“Most people think of bureaucracy as something negative. But it was designed to protect fairness, we just forgot how to use it well.”

Ever had to fill out a form that felt like a guessing game?
Not because you don’t know your own information, but because you don’t know what the system wants.

Ina Remmers looks at bureaucracy from a different angle: not as “paperwork”, but as rules, and what changes when those rules become clear and usable.

Ina Remmers: the upgrade starts with the rules themselves

Ina is the founder of Rule Mapping and co-founder of Nebenan.de. In her episode, she puts words to something many people sense but rarely articulate: our lives are digital, yet many public systems still run on paper logic. Centuries-old rule formats, written as free text, interpreted manually, applied inconsistently across offices and cases.

Her core idea is simple to understand and big in implications:

1) Make laws “readable” in the way machines (and humans) can work with

Rule Mapping translates laws from free text into structured, visual, machine-readable logic. When rules are explicit, it becomes possible to apply them faster, reduce ambiguity, and explain outcomes more clearly.

2) Keep the human part where it matters most

Ina doesn’t pitch AI as a replacement for public servants. She talks about empathy, emotions, and real human contact as non-negotiable — and frames AI as support that can free people up for the parts that require judgment and care.

3) AI is a relief, not a replacement

AI matters where public offices are under capacity pressure. The goal is to reduce backlog and uncertainty by automating the repetitive rule-work, not to replace people.

4) Measure the cost of slow decisions in real life

Ina points to bottlenecks like years-long approval processes to show that bureaucracy is never “neutral”: delay has real economic and social consequences.

And one of the most human moments comes near the end: “Policymakers are human too.” It’s a call for smarter collaboration: less blame, more design.

AI vs Bureaucracy Live

We brought the conversation into the room at CIC Berlin × Venture Café with a live edition focused on one guiding question:

What if bureaucracy worked at the speed of innovation?

The panel brought together people working at different edges of the same problem:

• Ina Remmers: making rules machine-readable so decisions can become faster, clearer, and more consistent.
• Bastian Hosan: journalist covering AI, civic tech, smart cities, and the digital state; cutting through what’s real, what’s hype, and what breaks in practice.
• Ann-Kathrin Kornemann (CityLAB Berlin): translating bold public innovation ideas into real experiments that can be tested, improved, and adopted.
• Camilla Dalerci: Senior Manager Strategy & New Ventures at Bundesdruckerei, focused on open-innovation work and partnerships with startups and GovTech companies.

The evening moved around very tangible friction points:

• rules written in free text and interpreted differently depending on who reads them
• digital services that still behave like paper forms, just on a screen
• what “faster” can look like while keeping decisions fair and accountable
• real examples already happening, from law as code to user-centered public services

The room was very engaged, with an international audience treating “administration” as a topic worth thinking with, not just complaining about.

‍GovTech runs on people who want to build, not on technology alone.

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