Petar Juršić: ideas and stories

Everything is easy except your city

5 min read

Everything is one tap away except finding out how your city works

Hook

Petar downloaded a form, printed it, filled it in with a pen, and a clerk scanned it back into a computer. We call that digitalisation.

Claim

Entertainment and knowledge cost a tap. Finding out who decided what in your town means scattered PDFs, separate portals and a visit to a counter. Each new digital service becomes an eighth window next to the seven that already exist, while the paper stays because it must be signed and archived. The gap, not citizen laziness, is the first thing to explain. The useful question is what can be removed, not what can be added.

Story

Petar handed in a form he had downloaded, printed, filled in by pen and had scanned back in. The clerk worked in several programs that do not talk to each other (his essay names three: registry/pisarnica, budget and local fees/komunalna naknada; he says he cannot name the rest, and the “seven” is his figure). His own Moja Pula was built before he learned that small municipalities wanted a replacement, not another layer.

What the essay says vs this note

  • Form downloaded, printed, filled by pen, scanned by the clerk: yes, in the essay. No date, office type or form named.
  • Seven programs “that look like 1995”: essay says “7 programa koji izgledaju kao da su iz ‘95”; names pisarnica, proračun, komunalna naknada only.
  • “Teta” is the essay’s word for the clerk. No vendor or county is named in the essay.
  • Moja Pula claims in the essay (61 public sources, 469,383 payments, 80 council sessions, 150 calls, 12 meetings, Pula and Kranj agreements) are Petar’s own and were not re-checked here. Moja Pula is a Civium product: say so.
  • “555 local units, most under 5,000 residents”: 555 (428 municipalities + 127 towns) is in a Croatian government document found by search (undated, snippet only). One search result says 128 towns (556 total). A 2019 EIZG presentation snippet says half of units have under 2,800 residents. Not opened in full: treat “most under 5,000” as likely, unverified.

Data on take-up (Eurostat, opened via the Eurostat API 2026-11-04, dataset isoc_ciegi_ac, % of individuals 16-74, last 12 months)

  • Used websites or apps of public authorities, 2025: Croatia 65.7 %, EU 71.9 %, Denmark 98.0 % (Croatia 74.6 % in 2023, 70.1 % in 2024). Eurostat news release 12 March 2026 gives the EU 71.9 %: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260312-1
  • Downloaded or printed official forms, 2025: Croatia 29.6 %, EU 36.8 %. So about three in ten Croatians still did what Petar did.
  • Supply side, Digital Decade 2026 country annex (Council doc 10476/26 ADD 5, 18 June 2026): digital public services for citizens Croatia 75.3 vs EU 84.6 (last data DESI 2025, reference year 2024); for businesses 65.3-67.6 vs 88.6. Report itself says “administrative friction” remains.
  • What this does and does not show: Croatia is below the EU average on both use and service quality, which supports “digital state services lag”. It says nothing about municipal back offices (the clerk’s seven programs) or about finding out “how your city works”; no EU dataset measures that.

Sources

Check before posting

Open (needs Petar):

  • The “one tap” comparison (film, news, recipe vs civic information) is Petar’s opinion; no dataset compares them. Post it as an observation, not a statistic. Do not claim “everything else is one tap”: about a third of Croatians did not use any public-authority website or app in 2025.
  • Would people ignore even a perfect interface? Eurostat shows 34 % did not use public websites in 2025, but no data separates “could not” from “would not”. Resolved 2026-11-04: essay checked (hearsay wording of the two-month claim fixed); Croatian take-up and quality data found (above); vendor and county are not named anywhere in the essay.

Counterargument

People would ignore even a perfect interface.

Post angles

Facebook (Croatian)

  • Film, vijesti i recept su na jedan dodir. A tko je odlučio o vašoj ulici, tražite po PDF-ovima. Zašto je to tako?
  • Skinuo sam obrazac, isprintao ga, ispunio kemijskom, a gospođa ga je skenirala natrag u računalo. I to zovemo digitalizacija. Službenik na stolu ima sedam programa koji ne razgovaraju jedan s drugim.
  • Pitajte svoju općinu koliko programa službenici koriste svaki dan i koliko košta licenca. Nitko ne treba osmi program. Treba da stari prestane trošiti ljude.

LinkedIn (English)

  • Movies, news and recipes are one tap away. Finding out who decided about your street means searching through PDFs. Why is that normal?
  • I downloaded a form, printed it, filled it in with a pen, and the clerk scanned it back in. We call that digitalisation. Ask your municipality how many programs staff use every day. Nobody needs an eighth one.

Graph View

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