Why I Started Building AEGIS (and What Bureaucracy Taught Me About Blame)

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Not weeks. Years.

It started with my own case. I was born in 1986 and came to Germany when I was three years old. I've lived here ever since, nowhere else. German citizen since 1999. Went to school here, did my military service, completed my vocational training, built a career, paid my taxes. Germany is the only country I know.

And then, a few years ago, I spent three years fighting to prove exactly that. Three years of letters, appointments, and officials who didn't know what to do with my case. Nobody in Munich could figure it out. I got bounced between offices until I finally escalated to the Government of Upper Bavaria. They recommended a "Feststellung der Staatsangehörigkeit," a formal determination of citizenship. The result was, of course, what it always was: German. Period.

Here's what happened: when my father, who also only held German citizenship at the time (the entire family had been naturalized together), later acquired Turkish citizenship, a Turkish law kicked in that automatically granted Turkish citizenship to all biological minor children. I had no say in this. I didn't apply for it. I didn't even know about it.

But now I technically held dual citizenship. And because I was born before January 1, 1992, German law at the time didn't allow that. So the German authorities concluded that my German citizenship might have lapsed. Might have. Nobody was sure.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, I was classified as a deserter for not completing military service there. A country I hadn't lived in since I was three considered me a fugitive. If I had traveled to Turkey during that period, they could have arrested me. For a citizenship I never asked for, in a country I don't remember living in.

The resolution took three years and required two things: a forced renunciation of Turkish citizenship (initiated by the Turkish state, not by me), and a formal determination by the German authorities that yes, my German citizenship was and always had been valid.

Forced renunciation by one country. Formal proof of the obvious by another. For a guy who grew up in Munich, served in the Bundeswehr, and hadn't left Germany for anything more than vacation.

That's not a minor inconvenience. That's the kind of experience that changes how you see institutions. Not because they're malicious, but because they're structurally unable to handle cases that don't fit the standard template. Two countries' legal systems interacted in a way that nobody anticipated, and I was the one stuck in the middle, spending three years and considerable money to untangle something I never caused.

That frustration didn't go away after a rant over coffee. It sat in the back of my head and slowly turned into a question: Could this actually be fixed?

It's not just my story

My case was domestic, one country, one system that couldn't find my file. But the problem gets exponentially worse when you cross borders inside Europe, the continent that promised freedom of movement.

Think about this: an engineer in Poland gets offered a senior position at a company in Spain. Great opportunity. He's married, two kids, one still in primary school. He wants to take the job. The company wants him badly. Everyone agrees. And then the bureaucracy starts.

He needs to deregister in Poland and register in Spain. His wife needs to transfer her employment status or register as a job seeker. The kids need to be enrolled in a Spanish school, which requires translated and apostilled birth certificates, vaccination records, and proof of prior education. Health insurance needs to switch from NFZ to the Spanish social security system, but there's a gap period where nobody is quite sure who covers what. His Polish driver's license works in Spain, in theory, but the address on it is wrong now. His professional engineering credentials need to be recognized by the Spanish authorities, a process that can take months even though the EU has a mutual recognition directive that's supposed to handle exactly this.

Every single one of these steps involves a different office, a different country, a different language, different forms. And they're all sequential. You can't enroll the kids until you have a registered address. You can't get a registered address until you have a rental contract. You can't sign a rental contract without a Spanish tax number. You can't get a tax number without... you see where this goes.

Meanwhile, the kids are confused. They're leaving their friends, their school, everything they know. The family is living in temporary housing because the permanent apartment fell through over a missing document. The wife is fighting with a Spanish call center about health insurance coverage for a six-year-old. The engineer is starting a new job while simultaneously trying to navigate bureaucracy in a language he's still learning.

None of this friction comes from the family. They did everything right. They want to move, they're willing to do the paperwork, they have the qualifications. The friction comes entirely from systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

This is what "freedom of movement" actually looks like for a family in 2026. On paper, it's a right. In practice, it's a project management exercise that would challenge a professional consultant, let alone a father of two who just wants to start his new job.

And this is a best-case scenario. An EU citizen moving within the EU. Imagine the same situation for a non-EU national. Or a single parent. Or someone without a university degree who can't easily prove professional qualifications.

These aren't edge cases. Millions of Europeans move across borders every year. Every single one of them encounters some version of this. The scale of unnecessary human friction is staggering, and almost all of it is caused by systems that don't interoperate.

The uncomfortable part

Here's the thing I had to learn, and it took me a while: blaming the system is easy. And it's not wrong, exactly. The systems are slow. The processes are outdated. The infrastructure is held together with fax machines and good intentions. All true.

But it's only half the story.

I've seen the other side too. People who submit incomplete applications and then complain about delays. Citizens who book three appointment slots at different offices and show up to none. Applications that get rejected, resubmitted without a single change, and rejected again, wasting everyone's time, including the applicant's.

Saying "it's always the government's fault" feels good. It's a clean narrative. Us vs. them. But it's not honest.

The truth is messier: the system has real structural problems, AND citizens sometimes make those problems worse. Not out of malice, but because the system gives them zero guidance on how to participate effectively. There's no feedback loop. No "hey, your application is missing three documents, here's exactly what you need." You submit into a black box and hope for the best.

That's not a people problem. That's a design problem.

Failure is the teacher, not success

I'm an IT Manager. I've been through TISAX certifications, incident response drills, system migrations that went sideways at 2 AM. If there's one thing I've learned from all of that, it's this: you don't learn from the things that go right. You learn from the things that break.

Every failed deployment teaches you more than ten successful ones. Every security incident reveals assumptions you didn't know you were making. Every process that collapses under load shows you where the real bottlenecks are, not where you thought they were.

Government services are no different. The 20% no-show rate at Berlin's Burgeramt isn't a character flaw of Berliners. It's a signal. The system created conditions where booking multiple slots and hoping for the best is the rational thing to do. If you want different behavior, you need different conditions.

The 30-40% error rate in submitted applications isn't because citizens are careless. It's because nobody told them what "complete" actually means until a caseworker opened the file six weeks later and sent a letter asking for the missing documents.

These aren't failures to be ashamed of. They're data. And data, if you're willing to look at it honestly, tells you exactly what needs to change.

Not enforcement. Participation.

This is where my thinking shifted. The first instinct, when you see a broken system, is to add rules. More checks. Stricter deadlines. Penalties for no-shows. Force people to behave.

But enforcement doesn't work when the problem is structural. You can fine people for missing appointments, but if they booked three because the system gave them no other way to secure one, you're punishing a symptom.

What actually works is participation. Make it easy for people to do the right thing, and most of them will.

That's the core idea behind AEGIS. Not a system that forces citizens to comply, but one that makes cooperation the obvious choice. Pre-validate your documents before submitting? You get faster processing. Show up to your appointments? Your trust score reflects that, and next time you get priority. Be flexible on timing? You're guaranteed completion without standing in line.

Nobody is punished. Nobody is denied service. The system just makes it clear: if you invest a little effort in doing this right, it directly benefits you. Not the government. Not some abstract "common good." You.

That's not enforcement. That's alignment.

Why this is personal

I'm not building AEGIS because I think government IT is an interesting technical challenge. I mean, it is. But that's not why.

I'm building it because I watched bureaucracy put a crack in someone's relationship. Because I've sat in waiting rooms myself, holding a number, wondering if the system on the other side of the counter was designed by anyone who ever had to use it. Because I've seen smart, motivated people give up on legitimate processes because the process itself was the punishment.

And because I believe, genuinely, that it doesn't have to be this way. Not through some revolutionary overhaul. Not through blaming caseworkers who are doing their best with broken tools. But through small, structural changes that add up: better feedback loops, clearer guidance, incentives that reward cooperation instead of punishing confusion.

Mistakes will always happen. On both sides. The question isn't how to eliminate them. It's how to build a system that learns from them instead of getting stuck in them.

That's what AEGIS is trying to be. Not perfect. Just better. Measurably, structurally, honestly better.

This is a personal reflection on why the AEGIS project exists. The technical series starts with "Inside AEGIS: A First Look at the Architecture" and continues with posts on mechanism design, security architecture, and more.