Public Sector & Civic Tech

We built Quellenportal, an independent public search portal over Bundesarchiv records, and we run MeinBezirk, a civic-tech app that ingests council documents via OParl, ALLRIS, and PARDOK and turns them into plain-language summaries. Earlier, extensive public-sector engagements during four-and-a-half years across McKinsey Design and McKinsey Digital Labs: federal-agency service and process redesign, government digital transformation, multi-jurisdictional implementation work.

Search at archive scale

The Bundesarchiv holds a century of state records. Making them findable for historians, journalists, and the curious public means search that doesn’t punish OCR drift, doesn’t require knowing the exact term, and tolerates the messy reality of historical metadata. Rails 8 and Meilisearch under the covers, with the indexing and tuning that a corpus that size deserves.

Civic data plus language models

Council documents are dense, slow, and crucial. MeinBezirk reads them automatically and generates summaries citizens can actually parse. Rails 8 on top of public-sector data plumbing: OParl, ALLRIS, and PARDOK feeds, normalised across municipalities that all interpret the same standards slightly differently. The LLM work is the easy part. The plumbing is the work.

Service design for government

Public-sector software lives or dies on whether the people running the agency can actually use it. We’ve designed services and processes for federal-agency clients in DACH, addressing jurisdictional complexity, staff capability, and the kind of legacy that no commercial product has to deal with.

Public-sector software has its own logic. Procurement that runs years. Open-data standards that exist but aren’t always followed. Citizens who can’t be substituted with “users.” Compliance regimes that don’t bend. Civic tech built right has long-term value for the people who use it, and demands the same patience for unglamorous work that infrastructure software always demands.