, and the complexity of the issues it reveals.

Welche Hürden gibt es bei digitalen Verwaltungsangeboten? Darauf möchte das Projekt Digital Dabei? Antworten finden.

What the stories show

From the interviews, we have developed what we call Exclusion Stories: condensed narratives that place the experience of one person at the centre. Here are a few examples of cases collected by our Citizen Scientists:

• A person who waited six weeks for a letter from the immigration authority that never arrived. A hidden intermediate step in the online form had blocked the application without any indication appearing on screen.

• A person who spent two hours filling out a form for the State Office for Refugee Affairs on their phone, looking up every technical term as they went. ChatGPT was their only source of support.

• A social worker who, on behalf of a client, was unable to reach anyone at a district office for weeks – neither by email nor by phone – despite the name and number of the responsible caseworker being printed in an official letter.#

• But there are also positive examples: one person was able to apply for a residents' parking permit entirely online. All the information was available on a single page, the process was clear, and confirmation came quickly.

The problems uncovered may not appear new at first glance: frustration with language barriers, weeks of waiting without any response, contradictory information, poorly designed interfaces, and so on. But our material reveals something that is often overlooked in public debates about the digitalisation of public administration: there is no universal solution – neither "more digital" nor "more human contact". While some residents explicitly want human contact because forms are too complex or linguistically overwhelming, that same contact is an additional barrier for others. People who do not speak German often stand at the counter defenceless – unable to use a translation tool or look something up, and frequently dependent on the patience of the caseworker. This makes clear that what is needed is freedom of choice in the design of both digital and analogue services, taking the different lived realities of people seriously.

This is just one of many insights our material holds. What the upcoming joint analysis workshop with our Citizen Scientists will reveal, we will report here.

Systematic classification as a research foundation

Alongside the narrative processing, we have also systematically categorised the material along two dimensions: the type of authority – meaning which agency was involved or which service was needed (ranging from social benefits to immigration authorities and citizens' offices) – and the type of task, meaning what the person was fundamentally trying to do. Here we distinguish between one-off life events such as naturalisation, recurring administrative tasks such as submitting documents, information and orientation needs, and crisis-related situations under time pressure. This taxonomy helps us identify patterns: Do certain barriers cluster around certain types of authority? Are it primarily one-off life events where people struggle, for instance because they have no prior experience and the consequences of mistakes weigh particularly heavily?

The next step: the analysis workshop

Our Citizen Scientists will soon come together for another workshop. They will read the Exclusion Stories and annotate them freely: Where does the actual barrier lie? Is it technical, linguistic, structural, or emotional in nature? What would have helped?

The insights from this workshop will feed into the Inklusionsradar currently under development. It is intended to provide a systematic overview of which barriers occur most frequently and what those affected concretely call for.

In Germany, discussions about digital public administration tend to be dominated by a technical perspective: better portals, more user-friendliness, faster loading times. What gets too little attention are the structural questions: Who is being systematically excluded by digitalisation? Whose experiences inform the design of digital services?

We are looking forward to seeing what the workshop will bring. We will keep you posted.