Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND) is inviting citizens to propose and vote on open-source digital service projects intended to reduce bureaucracy, as part of a new SPRIND.SOCIETY initiative called “Deutschland, was nervt? Deutschland, was geht?”
SPRIND said the program is designed to collect input on bureaucratic pain points and turn that input into implementable software projects. The initiative is positioned as a citizen-driven pipeline: participants can submit problems, suggest solutions they would like to see, and vote on which projects should be implemented.
According to SPRIND, the first participation round begins in April and runs through four phases, from idea submission through project selection. The project site describes a goal of identifying 30 topics, narrowing to 15 project ideas, and committing to implement the five most popular projects by the end of the year.
The initiative also outlines specific participation methods and an intent to build reusable tooling. SPRIND said it plans to use digital participation approaches including Pol.is and quadratic voting, and to develop a reusable “participation stack” that could be applied in other settings. The program cites Taiwan’s experience with digital participation methods associated with Audrey Tang as an inspiration for the model.
While the initiative is framed broadly as a government modernization effort, the kinds of services that emerge from the process could touch identity and access workflows commonly found in public administration, depending on which problems and solutions are selected. SPRIND has not published a list of specific projects yet, instead emphasizing that citizens will shape priorities through submissions and voting.
SPRIND also frames the work as open source from the start, aiming for outputs that can be reused, audited, and improved over time. The initiative says it will develop a reusable participation stack alongside the projects themselves, signaling an interest in tooling that could support repeated rounds of civic input.
The SPRIND.SOCIETY effort reflects a continued push across Europe toward building public digital services in the open, with code reuse and transparent participation as explicit goals. For agencies and vendors working on digital government platforms, citizen-driven prioritization and open-source delivery models can influence how digital identity, authentication, and service access requirements are designed and implemented across public-sector systems.
Sources: SPRIND, Deutschland was geht
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By Ji-seo Kim
